Fall has a certain soundtrack for the perpetually broken-hearted.
I come here often, every time vanilla memories sweeten my images of you.
When fall comes, maple trees in the park’s Japanese tea garden trade their animated greens for deep reds. These leaves will fall in time; they’ll surrender to gravity’s incessant pull, their chlorophyll having completely broken down. It’s a cycle of dimming and release I find comforting. Or, perhaps more accurately: relatable.
Especially ever since you walked out the door with a simple “Ok.”
I remember the creases in your skin and the folds of your denim jacket all too well.
My 160-square-foot apartment — the one where you told me about your blue-collar upbringing; the home of mine where your books still litter my cabinets; the one where I cried into a damp pillow, realizing the stories you told were just empty anecdotes — is some three miles away from Golden Gate Park. On the occasional, more frivolous whim, I’ll venture to a nearby Lyft docking station to unlock a bike.
There’s a willingness in those moments to simply go. Fast. Not pushed by any particular timeframe or arrival time. Just fast. To run from that corner in my mind where you won’t move out of.
Our fetishization of balance is all sorts of fucked up and, quite frankly, unattainable. Like catching the first snowflake to fall in winter.
Because I still remember the first time my mulch-colored eyes met your evergreen stare. Combing slowly through our past has done nothing but complicate old wounds — like bumping a bruised arm into a half-slung door. It’s not a foreign pain; it’s a familiar tingle with similar aches from falling in love, only to then crash into hard soil.
Heartbreak has always come swiftly into my life but lingers like a fine wine. I prefer to still hold onto hollow fantasies that I can outrun or pedal through or drive far past it. But I can’t. I’ve tried. I’ve failed, every single time.
All’s well doesn’t necessarily end well when innocence dies alongside skin and bones.
More often than not, I walk from my domicile to the park… half hoping to see you on the other side of Market Street.
There’s something so audibly pleasant about hearing dried leaves give way to your body weight. It’s as if Mother Nature intentionally created an organic symphony that waits for a forceful director, be it a rummaging ground squirrel or a melancholic biped on a quest to numb his or her or virtue. That tactile concert of collapsing foliage delights and heals, in eardrums and on bare skin.
It reminds me that I’m, in fact, alive. And that my life, too, oscillates between seasons.
Our fetishization of balance is all sorts of fucked up and, quite frankly, unattainable. Like catching the first snowflake to fall in winter. I’ve come to learn through people far wiser (and welcomingly older than myself) that a well-lived life exists in conscious seasons.
My hell became your haven when you willed me to believe in your stained excuses.
You’ll weather hardships and heartbreaks, financial destitution, and material ruin. You’ll bury your loved ones, feeling three months out that the only difference between your listless frame and theirs is that one still pulses. Maybe you’ll come to find a few treasures in those mournings. Maybe you won’t; that’s fine. All’s well doesn’t necessarily end well when innocence dies alongside skin and bones.
But one season follows another. Spring to summer. Fall to winter.
Hearts will mend during these times with new partners who like the birthmark on my left calf, whose bodies fit like yours against mine on November nights. Companions who don’t hold my generosity like a glass animal over a parking garage ledge. Lovers who are patient with me as I unearth fragments of a more benevolent self again in bathroom stalls and over candlelight dinners. Those lovers will allow your stories to be told in complete sentences, rather than in cut-off pieces while meeting their parents.
You only called it love when we slept in beds that were not our own.
Although you never showed up for me in death’s curtain call last December, they will. They’ll hold space instead of handing me my car keys. And they won’t use passings as an excuse to avoid calling love by its name in the sober glow of morning.
The summer of secrets you told will, thankfully, pass in time. What comes after a soulless harvest is fresh sowing — far away from tricks and tools made of malice.
My future is ripe with new fruit. My hell became your haven when you willed me to believe in your stained excuses. Throwing those letters into the wind, hoping they’d catch something. All they did was leave a million small cuts.
“You have grace, something I need to learn more from you,” you said that Friday afternoon leaving a waterfront restaurant after what felt like three weeks in a frozen frame. We were remarkably great at making mountains out of molehills. We would injure each other, every time we fell the highest of those peaks. But we got up standing in entirely different fashions.
It’s not that we always found an excuse to escape our individual realities. It’s more so that our fantasies fit better than our day-to-day lives did.
In my lows, you would poke fun at my small joys; compare my writing to that of a child attempting to understand conjunctions; how the clack of my sandals would ricochet too loudly off the sidewalk in Nob Hill. The fascination I held with fall’s melancholy was just another casual cruelty in your red backpack.
I, somehow, never thought, even in those tender moments, that you were entirely shitty. I glossed over your behaviors — lies, emails, phone calls that punched me in the appendix — under the guise of my ascension toward a summit where grace patiently sat, waiting for an epiphany.
I want that patience I once had back. I want that black button-up I left in your dresser drawer back. I want the laptop I gave you — the one I began my writing career in San Francisco — back. The mechanical watch that’s been stopped at 11: 27 for over two years, I want back; it’s quite clear you won’t fix it before this upcoming Christmas in Upstate New York.
I want that grace back. I want my time back. I want some semblance of naiveté back.
What I offered you on slow walks through Peacock Meadow wasn’t mercy. No. Looking back, I surrendered to my delusions of you — notions that you’d hold yourself accountable for not only your own life’s trajectory but how you skewed mine along the way through your crooked smile and button nose.
How the street lamps brushed your unshaven face when you told me accounts of your bullied youth — “it’s why I act out like this,” giving a reason for your current passions that were based on a past self, long gone and twenty-three years more childish. The sound of leaves crackling like firewood under my rubber soles near Music Concourse, as I felt myself unravel in real-time.
When the space between us wasn’t measured in miles, but rather in millimeters.
How I allowed myself to, yet again, fall prey to the serotonin afforded by seeing your iMessage notification flood my lock screen. I kept our final rekindling like a secret when I should’ve treated it as an infection.
How I traced your footprint in the sand on Muir Beach, the youthful look you threw my way when I found a pearlescent shell. When we passed a bottle of chardonnay back and forth, filling its empty space with plans to spend a September tucked away inside a warm Mendocino cabin. It’s not that we always found an excuse to escape our individual realities. It’s more so that our fantasies fit better than our day-to-day lives did.
You only called it love when we slept in beds that were not our own.
I don’t want you to toss my car keys back one last time, only to again hit the dirt with a thud of happenstance shame leaving another hotel. I’ve tried to replace that noise with gentler static. Like the song of sparrow calls that soundtracked when I wrote one last letter to your San Francisco address. Just between us, I still wonder if you’d made sense of the words I smudged in wet ink; those crossed-out phrases of love I felt came off too strong in my sinking depression; I wanted you to anchor me as you did in 2019, both of us dancing on a fool’s promise made inside an unfurnished living room.
Time is meant to heal, but I can’t help but think how much you’ve taken of mine.
My wide-eyed gaze gave way to your unsalted disposition. I thought I could confuse my visions of you which didn’t glow through that kaleidoscope of illusioned nobility. But I couldn’t. Not in the long run, at least. You still drive through my mind on familiar roads. I still can’t get you to pull the e-brake, drive off the road to turn back around—going somewhere, anywhere but back into my late-night musings permeated with your what-ifs and only-once. You held my hand tight when the destinations fit your needs, never my wants.
I remember the creases in your skin and the folds of your denim jacket all too well.
On days like this, when San Francisco is slicked with a cool breeze and hints that autumn has crept into the city, I walk through Golden Gate Park imagining you’ll leave my mind. I’ve done the learning — the making sense of broken dreams, finding solace in the fact that this house of wax paper we built has infinitely crumpled, finished studying the scene where you dropped your shoulders and walked out the door toward Page Street — and still feel shitty.
I can take power — find comfort, explore gratitude — in painting you anew, though not forgetting about the fleeting love affair that sits on the prior coat.
Time is meant to heal, but I can’t help but think how much you’ve taken of mine.
In those low moments, I walk through the Conservatory of Flowers searching for indefensible amounts of beauty. Organic material that serves no purpose other than to look proposing. Vegetation neither yields sustenance or fuel or adhesive. Plants that don’t produce timber and have no real use outside their place in their endemic ecosystems. When I begin to think of you, I look for proof that delight can still exist when all things feel otherwise cold and synthetic.
Tree ferns mask my memories of you from that very first week. And, even if only for a moment, your tongue-in-cheek jokes fade into the background when I step through a thick blanket of deep brown leaves. If I were to listen for your laugh, it wouldn’t cut through the chorus beneath my feet.
Respite from your haunting presence is still elusive. Part of that’s on me; I still haven’t left all the bad memories, gone and buried. They’re tied to good ones that linger on my fridge and in purple lighting.
I think now it’s not more about how I go about ridding myself of them, but rather finding a way to exist alongside them in softer shades of gray.
I only want you to dissolve into the background as I grow older, my future lovers all not quite your age.
I can take power — find comfort, explore gratitude — in painting you anew, though not forgetting about the fleeting love affair that sits on the prior coat.
It’s about holding simultaneous space for the remembrances of you buying me spring blossoms and of the two fall birthdays where you left the chair next to mine vacant; that one birthday where you, after an afternoon of binge drinking, sent me an email detailing how I was a “worthless faggot.”
When those closest to me worried I lost touch with reality allowing you back into my life, I made excuses for your actions; I justified your deplorable actions I, myself, couldn’t quite wrap my head around unleashing onto someone else. How I allowed myself to, yet again, fall prey to the serotonin afforded by seeing your iMessage notification flood my lock screen. I kept our final rekindling like a secret when I should’ve treated it as an infection.
Perhaps I wanted to prove myself — and my friends, and my mother — wrong, and that things “were different this time around.” But nothing was, it never was; it couldn’t be when the first fall glistened with that many rhinestones.
Inside this city where you’ve cried wolf on problems of your own doing sits the very park where our love was birthed and buried. For better or worse, you’re a season in my life I can’t help but revisit more than I’d care to admit. I don’t wish for us to be fine, before or after I turn 32. I only want you to dissolve into the background as I grow older, my future lovers all not quite your age.
Through all those upcoming seasons, I’ll come back to hear echoes of myself in autumn leaves breaking around Golden Gate Park.
