Where X Marks the Spot

Not long after you had told me, gently, that you still grieved for your last love, though that had ended almost a year before, and that you could have no intimate relationship with me, maybe not with anyone for a time, I stopped my fork in the air with whatever hung on the end of it that I was eating. My throat wouldn't swallow. I felt weak and sick, as if it were myself that I devoured, piece by piece, as you talked away the hopes that I had put in your lovely face. It was the old story coming true for me once more, though you were hardly mine. . . . When we finished I walked you back to your car; I don't remember having much to say. Why would I? Buildings drifted by, and cars, and faces. Then we arrived at the place where, afterwards, I would never see you again, at a parking lot near Times Square. There I marked the sidewalk with X's visible only to me: "At this place I was lost again," they'd say to me when I walked there in the future. "Dig here and find what's left of me, or what I left behind, where X marks the spot." I felt like the death's-head and crossed bones that surmount the treasure chest. I only felt a little like gold coins and jewels. I have signed the City with these sphinxes —in parks, in streets, in bedrooms, in my own apartments. And there we stood, you and I, hemmed in by the stitches of X's that could not hold you to me. But X's mean kisses, I realized, as well as what is lost: all the kisses I couldn't give you chalked like symbols on the sidewalk. After all, you yourself had been marked by loss, even in your laughter that afternoon at the show I had taken you to. Bright-eyed and smiling in the seat beside me, you stole my glances with your dark, dark eyes and your long hair. I thought that I had not been this happy in a long time with a woman and was ready to become even more happy, ready to do anything that you wanted in order to please you, to see that smile come up, not knowing what you were soon to say to me as we dined. And when you spoke, I felt life fall away from me. Again I felt that I would never be happy. I felt the words that I had wanted to say to you leaving me, rushing out of my chest like dead air, until I had no more words to say. I seemed to cut and swallow my food as if it were me myself that stuck in pieces on the end of the fork I had raised to my mouth. Had I been chewing on my own flesh? Self-Pity the Devourer took me by the hand that held the fork, and once again I feasted on all that was dark and hopeless in myself, in lieu of all that was beautiful, desirable, and unattainable in you. And then I stood beside you in the lot where you had parked your car, with the X's buzzing in the air, sticking themselves to you and me and the blacktop and the cars. When you reached out to embrace me, I moved to embrace you in return—and then came the part that I don't want to remember, the part I hate: I caught a glimpse of your face as we put our arms around each other, and your face said everything to me about how you had wasted the afternoon, how eager you were to speed away in your car, a mixture of disgust and relief that the thing would soon be over, that I would be crossed out forever from your life—and everything that I hated about myself, my stupid chin, my ugly nose, my hopeless balded head, my stuck-out ears, my wreck of a heart, crashed over me, spinning me into the vortex of a palpable self-hate that I have only ever let myself feel a little bit at a time, though it is always there