A Brief History of My Life Part VII

I can’t go to the east village anymore because it is like going on a tour of my worst dates. I get older, my heart leaps at the sight of children who don’t belong to me, I pronounce everything like an Italian opera title. I used to listen to songs and have someone in mind for the you parts, now I just want to be where the light is intense, I want the kind of heat that kills you if you drive into it unprepared. This isn’t a metaphor for anything else. When I speak of the light, I mean the light. I go to church and sing along and feel just as moved as if my faith were blind. When I speak of the blind, I mean the light. Truly the only things Lindsay Lohan and I have in common are our preoccupations with fame and weight loss, and yet I recognize a kinship there, as if those two things mattered more than anything. When I speak of the darkness, I mean this living. In a restaurant called Caracas, I once spent fifteen minutes arguing about an Ayn Rand book because every time he said Anthem I thought he meant We the Living and I said what dystopia, what about the woman, and he said what about the Home of the Infants and I said what Home of the Infants? What about loving a man so much you’ll sleep with another man in order to finance the first man’s tuberculosis treatment? Welcome to Russia, I said, and we were looking at each other and then not. I tried to picture Caracas, tried to leave him for elsewhere, a fever.