The King's Speech

I was high and had gotten off at the 28th and Park stop on the 6 train. I was listening to Erykah Badu and on my way to a matinee screening of The King's Speech at Kips Bay. Walking down 28th Street brought back a flood of memories. Diego used to live around the corner from this train stop, lived on Lexington, while we were dating and I had spent so many nights at his apartment, had walked to this subway stop so many times, walked back to it messy and hungover and probably with dried cum somewhere on my body. The block was littered with these memories that I kept tripping over. That time in my life I kept reliving, brief and very detailed memories of some moment coming hurtling across the front of my consciousness.

I've eaten at that McDonald's, bought lube at the Duane Read with Diego the first night I went home with him, and bought bags of chips and candy bars so many evenings after coming home from a bar at Little Michael. It was still kind of early in the morning, the sun was slanted just so, bathing everything in a certain type of lighting, the type apparently really conducive to fostering fits of nostalgia.

I miss Diego and I miss Matt and I miss Gabriel and I miss Andrew and I miss Sean, and surely many other names that at one point I had some romantic feeling for. To live in this world and age and go through love affairs is really something. The past often doesn't know its place, or your memory confuses it, and the jewelry box opens when you walk down a certain street, 28th in this case, and the ballerina starts to twirl to that mechanical bit of music played, a tune you recognize but hadn't heard in a long while. It is really something, all of the things that we carry with us. That we function and live in the present and continue to move forward and are not continually grieving all the things we no longer have in this world is really amazing. We are humans and our drive is to live. Our minds and bodies keep going, breathing, loving new things, new people

Dating Jacob and living with him provides me a great deal of happiness. I absolutely love the curl of his cold feet against mine when we spoon in bed. And yet, walking this street today, I realized that I had said goodbye to certain experiences. Now that I live with my boyfriend, I no longer have that experience of getting dressed to go over to a boy's house, that tussle about who's house to spend the night at, or, what really struck me today, the morning after walk back home - wearing clothes that smell like smoke and sex and booze and your eyes still crusty with sleep, thinking about your night and that boy as you spend some time alone, one of the most beautiful moments of contemplation a person can have, looking at all the morning commuters wondering if their lives bring them as much joy as you're feeling.