from "My Heart and the Nonsense"

from "My Heart and the Nonsense" John Okrent (bio) Oh heavens, all the lives one wants or has to lead. —Robert Lowell, in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop I Before I longed to be young I was young.It was summer all year long. I'd just met X and allI did, was doing, had not yet done pressed on me like the sea in a shellto my ear. The problem with beingyoung and beautiful is that it does not age well, said Will, but I was only changing,which is the antidote to aging, learningto auscultate the lungs, cramming, naming each root and trunk and cord and branchof the brachial plexus only to forget itthe moment she took me in her hand. She came and went. Mostly I was learning to wait,the patience of a river, and she was my teacher.I waited for her like a river running late, flung myself beyond myself, went rushingafter, and busied myself in AnatomyLab, where we had to split the sternum open End Page 61 with a bucksaw when the day came to dissectthe heart, which reminded me of a horseeuthanized on the track. This inexact mass of muscle that had moved with suchexactitude for years that a life's entiresoundtrack followed, its dance, its double Dutch. Our first time together we did nothing but sharecigarettes on my fire escape, traceeach other's faces with our fingers. It was a childish pace. We basked beneath the pureproducts of a lesser Great Lake, a snow factory,normally, in a factory town, but that summer it produced nothing but erotic breezesand Old Testament clouds. We watched themfloat over us, taking turns on our backs, pleasing, pleased in the open field of those afternoonsand evenings that blurred together like the wordswe spoke until words meant nothing and soon only our bodies meant. And she was mean.There was another man. Had always been. And hewas waiting. So I waited. I tried to wean myself from her. Could not. Stayed awakemost nights to the sound of falling snow. Triednot to text or check my phone. Tried to make of myself a self with which to welcome her back,broke out in hives, flunked a test, and then another,wrote her letters that shook in my hand above the box. I dropped them in.I waited. She was heading cross country, she wrote.She did not say she was ready to begin End Page 62 a life together. I was going that way, too, I lied,so why not go together? That beganthe roving part, the lush part, the part with light we tasted. And were they longerthen, the days? Did our insistence on exploringevery option stretch the gloamings out? We demurred in roadside diners, kissed at rest stops, more—made rest stops of as many momentsas we could—our eyes, horizon-sore. We were trying to learn what the body is for.Leaping naked into swimming holes hollowedby soft inland streams, we aroused the smaller, closer gods, also known as the local gods,or the only gods. In the city, in autumn's bookishair, we read and read and thought often of bed. We dressed to undress, and we undressedeagerly. Everyone was undressing then. From the streetyou'd see lit rooms dim with undergarments tossed over lamps. Nightfall, a mess of sheets, and noonand dawn, the same, those days we made, unmade, madeagain . . . Come winter, the whole city became a room and everything that happened to us happenedwithin it. It felt good to be there, to be within. Withinthe drapes, the walls, the doors, astride the sapped upholstery, under sparks our conversation made.Why not be totally changed into fire? we asked. Come spring,we followed the path of totality west, lay splayed in a democratic median, watched the sun, erasedlike a shutting eye, and the birds went quiet, shockedby sudden dusk at noon, and in their place End Page 63 we heard the thrum of blood flung up...