Going Out

It is important — so we agreed — to go out properly
("go out" as in "That’s not how I want to go out"):
sweetly. As friends. Remembering what we have caused each other to feel,
so as to not destroy the good things that we've had together.
What would be the point of being dishonest or cruel?
I want the meaning of our time together to survive.

I was born, I am alive now, one day I will cease to exist. I'd rather
that it mattered that I lived. Or, failing that, let me at least
not hurt the ones I most care about.

When we first started going out, we met in the middle of the Square.
You approached some bald dude first, thinking it was me.
I had joked that my hair had fallen out since the photos, and you took me at my word.
We tell these stories to each other over and over.
They are important, even if I can't quite explain why. The stories
remind us of who we are together.

We sat on the grass and talked about music and politics.
What else do you remember from that day?
In an ice-cream shop, in a secluded booth set up in a decommissioned
bank vault that had been transformed, with aquamarine paint
and some imagination, into a fantastic aquarium, like a pulsating anenome
you opened up to me — about your family in childhood and your parents’
divorce. Some topic for a first date, right? Yet something
unusual had happened: a rare event
when one has been exhausted and blunted by going out
almost at random, on the off chance.



In Literati — that's Scrabble with the name changed for licensing reasons —
You would always "go out" first. (Excuse me? "Go out?" I had to ask you
to explain. It seems that "going out," in Pennsylvanian, means what I call
"running out of letters.") In Literati, going out is good. It earns you more points.
Our rating scores are adjusted after each game. Yours goes up. Mine goes down.
The economist's "fixed pie": someone wins and someone loses every time.

Now the calendar is like the Literati board.
I am running out of tiles. In fact I am very close
to going out. I am losing you. My heart tells me what to feel: it knows.
But who has won this time? I think that you've beaten me again.

In bed, though, I would usually come first
and then my excitement would set you off.
I have found that it is better to come in than to go out.

(c. May 1-June 8, 2005)