someone to crowd you with love
You’re waiting by the baggage carousel, a day late. Your hands are shaking when you try to hold your phone, so you don’t; you shove that fucker deep into your pocket, only to take it out again when you realise your brain will not tolerate being left alone with its contents. Across the length of the room, strangers are descending the stairs into Canada, slowly — as John Green might have it — and then all at once. None of them are the stranger you’re looking for, who isn’t a stranger, but whose face you can’t parse with a mask and a creeping panic in the way.
Richard Siken wrote you’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and that is all well and good. He did not write you’re awaiting a beautiful boy in an airport, which is an equally deranging experience, and one which I feel has been sadly neglected by poetry at large.
You look away for a moment, face twisting behind the mask, lips and cheeks damp with your own hot breath. You look back. He lifts a hand and he waves to you, and you forget at once how you ever doubted that you’d know him on sight.
You made it, you tell him as you hold each other tightly together. The world doesn’t fall away so much as it ceases in an instant to exist. You made it. I’m so glad.
I didn’t plan to come to Canada so that I could share a landmass with my boyfriend. No, seriously; I planned this in late 2019, having made my peace with being single forever. Also, if I had planned around Isaac, I would have moved directly to the west coast and probably had a much more harrowing outbound flight.
I chose to come here, in fact, despite many of my deepest friendships and connections being based in England. When I was much younger, the fantasy was that I would remove myself from all my regular influences — all the people whose expectations informed my personality — and figure out who I actually was. That fantasy died a death when I arrived at university and realised that ‘who I actually was’ was just depression; but I am older now, and my problems are as treated as they’re getting for the moment, and I just spent two years of plague figuring out that somewhere along the line, I changed.
You can’t do something like this for someone you haven’t met in person. (It is embarrassing how long it took me to reach this conclusion.) It’s unsustainable to build an entire life around someone you only know at one remove; planning is one thing, daydreaming another, but for God’s sake at least plan for an in-person hang before you commit to a transatlantic move. I did this on my own. I would have done it regardless. It is important to me that you understand this.
I met Isaac online about a year ago. We’ve been talking weekly in voice channels on Discord, the telephone of the internet, for about eleven months. I couldn’t tell you when I fell in love with him. The feeling was there for a while, quietly, before we ever talked about it; it waited us out, I think, until we were ready to talk.
This past week, I have been able to explore Halifax in a way I wouldn’t have managed on my own. My apartment is tiny — too tiny for two people, strictly speaking, though we functioned remarkably well for a pair of autists accustomed to living alone — and Isaac is used to walking every day, so we spent a lot of time outside and looking at things. Most particularly we looked at the sea. The photo I’ve included is from our first walk to the waterfront; I sent it to Isaac’s best friend. He is in his natural habitat. We just kept going back, walking along the wooden piers, waiting out quiet moments by the water.
We spent an evening at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, poring over wood-carved remnants of the Titanic together. We went out on a boat tour, and even though he was hungry, Isaac sat with me after while I found my land legs again. (The boat tour completely slapped, by the way. If you’re ever in town, I recommend Halifax Harbour Tours; it’s run by a local guy who built the boat himself, the commentary is not at all obtrusive, and the views of the islands in the harbour are perfect.)
What I will remember most enduringly, though, is that we were together and it was perfect. We took the mornings slowly, enjoyed waking up together; we went out for groceries together, waited for buses together, cooked together when we didn’t feel like dining out. On the way back from the airport today (as I write this, anyway) I looked at the empty seat beside me on the bus, and I realised I no longer knew what to do with my hands. I am used to human contact being effortful and tiring, particularly over long spans of time — and sure, it’s nice to be alone again for now, but I keep waiting for the door to open and for Isaac to come back. Maybe he is just out for a walk!
I wonder sometimes if it’s possible to think about love without also thinking about loss. Lived or pre-empted, it casts a long shadow.
But love gave me my new home, which I wouldn’t have seen like this without the benefit of a second pair of eyes. What do you give up if you live without the risk of goodbye?
If all goes well, I am looking at another international move in 2024. What a way to announce an engagement, right?
That move will be about him. It will also be about me, and the fact that this whole week I have barely bitten my fingernails at all. I’ve slept well, and woken up rested in the mornings. I love Canada. Isaac does, too, and we both hope we can come back here someday. But I hope we can find a way to be together all the time, first.
You’re at the very edge of security, and you’re unhooking your mask from your ear so you can kiss your fiancé goodbye. You kiss him once, twice, three times — one for luck, and one to see the pair of you through until the end of summer. You have already booked your flights. It isn’t as awful as you know goodbyes can be. That’s the only reason you don’t cry, though your body is heavy with wistfulness and your eyes are prickling uncomfortably hot.
You laugh as you pull your mask back into place. Oh my God, baby. We live at the end of the world. You have to laugh. W.B. Yeats didn’t laugh at Götterdämmerung, and he’s extremely dead. Soon, okay? Soon. You agree, the two of you: soon.
You sit on a bench and you watch until you can’t see him anymore. You blink away the tears, and you try not to think about the absence at your side as you leave.