Pistachio Ice Cream
“You write in time then time is gone and in trying to catch up you write a whole new story.”
—Patti Smith
California
Billiard balls clank and disseminate across the table like atoms in spontaneous combustion. He hands me the cue and takes my glass of beer.
“I have a feeling you’re secretly really good at this,” he announces, and I do that half-laugh, half-sigh thing where I’d love to surprise him that I am, in fact, very good at pool, but the truth is, I’m not. And that’s just not something I’ll be able to maintain a lie about.
I lean over the table and mimic the shape I think my body is supposed to make while squaring the white ball up with a solid 7 sitting mercifully close to the pocket. I steady my arm, jerk my elbow, and launch the cue with a burst of untapped power, but ultimately fail to make any contact between the stick and the ball.
“See,” I say, while handing back the cue, “I’m really bad at pool.”
He smiles, possibly relieved to be better than me at something — possibly thinking I’m faking it — and capitalizes on the opportunity to coach me. His warm body blankets my exposed midriff as he leans over to bend me into position. He moves my hands where they’re supposed to go and gently drags my arm back to line up the shot.
The ball sinks. I look back at him, beaming with accomplishment. He holds my gaze.
I can tell I fascinate him because of the way he looks at me when I share things about my life. He’s a good listener. I wonder what else I can say to keep this game going a little while longer.
Two weeks earlier I should’ve died alone in the middle of an empty highway in Nevada. For some reason, I didn’t. I left my crumpled car in a ditch and hitched a ride with a truck driver across state lines until I eventually found my way here.
A new town. A clean slate. In a hipster dive bar playing pool.
He tells me he’s moving to Mexico in two weeks. Perfect — I think. No strings attached. No hazy future to hold on to. Just the two of us together, right here, right now.
With definitive proof of my being a better conversationalist than a pool player, he suggests we continue our evening elsewhere. He drives his truck to the wharf and parks at the very edge. It is late and moonlight shimmers on the glassy sea surface. Not a lick of wind. The first night of June. Anticipation builds as words wear thin and the moment to make a move draws nearer and nearer. At last, he leans in for a kiss. A man approaches the truck, startling us both.
“We’re closing the gate in 10 minutes. Either leave or stay the night out here.”
We look at each other.
“We’ll stay here,” we blurt, practically in unison, and the man, surprised by our choice, raises his hands as if we were two people he’d never touch, and walks away.
At dawn, once the gate re-opens, he takes me home, and kisses me goodbye. I close my door, oozing in the after-glow of a perfect slice of suspended reality. The story could end there if it had to. Each morsel was savored and I would ask for no more.
But it was only the beginning.
Mexico
I lean in close, placing my hand on his bare torso for balance in the small bathroom. He is overheated and I brush small beads of sweat onto the palm of my hand. My toes curl in the cool sand to get a grip on something — anything. Inside my stomach is an unprecedented cocktail of antibiotic pills, mezcal, and marijuana. My head is spinning and all I want is to lie down.
“Here,” he says, holding me upright, “take some of this.”
Out of his keychain opens a compartment I never noticed before. Atop the metal key sits a mound of white powder. I stretch my heavy eyelids open wider, trying to regain focus and confirm that it is what I think it is.
“Uh — I don’t know. I’ve never done that before.”
“You’ll be fine,” he says. And I believe him, because he’s the one saying it.
“It’s only a little bit anyway.”
He brings the key up to my nose and before I can make any excuse, I sniff it inside. My nostril burns and my brain lights on fire. In a flash I am wide awake and steady on my own two feet.
Outside the bathroom club music pounds and the thumping rattles the wooden door. There lies a world so full of excess and oblivion I can barely contend with any of it. The music is too loud and the waves are too big; the tropic heat is relentless and the language is different from the one inside my head.
Inside it’s just us. And even though it’s been over five months — even though questions swirl about how a place like this alters the softness of a soul, even though I wonder how many more barrels or pretty girls he needs to be inside of before he finds what it is he is looking for — the distance between us feels like the only space I’ve ever known. All else is lost in translation.
I watch as he inhales a line and the vessels underneath his freshly tattooed skin bulge. He looks at me with bloodshot eyes.
“Feel better?” he asks, and I nod, because in some odd way, when I’m with him, I really do.
Texas
“I think he really likes you,” my friend whispers in my ear as I shuffle through the perplexing screw head options on my camera body. I am tempted to sink the entire contraption in the chlorinated wave pool behind me and be done with this profession.
“Who?” I ask, half-listening.
She chuckles. “Don’t play dumb, there’s obviously something between you two.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I counter, secretly wondering how much she already knows.
As if scripted, he walks over, wetsuit lowered to his hip, glistening under a Texan sun. He hands me a can of cold beer.
“Thanks,” I say, taking the beverage and avoiding eye contact with either of them.
“Wow! A man who brings a working woman a beer — a keeper,” she teases, winking and squeezing my shoulder before slipping away into the group of my closest friends behind us.
I bury my face back in my work, hoping to disguise the flush.
He plops down next to me and pecks me tenderly on the cheek. For a moment, I swear I can hear an old echo of, “Honey, I’m home,” but can’t decide who is the honey and who is the home, and am probably just hallucinating anyway.
“Cheers,” he says, holding out his can. I crack mine open, watching foam overflow precariously close to my electronic equipment, and clink in return.
“Cheers.”
He wedges himself against my body, enveloping me as if he did so all the time. As if I were home. I can feel the groups’ eyes on us, and am not quite sure how to respond to affection no longer confined to tiny spaces or late nights. I lean in and he wraps his arms around me.
“Sometimes I can’t tell if you’re good or bad,” I confess, pulling away to look him in the eye while I say it.
His grip around me tightens. It’s so strong I can’t move a millimeter.
“Neither,” he says, before taking a generous swig of beer.
“Well,” he adds, “Maybe both.”
California
The rain is relentless and my apartment is frigid. I am bundled three layers thick, guzzling tea, and kicking the heater, hoping the abuse might raise the temperature a few measly degrees.
I stop kicking to collapse on my bed from sheer, overwhelming sadness. I’m writing again. Drudging memories from buried corners which sit like plastered post-its on the computer screen. The cursor blinks, challenging me to connect the dots between then and now to solve this mystery of why, when it comes to matters of the heart, everything hurts all over again.
I have not heard from him in over three days. Normally this would not bother me except that it’s Christmas and I’m alone and nothing hurts worse than being alone on Christmas. I’ve been here before, a year to the date, with someone I thought things could be different with too. But the pattern persists. The lessons go unlearned. Even the weather took notice.
The words become blurry and I squeeze my eyes shut, lamenting the impending doom of the talk that’s to come.
He walks in. The room is heavy. His eyes are red and swollen — from a three-day bender or shared sadness? Sadness, I realize. I’ve never seen the way it looks on him. All it takes is one look at his pain to absolve mine. It means that I mean something to him, and that’s all I need to forgive.
The room becomes lighter and the distance between us smaller and we hold each other like we are the last two people on earth. It feels so good and everything before so stupid. His body presses against mine, and he wipes away tears from my eyelashes gently with his lips, stopping them before they even have a chance to run down my face.
He asks me if I want some ice cream.
“Ice cream?” I laugh, genuinely confused.
“Mhm,” he purrs, “doesn’t that sound good?”
It didn’t, but because he was the one saying it and he was the one who wanted it, suddenly it sounded like the best thing in the world.
“What’s your favorite flavor?” I whisper as he grazes his nose down the contours of my face.
“Guess."
“Mint chocolate chip?”
“Close. But no.”
“Really? I pegged you as a mint guy. I don’t know… coffee?”
“Wrong again.”
“Tell me.”
“Pistachio. I love pistachio ice cream.”
“Pistachio ice cream?!” I squeal, “But I’m allergic!”
“Then I guess I get to eat it all by myself.”
His lips stretch into a Cheshire grin and he bites down gently on my lips.
“But you can’t kiss me if you eat pistachio ice cream,” I protest, pushing him away and then pulling him back in to plant a fresh kiss.
It lasts a while. It tastes like forgiveness. No ice cream in the world could possibly be as sweet.
“Fine,” he whispers, breaking away slowly, “no pistachio ice cream.”
He nuzzles my neck and I run my fingers through his hair. We continue to discuss alternative ice cream flavors, but our voices grow weary and our bodies too magnetized to move.
For a moment, time freezes and the world outside stands utterly still. But inside, where there is heat, there is motion, and where there is motion, there is permission to love. We exist in some kind of odd infinity: a portal in time and space where our bodies are always beautiful, where there are no lines on our faces or gray strands in our hair. Somehow we can be like this forever.
Rain taps symphonically on the sycamore outside my window. Cocooned in each other, we drift into shared dreams of triple-scoop cones and far-flung places. It is only 7:30 at night.
And I have never loved anyone as much.
Hawaii
“Is everything okay?”
He nods almost imperceptibly.
“Are you sure?” I press further.
He nods again, this time brushing his hand through my hair as I lay my head on his chest.
“Would you tell me if it weren’t?”
He lifts my chin up so I can look at him even though in the darkness I can barely see.
“Yes,” he says, shutting his eyes and leaning his head against the frame.
He’s gone away again, to an island in the Pacific. I’ve thrown caution to the wind, crossing an ocean for someone I’m not sure would do the same.
Here the air is sticky-sweet and the water a warm, wet hug. Here the smoke left his lungs and bags no longer drape themselves under his eyes. His skin is tan and his dark hair bleached reddish-blond from an overdose of salt water. Here there is no darkness like back home. No histories to avoid or memories to wipe clean. His body is stronger, and his mind, too.
Here there is wisdom in the bones of an island — an old, old island — where secrets are whispered into the wind and carried across oceans for those of us who really listen to hear.
He closes his eyes and I watch his eyelashes graze his cheekbones. With every blink of those ridiculously long lashes, I am convinced pulses of groundswell rupture through the water and travel to the other side. Only a small thing like the Pacific Ocean separates us now. All we can do is love each other in waves.
I crawl up his torso to get a better look at someone who is magic but does not know it yet. His eyes flash open and he looks straight at me.
“Am I just going to be another one of your stories?”
The question catches me off guard and I hover awkwardly a few inches above him. It stings as it implies the stories are meaningless. Tales of past love and potent lessons. I didn’t know he read them. He didn’t even respond to my letter.
“I don’t know,” I say, which is the truth.
I could tell him that these stories come from a deep place. That they are evidence of self-discovery and profound transformation. That I share them because they are the greatest gift I know how to give.
But I don’t say any of this, because he should know that by now.
Besides, I can only know a story once it has an ending.
Something tells me we are getting close.
California
Slicing through an overly ripe tomato, the skin tugs stubbornly against the dull knife. Dinner is spaghetti from scratch. I wonder if he will call first or if I should.
I decide to text — Are you coming over?
He calls instantly and I answer, smiling, happy to hear his voice.
“I have dinner with co-workers,” he says, and the joy in my body deflates.
“Oh. Until what time?”
“Not late. I’ll come over after.”
My fingertip grazes the edge of the knife as I manufacture a smile.
“Okay,” I say, “have fun.”
I open the cupboard and grab a bottle of wine. I pop the cork and think to myself, maybe there will be time to share a glass, talk through our day, put on a movie.
It’s our last full night together, after all.
I decide to believe this lie and continue my evening as if every action isn’t oriented around the countdown of his arrival. The hours pass. I catch myself in the mirror and think I look pretty. The sauce bubbles to a boil and tastes better than any before. My apartment is cleaned spotless.
Grains of sand in an invisible hourglass fall until it’s drained. I haven’t heard a peep.
Impossibly sleepy, I slouch in my papasan holding on to expired hope and an empty glass of wine. I reminisce about how in Cuba, I learned to dip the cap of a cigar in a jar of honey to make the bitter end taste sweet. What I didn’t learn is how to do the same with people.
I crawl into bed alone, angry at myself for doing it again: falling for a figment when the reality is perpetually at the precipice of existence.
A kind of love that begs for scraps is no kind at all.
A day later, we drive to the airport so early not even the sun can join us. His Gate is number 51 and mine 52. He boards thirty minutes before and I watch as he approaches the counter, scans his boarding pass, and disappears.
A kind of love that’s always leaving is no kind at all.
I look down at my scuffed sneakers and wonder if this is it — finally an ending? It would be as good a place as any to leave things: right here on the linoleum floor.
An announcement that my flight is boarding cracks through the airport speakers and autopilot flips on. I turn around, bound for a different direction with no plans to reunite soon.
What kind of courage would it take to do such a thing? To let it hurt like a bitch and then let it go, walk away, unencumbered and resolute in the choice to make space for a love worthy enough to move in.
Perhaps the kind that at the end of it all, amounts to just another story.