only time can tell
His birthday is November 5th, 2001, and we kissed on November 1st, 2013. We were both eleven until he turned twelve. He was my first and I was his and then our relationship ended for the first time with a note dropped on a table during indoor recess because he was too busy playing table football with a folded piece of white printer paper to have a conversation with me. I haven’t seen him in two years, but he still texts me ten years, ten months, and twenty-nine days after that kiss, asking how I’m doing and when I’m planning on taking the LSAT, and I wonder if he remembers anything that happened in middle school.
Her birthday is March 16th, 2002. We haven’t been best friends in nearly a decade, but I don’t think I could forget that if I tried. I wonder if we’ll meet for lunch when I’m back in New York in January.
His is September 3rd, 2002, and every year he loves to remind me that he’s six days older, those six days feeling so significant when you’re five, before you grow up a little bit and turn twenty-one and realize that they aren’t.
Hers is August 8th and mine is September 9th and hers is December 12th and I will always remember this because she’s 8/8 and I’m 9/9 and she’s 12/12 and I know which one of us realized this first.
June 28th, 1961, and January 20th, 1962. March 7th, 1984. October 10th, 1984. October 15th, 1990. May 28th, 1995. June 4th, 1996. August 9th, 2000. October 31st, both in 2000 and 2001. November 11th, 2001. July 2nd, 2002. December 24th, 2002. I can’t continue or I might never stop. Perhaps the reason I can never seem to memorize my social security number is because my head is filled with birthdays of varying significance. I only know three phone numbers by heart: that of the landline still operating in my childhood home, my mother’s, and my own. My parents got married on April 4th in 1987 and even though the Massachusetts court system made their divorce official two years ago, I still use 4-4-8-7 as my locker combination at the gym.
It’s hard to be the person who remembers when other people so rarely do. I know exactly what I was wearing (black yoga pants from Lululemon and a black V-neck camisole from Aritzia, the latter of which I thrifted from Buffalo Exchange in the East Village my sophomore year of college) the first time I went to his apartment, I know he made me guess which bedroom was his out of the three and I knew which to guess because I checked the ID in the wallet he had left on his desk, and I know the exact expression he made the first time he accidentally looked at me from the stove after instructing me to stand in the corner of his living room — the one where he and his roommates would soon set up their Christmas tree — because I was too distracting and he was attempting to make pasta. He undercooked it, supposedly because I was too distracting. I don’t have to wonder if he remembers any of this because I’m sure he doesn’t.
I often feign nonchalance, because pretending I don’t care feels safer than admitting that I will memorize a person without trying to, but then I tell the waitress to leave the dumpling sauce on the table and she reminds the waitress that I don’t like onions in my drunken noodles and I realize that this is everything I want girlhood to be and maybe I’ve been looking for love in the places and people I shouldn’t be searching. I could still write a love letter for every person I have ever loved and I wonder how many could do the same for me, but then I stop because I no longer want to seek out ruin. A person can only handle so much masochism before they pass the point of recovery.
I know you don’t want to be that way, he tells me, and the truth of it stops my heart. I eventually find myself standing on the beach, the pinks of the sunset reflecting off the water and the ocean so shallow it’s the palest blue I’ve ever seen from waves, and tears start rolling down my cheeks as I suddenly understand how he can promise me that everything will be okay. I don’t know what changes. I wonder what would happen if I never came back to New York. I wonder if anyone would miss me, and that’s when I realize that I don’t care. Sometimes you don’t realize the ways you’ve changed until you find yourself in a situation from your past and you feel yourself responding differently.
When my rage begins to re-circulate in my blood, I remind myself that it was his first time having this experience too, and I can’t expect people to know better or act differently simply because they’re older. That’s no longer a fantasy I can maintain.
I sit by myself in cafes, eating pasta and drinking white wine and reading books of various seriousness. Responses form faster than my fingers can record my thoughts. I try to write a memoir about my life and I realize that there are years which I can’t recall and I wonder if that’s because I was too busy learning other people’s. So I think about love and life and influence instead, and I don’t come any closer to an answer. I don’t even know what the question is.