Enough

You just never know, do you, when you're gonna run into your so-and-so - a bad date you'd rather forget, a one-night stand that had no follow-up, a crush that didn't take hold, a former co-worker you never got along with, whatever. San Francisco is simply too small of a city to avoid these inevitable - and for the most part, unwanted - path crossings, and it's happened to me enough times now that it probably shouldn't surprise me anymore. The thing is, though, I'm almost never bumping into someone I actually want to bump into, which makes me a little wary, I guess, of what it means when it happens. I'm not quite sure what to make of it, for example, when a casual walk down Valencia Street turns into a reunion with Victor, a man I met and dated for maybe two weeks when I first moved here, eons ago, at the age of 23. Or when a drive to the Panhandle for some afternoon hoops unearths the reemergence of Michael, also a remnant of my dating history. I'm thinking, what is the purpose of my running into these guys, as if there is a purpose, as if our mutual appearance at a particular cross-street at a particular hour is Mother Nature's way of telling me something significant...but I'm not sure what it is.

The easy answer, of course, is that I'm supposed to get some sort of vision of the person I am compared to the person I was - I do, after all, seem to rediscover, by the perspective I typically gain during this time gap, just how far I've come from these relationships, however long. And so I use the reunion, unpremeditated and accidental though it may be, as a kind of personal gauge, like wow, isn't it great that I don't date someone like that anymore or shit, I was so young then, and too bad I didn't know better than to be taken in by the affections of men who, ultimately, couldn't cut it in the maturity department. I try, with my east coast sensibilities and west coast vocabulary, to navigate these run-ins rationally, to distinguish between fate and coincidence, to see the situations for their fictional and non-fictional values. It's always a great story to tell, of course, a you'll-never-guess-who-I-saw-yesterday jaw-dropper that gathers an attentive audience from your friends. And I appreciate the thank-goodness-that's-over part of things, the evidence that I was not crazy or heart-sick enough to actually stay put with any of these people. But I can't help it, there's a mystery to these spatial collisions that I can't quite ignore.

I feel like I'm always on the verge of these intersections, living in this city as I do, and yet of course I can't prepare for them at all, can't prepare for the gush of activity - outward and inward - that erupts out of me when they happen. Unwanted or not, these fluke circumstances beg so many questions - why now, why this person, why me, what is it about this moment in time, in the universe or Universe, that would coerce a reunion, and what am I supposed to do about it?

And so I'm in the plant store on a weekday afternoon, whooshed in by a friend shopping for a housewarming gift, not thinking about any of this of course, which is the point, and while Hilary is in the back pricing cacti, I'm checking out the orchids, thinking about what it might take to make them last, wondering if I could be responsible enough to do the regular watering, find appropriate light, if I could follow the instructions to see them through their blooms again. Then the door chimes cheerfully, announcing the entrance of another horticultural enthusiast, and I look to see who it is, just like I normally do, observing citified note-taker that I am, and my heart, my heart takes a sudden, precipitous dive.

And all I see, mind you, is the back of this customer, or more precisely, her haircut, that's it, nothing else, but that's enough to send my blood into a tizzy, the haircut looking identical to that of a woman I used to date. Well, "date" is not quite the word, it's way too generic and lifeless and unevocative of what my feelings really were. I was smitten, that's what, carelessly, ludicrously smitten. And I mean flush-cheeked-and-breathless-writing-poetry-again kind of smitten, that's how bad it got. I was surprised - well, no, that's not the word either - I was unprepared for this, would not have guessed that my guard would have come down for a woman, not having been down that road before you see, but that's another point and another story and I'll spare you the details for now. The point is that I'm here in this plant store with a haircut that may or may not belong to a woman I fell for, and this sets off a dubious but nevertheless potent chain reaction.

Because I'm moving away from the orchids now, reaching my gaze past the insinuating ferns, and looking, no gawking is more like it, gawking at the rest of this woman's body as it's turned away from me. And it keeps going, the haircut unfolds into set of limbs and a shoulder bag and urbanly hip shoes and it's the same - from the back at least - it's a twin, a double, a mirage of the woman I knew, and my heart is pounding just like it used to, it throbs there in the center my chest as a salesgirl hovers nearby probing a collection of potted chrysanthemums, and my lungs quicken their staccato. I inhale deeply, as if on instinct, trying to catch a clue, a scent, the scent, trying to figure out - by pheromone alone - if this is her, if this is her again, in the flesh, perusing houseplants.

And she turns, the woman in the haircut, she turns to me and it is practically her, almost almost, same large, innocent eyes, same plum-red lips, same slim, angular bones jutting out, dancer that she was, and the ambiguous virus of her memory strikes me full force, pummeling my body. Everything bleeds out of the store in an instant - the orchids, my friend and her cacti, the saleswoman and her chrysanthemums, the heated moisture from the overhead sprayers - and it is just me and this almost-but-not-quite replica of a woman I wrote poetry for, for God's sake, and I'm dizzy with question marks again.

It amazes me, of course, or bewilders me, perhaps that's a better word for what's happening, for what always happened in the presence of that woman when I knew her, how susceptible I was to even her most minimalist gestures, how her Mona Lisa smile could make me blush all night, her shy touch turning my insides inside out. How just her voice on the other end of the phone, the alto caress of it, would send me to the moon sometimes. I was on the verge of loving her, I suppose, and fell, as if under the merciless spell of a Siren, fell into the perilous state of something in between lust and addiction, and not caring because I was loving every adrenaline reward of it, loved how everything around me was pulsing with the same wondrous chaos as my insides, loved the minutest pleasures of our sleep, her breath at my bare shoulders, my thumb tracing, abstractly, the curve of her hipbone.

And then who knows what happened but something did, something interrupted us, she left me unexpectedly, prematurely, just a few short months after we began, just as I was heating up and bursting with verse, she drifted away silent and stoic and then completely out of my reach, claiming she wasn't ready for next steps, wasn't ready for me entirely, and my insides, inside out as they were, violently protested her retreat, and my heart, untrained in the language of rejection, stayed raw and defenseless but enormously disobedient, ticking away frantically for answers. And because of this, something just kept on living despite it all.

And this visitation in the store now, a spectre of my past housed in this near-twin, collapses - in a fraction of a second - the time and distance marking our dissolution. Three years, I'm talking about, three years shaved away in the blink of an eye. Three years since I last held her body at night, three years since her palms cradled the small of my back as I kissed her, recklessly, to sleep. Three years since my skin, those mornings after, was imprinted with that mesmerizing sandalwood. Three years and is it possible that all it takes is a haircut walking into Plant-it Earth on a Tuesday afternoon?

And it's not even her, this is not even her I'm feverishly clinging to but the apparition of her, a phantom with a razor-cut black bob and I'm shivering again in the same stubborn, impish hope I kept circling myself into back then, trying to convince her otherwise of her departure. But what am I hoping for, exactly, now that fate or coincidence or Mother Nature has stepped in and is biting me in the ass again? Remorse? Restitution? I have no idea what I want of this person, no idea that if this really were her I'd want her back, impossible to say that I am still the same and the she's the one who's changed, ready now, and willing and able. But say if this was true, if this was true, what would I want then?

Yes, of course I want this to be her - some still woundless, still reckless part of me anyway - wants this to be her in this random little plant store we both happen to be in, want it to be her face that lifts in slow, slow motion, want it to be her gaze meeting mine, want it to be her eyes widening, momentarily, in the astonished clarity that deer have, illumined by a camper's flashlight glare. And then yes, I want it to be her whose lids go slack, whose shoulders soften, I want everything around us to narrow and coalesce into the dreamy translucence of a postcard vista, and I want her to surrender to me just like I did to her.

But wait a minute, I should know better, of course I should, I know I should have moved on once our connection devolved, eventually, into the near-obscurity of acquaintanceship, know I should have bushwhacked through our demise and kept going to the other side, where new things were, new people, new possibilities, I should have loved other people by now, women or men who cares, I should have gotten over it is the point, should not be susceptible still, and to a haircut, no less. I was expecting a neat, compact, stowable scrapbook of a history, pictures I could take out when I felt like it and made cooing remarks over. I was waiting for a scientific formula I could plug into this dissatisfying non-ending of an equation so that I could make it make sense. I assumed there was a ratio of exact proportions I could use to determine when it was, precisely, that I'd be done with this ever-so-tentative crawl to the light at the end of the tunnel. I had wanted my heart retrofitted to withstand the seismic rumblings of desire wintering without warning. I thought there'd be a brief, cynical moment when I could swing my sadness on a "Life's a bitch and so is she" and hop off into the next big, wild adventure with a willing co-conspirator.

I thought I was over her, I did, or at least over her enough not to swoon anymore, not to lose my shit at a mere silhouette, but maybe it's just one of those things, and maybe she's just one of those people, someone I almost ran into but didn't, someone I wished and also never wished I'd run into again, someone I'm forever running into in some form or another, who knows, but I don't get to choose, that's the point of this particular near-collision, there is no cleansing dismissal, no simple shrug of the metaphorical shoulders and an "Ah well, people are people" sigh, no picture-perfect chapter ending, and that, dear reader, is the lesson.

That's all I get this time around anyway, amid the tumult and verdancy of Plant-It's in-house vegetation, that's about all the closure I'm allowed, because the door chimes again and I turn to look and she is gone. Gone. And it is just me again, me and the orchids and the attendant what-ifs of their blooming capabilities in the less-than-perfect climate of a perpetually chilling San Francisco. And I'm wondering if I really do have what it takes to make it work, if my apartment has the right light and heat and moisture and whatever else I need for these delicate plants to survive my very amateur green thumb. I'm wondering if there's a genus or a species of plant more hospitable to this city's deceptively temperate weather. I'm wondering if maybe there's someone out there willing to bend just a little for me, to accept my nourishment and reward me with bloom, again and again and again.

There's a stir and rustle from the back of the store and Hilary, triumphant, swaggers to the front counter under the weight of a small ficus tree exclaiming, "This is it!" and I snap out of my orchid reverie. I smile at her and then turn and look out the window where a woman with a razor-cut black bob was a minute ago. It is a strange sort of gaze, really, and I'm feeling strange so I guess it makes sense. Wistful. Tender. Reverent. And, somehow, relieved. It wasn't her. It wasn't her. She was and she wasn't enough.