On my list

forgotten, mislaid, and dead, or dead to me

I became very sad in an unexpected way and told him I wanted to stop. Of course, he said. We got into my bed, where he pulled my head into the space between his chin and his chest. Do you want to talk about it? he said.

When I have to talk about my feelings, but don’t yet know what they are—which is often the case if I haven’t written about them first—I feel like a bird of prey hunting something very small from very high up. I speak, which is to say that I circle, with the hope that the person listening has the patience to wait for the final descent, if it’s even worth making; that whatever’s down there is animated by flesh and blood, and not a trick of the sunlight or my own hunger.

Every November or so, I told him, his beard tickling my forehead, I make a list of the people I’m getting Christmas gifts for. For Bambi: [redacted]. For Sophie and Julia: [redacted]. What was once a ballpoint scribble in one of the 2” spiral notepads the Sunday School teacher rewards you with when you’ve memorized a new Bible verse—along with machine-woven WWJD bracelets, but somehow never candy—is typed out in my Notes app. Now in my mid-thirties, I’m not giving for one anymore, but on behalf of Jade and me as a couple, which I like very much; though we don’t believe in marriage, there are married-people things that, as a closeted kid, I dimly suspected I would never be allowed to participate in. Now, even though I did everything wrong, I can still somehow be a grown-up married person that issues birthday cards signed, in my hand, with both our names, and delivers her home-cooked vegan food to friends recovering from surgery or grieving a loss.

The people on the list have changed, too, I told him. Over time names have been added, only to later be subtracted. Forgotten, mislaid, and dead, or dead to me (or I to them, but what’s the difference?). I don’t know if the list is shorter now than it was last Christmas, or five years ago, or twenty. But with every passing year, its mutability has become oppressive. By this I mean: though a simple matter of arithmetic, the losses don’t seem to be recouped by the gains—new friends, new lovers, the birth of my godson. Instead of organizing how I will send books and novelty t-shirts and (now that I have Jade) tamales to the people I care about, the list has become a reminder of how easy it is to lose people and be lost to them.

I felt him breathing behind me, our contractions matching each other. Was the circle closing? Was my quarry attainable, or even real? Instead of asking what my holiday shopping list, that tradition-turned-wretched consumerist obligation, had to do with the sex that I’d interrupted, he pulled me closer and waited for me to continue. Though I could trace some of the sadness I felt to a lover I recently parted ways with—someone who should have been on my list and now, simply, wasn’t—and who the man holding me knew was on my mind, my circle’s gyre seemed to be expanding rather than focusing. One subtraction not only suggested others from the past, but predicted more in the future. If I could lose a lover, I could lose a friend, even if they weren’t one and the same. I feel v proud of our little life together Jade texted me last night, and yet I had little lives with my parents, and their families, and one of my sisters, too, and those lives are gone forever. If the man in my bed with me, a new friend, could be gone tomorrow—whether by his choices, or mine, or someone else’s—how could feeling good with him in that moment be a safe decision?

I did not tell him this, by the way, or not all of it. I was still circling. Instead, I asked him to stop saying something—a kind, thoughtful phrase—that he had said a few times while we were fucking, because it was too much. For that, I’m sorry.

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