I was rocking a white Kangol with a slight tilt, a white t-shirt one size too small, brown cargo pants, and a pair of white Nikes I saved my summer youth employment money to buy. It was July…or August, in the year of our lord 1999. Or I was wearing khaki cargo shorts, and black Nike uptowns, with a black tank top, or whatever she liked. I always did whatever she liked. Those were the terms of our relationship, terms that would eventually force me away. She liked when I wore dark pants and bright shirts, so I did just that. Alyx, my girlfriend, was never busy, but I could never get to her on that archaic Star Tac cell phone of hers. It would be five more years until I even had a beeper; her mom was well to do. Whether it was July or August escapes me, but it was hot! Newly tarred New York City streets were bleeding translucent waves of heat, but I was keeping my cool. She had this thing about ‘cool’ guys, and maybe I took it too literally, but I was determined to keep my disproportionately attractive girlfriend. I wasn’t pleased about having to make an appointment to see Alyx, (afraid she would start charging, she was so hot), but I was eager to see her. Or nervous, whichever.
In about ten hours from this memory, I’ll be in my room, taking off my clothes. With each article shed, removing a layer of her expectations thrust upon me by predetermined pubescent pressures. I would know who I was, and who she was forever after. Standing at the precipice of my becoming a man, I would look back on this day with regret. Ten years later (at twenty-seven) I would turn over to see my wife asleep, her fertile mind mothering some loving danger, and laugh at how hung up I was on Alyx.
Right now, I’m a seventeen-year-old black kid standing on a stoop in the East Village. Looking a gangly collaboration of brown and white, some rice and beans The Bronx spit out into Manhattan. The blanket of smarmy heat is so oppressive the ginkgo trees are sweating – but I looked like I just stepped out of the refrigerator. It helps to be the lone person of color amongst the homogenized hipster trash strolling carelessly along Avenue A and Ninth Street, my cocoa skin acting as cooling agent. So damned cool.
She's late for our appointment, five minutes of so, actually an hour, but I never mind when she’s late. I can remember her as being so attractive, like ‘too hot for a guy like me’ attractive. The perfect equation: equal parts track and field athlete, valedictorian, and my sexual equivalent to boot. She’d just moved to New York from its wicked step-sister New Jersey. We’d just reached the point in our courtship where we were meeting each others parents. You’d think that should’ve been before the sex, but clearly we thought otherwise. It’d been about a year since we met eyes and locked private parts in some Jersey playground at night, and this was our anniversary date…or it was a random Thursday with no particular meaning. Either way, I was getting to know her as a person, and I was falling inexorably in lo--. Hold that thought.
She finally comes downstairs. As she does a breeze slowly crawls up the block and grazes her frame in the vestibule, right when as she crosses it. Her long, boxed braids gently jumped from behind her ears and landed on the soft of her neck and shoulders. The hem of her tan, linen dress skipped up her knees and revealed the carved, mocha-hued musculature of her thigh. Wind, the gentle pervert. She looks at her watch, beauty and beast in synchronicity. Gracefully parting her lips to say inconsiderate things perfectly.
“Sorry about that.” She says, guiltily.
“About what?” I reply, knowingly.
She whispers in my ear, “You’re so sweet.”
Or was it, “You’re too sweet.” In a flat, cool, even tone to my face.
She made reservations at a cozy Latin bistro on Avenue B a few blocks away, that, or we just walked in a found a table. It was designed so that patrons could walk in, go through to a back yard, and eat outside. She ordered an appetizer, the most expensive entrée on the menu, and a modest desert. I had the chicken with mango salsa. Or just a water. Whichever. The summer sun was setting, the pink and zephyr sky painting her brown skin in ethereal pastels. She was glowing. All of which, coupled with my combustible hormones, fueled my most daring and foolhardy adventures in romance. I started to say,
“Alyx, I think I love y—“
Before I could finish, as if she’d had something just as amazing to say to me, comes:
“I’ve been thinking about the idea of free and universal love.” Dreamily delivered deathblow.
“Uh, what’s that?” I replied, genuinely baffled.
“You know, like, being with whoever you want sexually. But always coming back to us.”
“Hmm.” Was all I could muster.
I didn’t say another word to her. Like, ever. Until I bumped into her very pregnant belly at an airport in Arizona ten years later, en route to see my fiancé perform her one-woman show in LA. Alyx would go on to say that she remembered the amicable and lengthy break-up conversation, or was it the really awkward and short one. You know, the one that happened? Whichever.
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