August 1998: A group of us had been working together in a restaurant for a little over a year. We were young and beautiful and totally wild- so boheme, so alive. Revelers, artists, drug addicts, drunk by noon- swapping lovers and cigarettes casually, Royalty in an isolated scene of brilliance and waste. I vaguely remember waking up around 11am, melatonin pills mixed with bong hits and iced coffee, floating around in any water we could find until around 2… then we would shower together because it was faster & the tub would back up to our shins from our long long mermaid hair; roll out dewy in little dresses and springy wet curls, smokes blazing, to work, waiting tables. We worked really hard and made tons of money for 20 year olds- often drinking our way through shifts, leaving each other bumps on the backs of toilets in the restrooms. We would take our drinks with us when we left the bar after work, sometimes long after work, always too intoxicated to drive- and then we would head about 15 minutes north and find our friends in this tiny 3 bar town on the Hudson River.
I remember exactly what I was wearing the night that I fell in love with him. I remember it was mid August and I was all bronze and blond wisp highlights, pepper freckled and never wearing any underwear, high like a hot air balloon and good to go, for most anything, most of the time. Strappy black sundress with tiny white dots, entering a packed bar humming and twinkling and clinking like these places always do in memory, bar doors and windows open to the night. Forgetting that I was still wearing my apron until my amigo the drummer came and affectionately reached his hands behind my back and kissed me on the lips while he untied it, low slung on my hips, laughing back and pulling me by the hand to the bar. We were shooting Jack and celebrating because a few great friends, who I only knew by legend, had just returned from The Lemon Wheel.
One of them had caught my eye at The White Party a few months before. That night we all wore white and were handed Ecstasy upon arrival; TVs tuned to other rooms in the house, drone music and ultraviolets, whisky bottles and free sweet love in every corner and on the floor. Ten foot red bullseye painted in the hallway, mannequins with fur boleros and never enough cigarettes to last the night. I saw him there passing through rooms and across the TV screens, and then he passed through the walls, passed and gone and I didn’t think of him again until this night in August.
We locked eyes across the room, like young lovers do, in bars. My heart burst into confetti and fireworks. Made our way across the room, like Bollywood magnet people, to collapse deep into the black leather corner of a booth, surrounded by friends. Holding hands and massaging thighs under the table while we laughed and shared stories of the summer with our friends, a long armed philodendron like a Beltane crown behind our heads. I had a disposable camera from vacation with a few frames left, which was drunkenly passed around the table, later to find someone captured our first kiss— the paint on his shirt, my moonstone necklace, faces fitting like puzzle pieces- we had the same coloring, aura and song. Trays and trays of shots and drinks all night long, I don’t even remember lifting 2 of the carved stone shot glasses as a memento of our evening before we left together. I don’t remember driving home, except for some flashes of night air and whizzz passing through the windows, while we sang Dave Matthews ‘Crash’ loud as sailors…
When I woke the next day to a perfect summer morning, birds sun breezy and soft clean sheets, he was laying there watching me, eyes like blue ice marbles, indentation in the bridge of his once badly broken nose. He had taken too big of a nitrous hit at the festival and fallen on his head and there were red blotches of broken blood vessels on the whites of his eyes, yellow-purple ring remnants of a shiner. I remember feeling a little embarrassed, when I got up to pee, stepping out of the bed to find 3 wrappers and neatly tied condoms in the waste basket. I think we had made love on the roof; I think we may have been up all night; I think we spilled wine in the bed. I took a shower, coming back into the lemon-sun & diamond dust room, he was standing on his head in my bed, singing along to Octopus’ Garden, toppling over to smile at me. He tugged on my towel and pulled me back into the soft bed, watching my eyes as he went down on me, legs skin hands and white light. So in love, so in love- like only relatively unbroken 20 year old summertime girls could be.
The next few weeks were both winged and endless, as he was away to work in the city and I was barely touching the ground. Developing those pictures to find our kiss, I kept that picture over the speedometer in my car and listened only to the mix tape he made for me, with the sparkle sun and moon stickers, his own songs mixed in. I told them all we were decidedly in love- he was The One, and we were so happy to have found each other. It felt true, between the lines and bottles, bodies of other lovers and dreaming of him every night, as he whispered ‘you are the light of the world’ and the world seemed to pixilate and fade.
He came back mid-September, we stayed up all night confessing our love and gratitude for finding each other, to each other and anyone else who wanted to listen to us while we blew lines and and kept our hands warm in each others sweaters and draw string pants. The next morning, in the back yard, entwined and gazing, stream of consciousness word associations and nothing that made any sense at all. A hedgehog passed us by and a friend knocked on the window to invite us in for breakfast. Together we quietly and happily washed all the dishes, soapy hands sliding up each others forearms, kisses nuzzles and giggles. I was wearing a red sweater, first hints of autumn descending, somersaults in the hallway by the stairwell. Sitting on the back of my car before I went to work that afternoon, our plan was that when he came back from another couple of weeks of work, that he would move in with me and I would support us while he looked for work. It felt very matter of fact, our certainty in finding each other, followed only by the certainty that together was how we would be from that moment on.
The next week, prophetic dreams and the highest vibrations. Collecting fabric for his quilt, buying a guitar to sing him songs, yard sale block parties in the street. Updating everyone on our plans- some people so thrilled, and others pointing out how insane this might be. Nothing in me questioned any of it or him for a second ever, from the moment we locked eyes in the bar. I watched the map of my life unfold and populate like an animated movie in my mind. The picture on my dash wrinkling in the corners from all of the times that I pulled it out to kiss it and slip it back between the plastic and the glass.
That Saturday the restaurant was busier than ever, the smell of hickory smoke in the crisp September air. Scandal breaks when the bartender from our sister restaurant calls to see if I am there, because she just found out there was a murder in town and she heard the victim was me. It’s 8pm and the place is jumping, none of us can really piece together what is happening but we know something has gone horribly wrong and it is very very close to us. By 10pm we can shake off the mistaken identity, but it is confirmed that someone was killed that night. We heard the description of the person who committed the murder, it rang familiar but couldn’t place him. We were all accounted for, between where we were and the satellite houses, and so we cleaned up and decided to go home. I was about a mile down the road and turned around to go back to the restaurant to grab a couple bottles of wine for the bath. I walked through the front doors, ceiling lofted and light above me- saw my friends turn to me, faces falling, everything kind of slows as one of them moves toward me, arm around my shoulder taking me out to the front lawn. He looked in my eyes and told me that my love had killed his ex-girlfriend, my legs gave out beneath me. I called my closest friend, choking and unable to speak into the receiver- she said my name and told me to come to the house immediately.
We held vigil all night, piecing together the timeline and the facts, between our house and the main house where the SWAT team had surrounded and arrested him earlier. The last kindness I remember that evening was my friend cracking open the door to the back bedroom, where I was half passed out and sobbing. He came into my bed and spooned me, saying that a friend had called to make sure I was alright, and was I alright? it was going to be alright. shhhhhhhh… shhhhhhhhhh… it’s ok it’s ok it’s ok…
no i do not love you 