Thirty-five.

Scattered, non-linear thoughts on someone who tries to keep me whole.

Somehow, Stephen always knows when to check in on me. Maybe it’s the absence of messages from me because I’m usually quite chatty; maybe he actually knows me better than I assume he does. Maybe he has a sixth sense—a Sam sense, if you will.

In the year I met Henry, before we ever crossed paths, I complained to Stephen about my loneliness. I had just exited my three years with Jun, and I was living alone for the first time in five years. The novel coronavirus had emptied New York of its typical liveliness, and I was more isolated than ever. Tinder suitors and Grindr dates were scarce, if not altogether nonexistent. It was easy to talk to strangers online—the lack of physicality meant they weren’t real—but I was nervous to meet them. I said it was because I was scared to fall ill but, deep down, I knew it was also because I was scared to fall for the wrong person again. My twenties would soon come to an end, and I was terrified of wasting what little time I thought I had left. That Valentine’s Day would be my first as a single man since four years prior. I knew that it’s a social construct, that its significance is only as great as I choose it to be, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit down. I felt like nobody wanted me.

Sometime in the afternoon on February 14, 2021, my buzzer rang. It was my doorman alerting me to the delivery of a package I wasn’t expecting. I went down to grab it and carried it back upstairs, where I unwrapped it with great puzzlement. It was a box of handcrafted donuts.

I don’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty sure it came with a note. I’m almost 100% certain that that note was simple, not verbose, and plainly signed off with Stephen’s name. I remember feeling like a total sap, giddy with happiness at the gift he’d sent me from a different continent altogether because he knew I was bummed out about being on my own. I remember feeling a twinge of guilt, too, because I knew he would be on a Valentine date of his own.

I took careful bites out of the donuts, opting to sample each in lieu of finishing them slowly one by one. There were cream-filled classics as well as more inspired creations, like a maple-glazed cruller with a candied bacon topping. They would be terrible for my diet, but it would be fine in the long term because I almost never ate donuts. Over the next few days, I tried to savor them.

In 2017, I wrote the following in one of my journals:

I woke this morning—or fell asleep last night—thinking about proximity. My notes urge only that I understand it, presumably the entirety of its underlying nature, examining the word and all its connotations as I have been wont to do with each and every thing. But, the vestiges of post-dream imagination left my mind without a trace during the subway ride this morning, and now I’m attempting to retrace footprints in the sand long since wiped clean.

I think it was romantic in nature, and it desired that I probed for depth. “You have to understand proximity.” Who is ‘you,’ and proximity of what sort? It might have been a comparison of contrasts, but I dislike pedantry.

I am thinking now of stars. Two on a collision course. Two in harmonic proximity suddenly becoming two disturbed, whose gravities pull the other ever closer, eventually ending their eternal dance. Two spirals that end in mutual consumption. I disdain [overly flowery] metaphors, but I think my irritating habit of bloviating about human nature can only be ended by getting it all out of my mind and onto paper. I do not believe that my initial ideas of proximity will return.

Remember that night in the rain? I ran east and you walked west [on Houston], and we missed each other because we moved on opposing sidewalks, just as I knew we would. Umbrella-less, soaked, vision obscured by night, water, and wind, and yet still pressing onward, fueled by desire. And so I turned around and I crossed the street because that’s who I am, and you stood and waited for me because that’s who you are. And now you’re moving to somewhere across the ocean, and it’s inexplicable why I feel like a chapter of my life is closing because we never were, but still I romanticized it all.

And so we aren’t quite stars but perhaps instead passing comets, or better yet a comet and a planet, momentarily bound until the comet is drawn elsewhere. I’d like to be the comet, but I suspect, deep down, otherwise.

A handwritten excerpt from my journal.

I drafted this about Stephen. I had just finished reading The Three-Body Problem and moved back to New York after six long months in California, and he had just shared with me that he was about to leave New York. It would be yet another separation from him, from me.

I had only met Stephen just four years prior to writing that about him. In college, I had joined a students’ advocacy council at my dormitory to make friends, and halfway through the school year he came into my life by way of that council. Fresh from his semester abroad, he was effortlessly cool. He was well-traveled. He was knowledgeable and everyone liked him and, for me, he was magnetic.

In the years since, I’ve given a lot of thought to that attraction. I hardly even knew the guy—what did I like about him? I did my best to qualify it. Maybe it was the way he always smelled good. Maybe it was the way that he always knew what to say to me and pique my interest. Maybe it was the way my eyes automatically looked for his in any room we shared, no matter how many people were in the way. Maybe none of it was real and it was all in my head. Regardless, it was obvious, of course. It was written all over my face. Everyone knew it; everyone could see it—even my then-boyfriend, Alberto.

When we dated, Alberto always warned me to stay away from Stephen. Alberto was right, but I wasn’t stupid. I would never have jeopardized what I had with him for the allure of adventure with another; I’ve said all along, and maintain still, that I would always choose deliberate love over passion, whose fleeting impermanence is intrinsic. I would always devote myself to the one who was devoted to me. When Alberto left and we broke up, I felt bereft and morose. I thought I had no one. I was wrong.

I have to stress that Alberto represented a watershed coming of age moment in my life, and his moving on also signified the end of my teenage naïveté. I had had my entry-level boyfriend, who introduced me to the world of dating and love and relationships, and I had completed my tutorial. Suddenly, it was time for me to fend for myself.

As I dated successive boyfriends, one after another, I was looking for The One. I tried to distance myself from Stephen as I did so, quashing whatever nascent attraction to him I might have still had. Instead, I kept him at an arm’s length; we would just be friends. If we met up for a meal at a Spanish tapas bar, if I locked myself in the bathroom until he came after me, banging on the door, because I was upset that he couldn’t stay with me that day as long as I wanted him to, so what? If he rented a car so that he could drive me to IKEA, if he ended up driving us all the way to Fire Island at dusk just because I liked listening to Ariana Grande while I rode along in the seat next to his, if we stopped at a diner on the way there and ate together like partners on a road trip, if we made it all the way to the lighthouse obscured by fog and saw an errant deer or two before having to drive all the way back to the city, what did it matter? We weren’t dating. I pretended not to care, but I knew I was stealing every moment I could get with him.

Nowadays, Stephen laughs at my tantrums despite all the stress I’ve caused him. He makes a dedicated effort to keep up with my life, and I continue to find myself seeking his input or validation because I still trust him. Always, I thank him for being patient with me.