When at last we parted ways, over twelve hours after we first sat down across from one another at the bar, I felt as if I had woken up in the city of my future. We stood outside with the hum of Sunday morning traffic pooling around us and he kissed me deeply. I watched him carry his suitcase inside and then waved the cab away and proceeded to walk the several miles back to Brooklyn in my roommates borrowed heels. It was a bright, sunny Sunday morning in early February. My twenty-fourth birthday just a few days earlier. From the familiar warmth of his affection, New York had been transformed overnight into the city of my dreams.
Hours later, I was back in my apartment as his plane took off for Los Angeles. Love, he said, love, my love. And me too, all this love, impossible to express. Flow. Overflow. Terror, all this abundance. The universe conspiring to bring us back together, the city a cinematic backdrop for our reunion. Bars in the lower east side, dinner at midnight, 11th street and 6th ave, his hotel room near Times Square where we couldn’t sleep for the pure heat of it all. We lived an entire lifetime together in the span of one winter night. The beginning and the end simultaneously, impossible to distinguish which was which.