Emo
New York, NY — Summertime — 5/11/2024 thru 6/22/2024. . .
In the end I will inevitably die by my own hand and what I experience now are fleeting and momentary lapses of beauty I find in life and other people and all this said I would like to paint a beautiful and precious portrait of Mai who I spend the last weeks of May and all of June with before she leaves on the 1st of July for New Haven where she’ll study dementia and memory loss as a research assistant at Yale. . . in other words, here is the account of my resurrection and rebirth and then subsequent death again where Mai and I fall in and out of love and descend back into our perceptive depressions having gained nothing but the memory of each other and the lesson still unlearned: oh, and I miss you terribly, Mai; and oh, I’m sorry if I ever spread my hurt onto you, Mai; and Mai, do you hear me now? in the dark, now, the sound of my ache and all the thoughts I have about you? (Pause.) When we meet Mai says she feels like she’s in an interview; it’s in reference to an interpersonal habit of mine on first and second and third dates where I ask questions and follow ups to those questions and then listen and nod and hum at the responses. We are in AMC Lincoln Square. We are on an escalator. Mai spins the conversation around and asks me questions about my creative work. We see Challengers (2024). Afterwards we discuss the movie and walk to 59 Columbus Circle station. She hugs me politely, and we agree to each other again; she takes the train back home. (Pause.) Mai is from mainland China. She came to the States as a teenager to attend undergrad at UConn and when we meet Colombia University as a grad student: in Mai’s words the biggest cultural divide between East and West is the latter’s obsession with the individual. Mai does not often think of herself in the way others around her think of themselves. Mai is also a manic depressive who suffers from seasons of insomnia and when she is finally able to sleep is plagued by nondescript nightmares which cause her to wake up exasperated and sweating; we try to break it all down. For our second date we sit in a café and analyze holistic or deeply rooted psychological reasons for her fluctuations in mood and the White Whale sadness that seems to have always hung over person: Mai has a father who is absent emotionally, a mother who is too smothering, and an ex boyfriend she describes as “screaming a lot” and who blamed her for every bad thing; none of these, she thinks, have had a massive influence on her current depression but cannot say for sure if the trauma is either nonexistent or just invisible — too ingrained in her psyche, she says, she cannot tell it apart from direct experience. She says she sees a shrink. She says she has no one truly to call when she feels bad. I tell she can always call me. She frowns: I change the subject. (Pause.) In grad school Mai earned excess praise from her professors for her academic performance; and it is one of these professors who writes her a recommendation to join the faculty at Yale. . . we knew our time together was finite come the day when she would, inevitably, pack up and leave her apartment on the Upper West Side for a duplex in New Haven. She would continue her studies there and leave behind New York for a career in academia which she had worked her whole life to acquire; and for this reason I never pursued anything sexual at first: (pause) We are in Greenpoint. I stumbled drunk out from performance of jazz pianist. She looks me as I am about to pass her off to the G Train. I ask what she wanted to; she asks me what I want to do. I sheepishly suggest we should head back to her apartment. We then take three transfer trains from Brooklyn to Uptown and then an elevator to the sixth floor of her building to a one bedroom. We fold into sheets. We sink into each other. After a few minutes I cry a little and then all at once. Mai looks concerned but not surprised. I like to think she knew about my sadness before I expressed it. I like to think we understood each other on a plane beyond the material. I weep now and she, too, has tears that leak down her cheek. In that moment I half wondered if it was good we see each other, if our connection was less of kindred spirits but two depressives who were hurting each with each other. . . similar to how I might burn or scratch my skin I involve myself in a romance I know will be taken away just as soon as it begun. Was it a version of self harm? an action taken to validate the feelings of unworth I always felt? We have sex. (Pause.) Later the next day Mai messages me she is afraid: afraid of becoming too close, moving away from me, she feels attached to me; fears she does not have the ability to be intimate in normal circumstance but especially under this context. I say the decision is entirely up to her whether we should see each other again. She says she cannot help it. She would risk a broken heart. We agree to meet in a another café after I am done with work. (Pause.) In the café Mai and me talk about her new roommate and complications with her work visa and what her first impressions of New Haven were when she visited recently. The conversation is loose and playful. Soon after we decide to walk through Central Park. We sit on a bench and discuss Japanese and French and American literature. She rests her head on my shoulder. We sit in silence. The mood shifts.1 Mai says she has to leave now, says she has to head back to her apartment. I walk her to 59 Columbus Circle station. She hugs me goodbye but the hug is initiated by me and feels limp from her end. She has a frown on her face. She leaves me without another word. (Pause.) Now I am in the dark. Now I am cursed like you, Mai. Now I lie awake in bed and feel the pangs of regret and despair I never sought to see you again. I was afraid it would hurt more than it already did. I was afraid I would cry again. I was too scared of the open wound in my heart: too worried I would irritate it even more and worried it would make it so I would never be able to heal it. But I think of you, Mai; I think of us together and I think of our talks about movies and books and other Art and I pray you are better than before. Because I’m descending now, Mai, I’m so much deeper in the hole you met me in. . . oh, and Mai, oh, Mai, I want you to imagine your sadness. I want you to imagine your despair like sweat leaking off your emotional body and I want you to imagine sending it all to me. Let me take the burden. Let me absorb it. Let me do it for you. I know it will all be over soon.2
An ill fated text message from one of her classmates / closer friends the day of where, the friend, confessed to Mai she had always had romantic feeling for her + kept it secret for the past months or years (?) they had known each other — the classmate / friend is also from China, was heading back to China for the summer, and from what was described to me, was a last ditch, I’ll-regret-it-if-I-don’t decision made by the friend to be truthful before, I imagine, she would never see Mai again or at least not for a very long time. Mai is in the middle of text conversation with her at the café — is seemingly able to chalk it up a weird surprise or social faux pas at first but in the park I can see her face twist with confusion and melancholy, sadness covers her face. She slipped from my fingers.
I love you always.