versions

I.
she finds a small apartment in st. louis for herself and her cat, gets a job at a bookstore and makes a few close friends, he changes the oil in her volvo and she calls her parents every week, at first it is so perfect, and then her cat gets nervous around him, it becomes the same old thing after a while, and she cant get him to snap out of it, he becomes impatient and irritable, sometimes he teases her cat, he leaves poems he wrote for her hiding in places where he knows she will find them, poems about this man who cannot break away from what he has become, about how all the answers to their problems are waiting in a cardboard box in a corner somewhere and how they cant stop looking for it, about how someday they will fly away together, about how to be patient, as if his words could change anything by themselves, as if all he needed to do to get something was to want it this badly.


II.
he leaves everything behind except his motorcycle and some clothes, finds a sculptor named luis in minneapolis to apprentice with, he starts making things again, he builds sculptures that try to express his sense of how fragile he is in the middle of everything, he is sometimes overwhelmed by the sense of continuity, by how his life has twisted around on itself and sometimes it almost chokes him it is so tight, he sees her almost every night, showing up at her door covered with rock dust and shards of metal, bathing in her clawfoot bathtub as she unwinds her day, they learn to dance the charleston and tango, staying out late friday nights when she doesnt work dancing and sweating into each others arms, she looks for grants for the two of them, and they stay up late writing out reasons why they should get money to go away together to foreign countries and write poems about the exquisite pain of the things they cause in each other that they sometimes call love, he buys a set of learn to speak italian cassette tapes and they stay up late repeating the words together to each other, good morning, how are you today, what are you thinking ?


III.
he writes her letters, joking about running away with her, just to see how she reacts, but she doesn't, her letters tremble on as usual, overflowing with images of fire escapes, and motorcycles, and tears streaming backwards from the wind, he calls her apartment when he knows she isn't there and talks to her cat elizabeth, he asks her what she knows, if she ever hears his name slip from beneath the bathroom door as her owner masturbates in the bathtub, elizabeth's answers are all very evasive, she speaks only of the weather and how she doesn't get enough attention, he tries to sound sympathetic, but when he hangs up the phone he feels this strangeness in his neck, a tickling that keeps him up all night coughing, thinking of her in fever dreams that don't let him rest, this feeling that he has only been talking to himself tortures him like a hairball in his throat.


IV.
they go on like this for years, meeting halfway every twelve months, meeting halfway between their lives, some years she has a boyfriend, sometimes he is spoken for, one year she is engaged, on the odd year they are both temporarily taken, but they meet anyway, she dates a man who rides an old bmw motorcycle, he becomes involved with a woman who knows six different languages and jumps out of perfectly good airplanes, she falls in love with a chiropractor, he becomes infatuated with his neighbor, but they meet anyway, they have to share this perfect ache they have been cultivating separately together for so long, this bitter thrill that is the idea they are truly, romantically, eternally star-crossed, why else would they keep meeting like this, why else would they have to live so far apart.

(written with rebecca stewart)