"End of Beginning"
Song by: Djo
I can see the two of us on that roof like it’s an Edward Hopper painting. The late August air hanging against the sweat on our skin that can’t be absorbed. I’m backlit by the Chicago skyline only two miles behind me but another world away from just the two of us. I never said it, and he didn’t either.
A week or so earlier he dropped me off after roughly our sixth date and I said, “Let me know if you want to do this again sometime.” He looked back at me with a crooked eyebrow and pained eyes only to say, “I think it’s safe to assume I want to do this again from now on.”
It was the first time I saw what directors are so often trying to portray in their films. I’ve seen them do it with animated sparks, with gasping violins, with wide lens zoom-outs. I get it, why they tried all those things, that’s pretty close, but you can’t re-create that moment.
It was nearly 11 p.m. but the world looked as if it was through a shadowy amber lens. It gave me the same unsettled but secure feeling I remembered from years before when I looked out a window at the School of the Art Institute. Outside the city was dark and busy and wild and inside I was in an optic white painted art studio under florescent lights and among people vibrating in technicolor ideas – the contrast welled deep into my belly. I have searched for this feeling, only for it to come at the moments I least expect it to.
I can see myself looking at him, caught off guard by the way he said, “You are so beautiful.” I can’t remember what I was wearing or how my hair looked, but I remember that I believed him. I can’t say I’ve ever really believed those words before.
Neither of us said what we wanted to say but what we felt sat in front of us laid out across the wood deck planks between us. His back was to Division Street. My back was to Milwaukee Avenue, the part where it angled south and raced toward the city.
Behind him, Division Street barreled East and West but never reached downtown just the lake. Behind me, Milwaukee Avenue moved Northwest and Southeast and eventually made it downtown but never to the lake.
If moments live forever, then there is a version of me and him looking at each other knowing what we knew. We are frozen there in time, on that roof, in some space and dimension.
No more than six months after that moment passed, I watched my legs tremble so hard they fell out in front of me when I learned he left the city. I realized then that directors in movies nailed all of the depictions of heartbreak. It was around that time when we both separately begged for the sweltering, suffocating, sweaty heat back as we stood in the snow.
No warmth would come for either of us until next spring with new flowers, new cascades of sunshine, and the two of us with backs facing two different streets.
