In the darkness after dusk, the temperature drops quickly on the Monterey Bay Peninsula. It is mostly warm and tropical in the daylight, but at night the daytime humidity remains stiff and suffocating in the air, no longer upheld by the warmth of the sun, but rendered stagnant, with a lifeless chill. It is not uncommon for nighttime to be windy, but each gust can only be characterized by a senseless violence; There were no refreshing breezes.

The town of Monterey is built like a Babylonian ziggurat. From the very start of the coast, every street adds a tier, parallel to each, up the steep incline of a large, statuesque hill.  The peak is about five miles from the coast. From the bay, Monterey probably looks like a Sicilian fishing town,with colorful houses, layered in crooked rows, one above the other, ascending the facade of the hill. There are no large commercial buildings. From the gate of the Army post, about halfway from the coastline, the ascension is called Franklin hill. The enclosure, nested atop the highest part of Monterey, is a coastal forest with clearings of buildings jutting out at intervals and thin streets etched through underneath the trees like the blue webs of arteries slowing underneath the skin. There are as many deer and raccoons on post as soldiers, and they are comfortable around people.

When I was younger, and naïve, I told myself- in my introspections- that love is real.  On these cool evenings now, chain smoking at the top of Franklin Hill, looking out over the lights of the town below and the vast darkness of the bay beyond, I am taken back to the cold weeknights, when we walked in the dark through the trees and snow to sit above our stream and get stoned. Under the ice, the water flowed and tripped over the stones of the rugged streambed audibly beneath our moments of soft and loving carelessness. How sincerely impersonal we were then, lying through our lips about our weaknesses for each other.  Those nights in the beginning were so simple. I could drink until I was incoherent and it was all the same to her, perhaps because I did not quite belong to her. Now, after a year and a half and three thousand miles, I reflect on those late nights into the sunrise; the drinks and flickering moments of ecstatic joy and savage brutality, and I lament on the irreparably shattered remnants of who I was.

It is not easy to find a reason to love now. It is not easy to find much of anything inside, or around me. All that is left is the occasional sunset over the bay, the view from the top of the hill at night, and the last cigarette before I go to sleep. I can find some pleasure in the sound of silence or the smell of freshly brewed coffee. The taste of whiskey only reminds me of my mistakes and the sound of a beautiful girl’s laugh or the depth of her eyes reminds me of something I once cared strongly for.

My history defines me, but there is nothing about who I was left in me. I was once strongly flawed. I was a prisoner to my vices, a helpless romantic to the arts, the strongest embodiment of emotional masochism, and a deeply poetic thinker. There is no sanctity left in me to exercise those practices, nor a desire to form an aesthetic appreciation for a beautiful thing. My identity is as foreign to me now as the emptiness filling me.

When I was younger, it was easy to find a reason to persist. I had love around me, in friends and whoever I was sleeping with. Often it was just my next drink. These things brought me happiness; the primary reward of life. If nothing else, I had the city. The city itself was a reason to carry on. When I die, I want my ashes taken back to New York. I want some scattered in Astoria, thrown in the gray water of the harbor off of the Verrazano. I want some taken back to my hometown, where someone should stand at sunrise in the summer on a small dock that just slightly edges into the Mohawk, fog all around the air over the water, and cast parts of me into the silent, unbroken river. All that one can ask for in their time after death is to be remembered in the places they loved the most.

Now, I lay stretched out on a wooden bench under a willow. It is short and stout and it is probably not a willow but it looks like one. It canopies the bench in a careful embrace. My head is settled in a girl's lap, and my feet extend past the opposite end of the wooden boards,stiffly protruding and suspended level with the bench by my calves. The girl's name is Victoria, and she is very beautiful. She has a little of every feature that qualifies a person to be beautiful; well defined legs, a large, firmly shaped buttocks that curves into her hips and the small of her back, perfect and confident breasts, sculpted collar bones, whispers of freckles on her cheeks, big, crystalline brown eyes,  and long, dark, full hair. I've promised to marry her soon.

We share a soft whisper of breath, not speaking, silent in the reprieve of darkness. I take long drags of my cigarette every few seconds, and exhale regretfully. I no longer find gratification in smoking, it is more than anything a chore. The smoke hangs over me, suspended in the heavy air, and I must be cautious to keep it from rolling over into Victoria's space. She caresses tufts of my hair, rolling them over in her fingers, and admires the night around us. The air is a cloud of mist within which we survive together.  I know she is observing everything with all her senses. She feels the coolness of the night, smells the bay, listens to the breeze, tastes the lingering remnants of my lips on her’s, and watches the deer that trot through the grass in the fogged moonlight. I know she does this when she is silent; one can see all the thoughts weaving together inside her on her face in these moments.

I did this as well in the silences we shared. My thoughts, less organized than the webs inside her, float in front of my face like the wisps of smoke from the cigarette that hangs on my lips and stings my eyes. I only speak when, finally, my thoughts come slower and more cautiously. Breaking the silence, I say, “I love you.”

“I know.” I pull hard with my lungs on my cigarette and hold the smoke in for a time, then allow it to pour softly out from my nostrils. Victoria strokes the bristles of hair on the side of my face and holds my hand with the cigarette clasped between its middle and forefinger. Then she whisps “Have you ever loved anyone else?” I take another long drag and release the smoke with my strained words.

“Yes. Haven’t you?”

“Of course I have, Babe.” She squeezes my hand tighter and says, “But that doesn’t matter to me. None of what I once felt will matter for as long as we are together, as one. Whoever you had to love to find me doesn’t matter now. They were practice.” She smiles and brings her face down to kiss me softly once on my bottom lip, then lingers above my mouth, locking her eyes with mine. The energy between us at this moment is powerful. I can feel her soul being pulled closer to mine in a very real, physical way. There is a shared warmth circulating us; the thermal power of our love emanating from our hearts.

“Do you want me to tell you about her?”

“No.”

“No?” She is quiet for a moment, then leans down and kisses me again, hard and quickly, straightens back up, and says with a gentle smile,

“Of course I do.” She is careful and closed now, but I will speak anyway. It is selfish of me. The truth had been holding me back, though, from loving her fully. She should know who I am now is not who I was, and that all people change constantly, that the man who loves her at this moment will be dead soon, but our love is not guaranteed to die with him.

“The nighttime reminds me of what I have I done in the night. All people are different once the sun has set, just as we are all different in the rain and the snow. I have done some horrible things in the night…” I pause here to light another cigarette. Victoria has taken her hand away from mine by now. My thoughts have stalled, so I waste time smoking. I know she wants to speak but doesn’t know what to say, so I eventually speak to relieve her.

“When I was sixteen, a junior in highschool, I thought I'd fallen in love. I worked in a small cafe, a quiet and calm place called Mochalisa's. It was family owned by Brooklyn Italians that had moved upstate. The owner’s wife would often bring us pasta and marina in large tupperwares for dinner while we worked the night shifts. His son was my age and worked with me. He was an egotistic, pampered child.

The café was always dimly lit, just enough so that one could see comfortably but subtly dark enough to hide coffee stains on the floors and accumulating dust in the higher corners and tops of shelves. A mock-fresco dressed the largest wall, opposite the bar. It depicted a nondescript Italian farming town in generic browns and shallow greens. When people entered, they would feel the aroma of fresh espresso strong in their nostrils. Inside it was warm and pleasant. It was a wonderful job, and I was an exceptional barista. I was a supervisor soon after I was hired, and when I came in early on weekends to brew pots of coffee, before the cafe opened, I would sit outside in the brisk morning air and smoke with a fresh cappuccino.

My father hated that I worked. I think it was that he had worked from a young age himself, but because he had to. Now that he’d become so successful, he didn't feel I needed to work. He wanted me to focus on my academics. I was supposed to go to college and become successful myself. Therefore, whenever my grades suffered at all he would demand I quit, but I never did.

Anyway, Mochalisa's was in an outdoor mall. The stores and restaurants were connected in a square of strips around a large parking lot. On one side of the café  was a very successful sushi-hibachi restaurant and on the other a failing barbecue joint. There was never a line of customers inside, and it was often completely empty, but for the employees, when I would go in during my breaks. The manager was short and wide, poorly groomed, and a foul man. He made it a point to hire only attractive teenage girls, and would put his hand on their shoulder or smile suspiciously with crooked and broken teeth as he spoke to them. When he taught them how to cut meat with certain knives, or perform other tasks in the kitchen, he would shamelessly put his hand on theirs and control it to demonstrate the movement, rather than do it himself and allow them to mimic.

I went to highschool with three of the girls he’d hired. They were all very attractive, and very friendly to me once I made their lattes. They would call the cafe while they worked, ask specifically for me, and order drinks. I would bring them next door on my smoke breaks and we would always flirt. In return they would give me pounds of brisket and ribs after they closed every night that would just be thrown away because they had no patrons to buy it.

In the fall of that year, Nicole was hired. She was beautiful. She had long, straight red hair. A deep red, almost burgundy. She had emerald eyes, freckles as if Seurat had had his way with her cheekbones, and the body of a varsity volleyball player. She began coming into the cafe to get drinks before her shift. I couldn’t even flirt with her when she was in front of me. I was still young, but not a virgin. Somehow she made me into a shy boy. She had a reserved confidence around her. She wore a sly smile on her face; one corner of her thin lips always curved slightly upward. She carried herself with insecurity but spoke with an intelligence beyond her appearance. She was breathtaking.

I remember the night she gave me her phone number as an anecdotal story I would tell my friends for years. I traded her a cupcake for it. She had always admired the pastries we had on display. The cupcakes were made individually, by hand, by a retired grandmother named Patti. She would call everyone sweetheart, or sugar, and treated each employee like family. It was mid October and when Nicole came in to buy her coffee before work, I noticed her attraction to a seasonal pumpkin cupcake. I bought it for her on the condition that she wrote her phone number on the back of the receipt.

That night, we texted for hours, and before I'd gone to sleep she'd sent me a handful of pictures of her breasts. I didn't stand a chance, she already had me.

We texted every day after that, but for the first time since she'd been hired it seemed none of our shifts aligned. Nicole lived in the neighboring town and went to a different highschool, therefore it was only ideal that she already be in town for work when we spend time together. After about a week of impatience, we found a night when we were both to leave work at the same time. The sex had been implied, but never vocalized, and I was very nervous.

When I worked at Mochalisa's, as an underage teenager, many of my coworkers would buy me alcohol. I had a stash of liquor in the back storage room, hidden behind a shelf of boxes. Usually, I kept scotch, rye, and gin on hand. I would always have some sort of drink with me next to the espresso machine. By no means would I ever get blind drunk while working. I drank like a professional, and there were only a handful of times in my 2 years working there that anyone ever suspected anything. That night, however, in the 3 hours before I met with Nicole, I drank three gin and tonics and 4 straight scotch’s, fretfully trying to calm my nerves in anticipation of what was to come.

30 minutes before my shift was supposed to end, my head was spinning. I splashed cold water on my face, pulled an espresso shot for myself, and stood in the autumn cold to smoke, trying to sober up a bit. As I stood on the sidewalk in the dim glow of the lights coming out from inside the cafe, a cigarette in one frozen numb hand and a small glass of espresso  in the other, it began to snow for the first time that winter. It began as a quiet presence in the air. It was light, and only evident as white crystals glistening in the beams of the streetlamps. Standing in the midst of it, my phone buzzed in my pocket.

‘My parents are getting pizza right now without me. This better be worth it.’

I was shaking.

We drove to an empty parking lot in her car. I'd barely said anything the entire drive. I looked out the window into the darkness. The snow had become a flurry. She parked facing the road, away from the building, the lot elevated on a hill above the street. Bright orange lights of cars passed every few seconds at its base. Behind us, I saw in the reflection of the side mirror a neon blue cross glowing through the snow in a field of frosted grass. I started to laugh. She was confused and awkwardly laughed with me and I tried to stop to explain but I couldn't. I was becoming hysterical and my sides hurt. Eventually I caught my breath and wiped tears from eyes, then said, ‘This is my mother's church. We’re in the parking lot of my mother's church right now.’

She stared at me for a moment, then broke down in laughter. When she gathered herself, she placed both her hands on either side of my face. They were warm and soft on my skin, and all my tensions began to relax. She was smiling with affection for me, studying the details of my face and looking for poetry in my eyes. The snow outside had turned into a blizzard by now. She pulled my face to hers and kissed me. My lips were meticulous and tense, but she broke into them. We did not have sex in that snowstorm in the back seat of her Altima. We made love. Everything she did and everything I did to her felt natural and beautiful.”

“Was that when you fell in love with her?”

I smile disdainfully. “Yes,” I lie.

In upstate New York, fifteen minutes north of Albany, is a town called Clifton Park. It has grown in the last two decades from an insignificant rural space between the capital and Schenectady into a prevalent commercial town with a leading high school and a tumorous growth of retail businesses. The school district was named in the language of the Iroquois tribes that lived in the area centuries ago; Shenendehowa, the great plains. In reality, only the campus was built on flat ground, the rest of Clifton Park is a series of hills. My neighborhood was even called Woodland Hills.

In autumn, the sunlight would fall through the thick trees and paint the roads all warm colors, as light shines through the stained glass windows of cathedrals, past the crucifix and altar, unto the holy marble floors and wooden pews. By mid November the leaves would all be dead, and the trees gray and naked. The snow comes and feels like magic until Christmas. By the first of the New Year, the winter loses grace and dignity, and the snow accumulates like the layers of bricks forming a wall. The snow covers everything and frames the roads, stagnant, becoming hard and icy and blackened by dirt.  There was a poetic justice to me in the death of autumn that I never felt in the resurrection of spring. I loved the autumn in New York, and I loved the winter. This is a time of deep artistic thought. Humankind is sedated in the cold, and easier to understand. The cold seasons would enable me to find meaning in myself and my movements. I drank a lot and took many other things. I read the classics and worked hard in school. Junior year I had Nicole as well, although I drank her away soon.

There are at least ten shopping plazas in Clifton Park, or were when I left, and one mall, where I worked. Teenagers would always be at the mall once school was out. They would smoke weed and drink cheap vodka out of emptied soda cans. Others would go to Mochalisa's and study together. There is an abundance of drugs for the youth of wealth. My friends and I were not born with silver spoons in our mouths. If you can't afford drugs, you sell them and smoke your profits. And so we hustled. We made some money on the side as well, and some of my friends got in trouble, but the hustle was never a part of my life. Drugs are different when you have to work for them. They begin to feel more valuable. It was just recreation, like playing video games, to the rich kids. To us it was our reward, and eventually a necessity in our lives.

This town, this is where I was raised. I am not proud of this place, nor ashamed of it. This town means nothing, it is only important because it is where I was raised, but New York is everything to me. It is not kin, she is a lover. New York is the sweetest and most beautiful woman I've ever had and ever will. I will die with her and if I die in New York I will never die alone.

“Sweetheart, you're getting away from yourself,” She says dryly. It is very cold outside. I have gin in a water bottle I haven't tasted yet, so I drink from it for a long time, then light another cigarette and take another drink. It is warm inside me and blood flows hot through my face. Although I still lay my head in her lap, we are separate now, and she is cold and quiet, but accepting my of  silence. I brush her cheek with the back of my fingers and drink again.

“I'm just thinking, Babe.”

She smiles, kisses me, and tells me to carry on. I take a few more drinks while I  finish my cigarette, recalling that autumn of my sophomore year inside myself.

Nicole and I hooked up for the remainder of October, every time her showing me new feelings and emotions and me becoming more comfortable with her and inside her. She didn't drink, but she loved me when I  wasn't sober and she loved to taste the liquor on my tongue when we kissed. This made me feel even closer to her when we were together. By November I was a supervisor and a keyholder at the cafe. Our restaurants both closed at 9 each night, but I always stayed later than her and my coworkers, closing down the register and doing the books for the day’s sales. Nicole came in after she finished closing next door with dinner for the both of us. We'd sit alone in the cafe in silence with the doors locked and all the lights off but the one over the counter as I worked. My music, connected to the speakers in the ceiling would play to comfort; soft soul and passionate rhythm and blues. Nicole would make me strong drinks from my stash and I would drink and work and then finish work and drink and make love to her in the dark to the music and after we would lie naked and exposed on the couches in the back corner of the cafe, silently feeling each other and staring out at the moonlit empty parking lot, feeling a need to not say anything, fearing it would ruin the perfection of the moment. 

One night, she was the one to break the silence finally and ruin everything. We were lying naked in each other's arms, her head buried in my chest, when she looked up at me and stopped my heart with her deep green eyes.

‘Why don't we ever do this at your house? Or my house?’

‘Well, we aren't dating.’

‘I know that.’ She tightened her lips and looked at me with more affection.

‘Your parents are Irish Catholics from Boston. I don't think they're the type of people that would let their daughter bring over random guys to hook up with as they look the other way.’ She laughed.

‘What about your parents?’

‘No.’

‘Okay.’ She paused in thought for a moment and asked, ‘Why aren't we dating?’

‘I don't know. I'd love for you to be mine.’

She pushed me away from her a bit and saw me more seriously. ‘Would you be the same if you were sober?’ She was proud of herself for that question, I could see it in her smile, but then, very suddenly, she appeared deeply sad, as if she'd made a horrible realization. ‘Can you even be sober?’

I looked at the space between our bodies. The world at that moment was the parts of our skin that touched and the suede cloth of the couch and the parts that didn't.

‘I don't know,’ I said. ‘I've been like this for four months now.’

She touched my face with her soft, warm hand. ‘We’re so young. How does this happen?’ She looked in me even more strongly with her gorgeous eyes and wrapped her arms around me. She pulled me tight into her. My chest pressed up against her breasts and my hand on her thigh, she buried her face in the curve where my neck meets my shoulder. My skin was wet and I realized she was crying. She was so quiet and strong, I didn't understand. She took a soft, deep inhale.

‘I love you, Omar.’ I reached over her body for my scotch and finished it. She didn't move. She wasn't expecting anything from me. I picked her head up from my shoulder and kissed her for a long time.

‘I love you more.’

And that was it. The first time I ever told a girl I loved her. The first time I ever thought I felt it. The very first time I would invalidate the sanctity of such valuable and delicate words in a blind state. It didn't last for long, though.

The weather in the month of November was cold and tense. The snow had fallen on just a few occasions, quietly through the nights. During the days, the temperature had been low and the air was dry and restless. If you were caught in the wind, it felt as if your skin would either harden and crack or blow off your face like sand. The sky was perpetually gray through the whole month and ice lined all of the edges of the concrete sidewalks and road. The life had been visibly drained of everything on the streets, except the cars which drove faster and more gracefully.

In Nicole I had a fire that kept me warm. We spent the month in each other's arms. It is true that the first time, of anything, is the best. I drank her passion like a new c***tail. She tasted like fireball and gin on ice. She stayed in me for hours after and my head hurt more than ever when I came down.

We spent our time together in the basements of our homes on Saturday afternoons, in her car after dusk, in the cafe at midnight with classes in the morning. The minutes we were holding each other close to ourselves were hours and the hours passed like seconds. The month was short and expired quickly for me in a blur of passion and alcohol.

Into the end of the month it was very cold and still very dry. The day before Thanksgiving I had been drinking bourbon in school since the morning. Walking back from school, the sky was gray, and snowflakes fell gently like ashes floating in the air around a bonfire; the inarguable admonition of a storm through the night. I wasn't very cold, from the whiskey, but walking quickly to get  home nonetheless. My aunt, uncle, and cousin were up from Brooklyn for the holiday weekend. My cousin and I would be secretly drunk the whole weekend and enjoy our family's company.  I had a date with Nicole that night, and then I was spending the rest of the weekend home. We had discussed earlier that week how we'd never been on a date together, which was strange because we'd become so close in such a short time.

Walking brisk in the flurry, I turned onto my street and saw my house at the corner of the next intersection. My aunt was standing in the driveway, arms crossed, one hand holding her phone to her ear. I smiled, excited to see her, and looked at my feet, walking more quickly. I breathed into a cupped hand and inhaled through my nose, checking I didn't smell too strongly of bourbon, as I approached the driveway. Nearing, she saw me but did not wave. She started to walk toward me but did not smile, nor put down her phone. She was nodding quietly in understanding of what she was being told on her phone, looking off to the side, almost as if to avoid my eye contact. Then she said, ‘I understand, but I have to go right now.’

She put her phone down slowly from her face into her pocket, crossed her arms, and then finally looked up at me. I was expecting a hug, but she seemed very tired and troubled, and I wasn't sure how I was to act. She took a deep breath and said to me, with a strained voice and an admirable strength about her, ‘Your Grandfather is dead.’

So she had lost her father, that was why she appeared so troubled. My only response was, ‘That's a shame.’ The comment seemed to pain her, as if my apathy was meant as spite. She told me she would be leaving with my uncle and cousin, as well as my mother, tomorrow to bury my grandfather. On Thanksgiving. I nodded, and told her it was great to see her again as I moved past uncomfortably to the door which leads into the garage. 

Inside it was very warm and somber. The air was thick with the stench of rosemary and simmering broth. All of the lights in the house were off and there was no sun in the cloudy sky to illuminate the house through open windows. Everything was grey in the limbo between light and darkness. My mother was frantic in the kitchen. I asked why she was cooking at three in the afternoon, but she didn't hear me. I walked through the kitchen, over the dirty white tiled floor, past the cluttered wooden table, and found my uncle-in-law and cousin in the dining room, setting plates and silverware in the shadows. From them I discovered we were having an ‘emergency Thanksgiving dinner’ that night to make up for their and my mother's absence tomorrow. How childish.

‘Will you come upstairs with me?’ I asked my cousin. She looked to Stefan, her step father, who sympathetically produced a smile, with no conviction, and offered to finish the dinner preparations by himself.

My cousin, Hannah, has been like a sister to me my whole life. She was less than a year old when her father left her and my aunt, and she lived with my family for much of her childhood as her mother pursued her medical education. They finally moved to Brooklyn together when Sandra found a residency down there. She was accepted into a performing arts high school in Manhattan to pursue her acting career. Hannah and I hated each other as children, but as we grew up, we found a connection together in drugs and alcohol, and eventually came to love each other as friends, cousins, and basically siblings.

‘Shut the door behind you,’ I said to her as we entered my bedroom. I turned my lamp on to light the room a bit; a dim, orange glow pouring over my dresser onto the floor around it. I dropped my backpack onto the bed, heavy from textbooks and the thick glass bottle. Then I took the bourbon out of the bag and filled an empty glass that was left on night stand. I handed it to her and drank from the bottle, then sat down on the bed.

‘Thank you. Have you been drinking all day? That's really not healthy.’ She took a brief sip and struggled to swallow it without making a face.

‘It's just because of the holiday weekend. It's not a big deal.’

‘Oh, okay. How are you holding up?’

‘About grandpa? The last memory I have of him was last summer when he yelled at my mother, trying to defend his foolish Conservatism, and then made me watch Wimbledon with him.’

‘He really loved tennis.’ I smiled, recalling the tournament the year before. It had been an upset final for the cup, taken by the underdog and not the Brit.

‘He taught me so much about the sport and the players. I still watch tennis often.’ We were both quiet for a moment, and each took a long drink. Then I asked, ‘How's my mom?’

‘She's still trying to process it, I guess She'll be sad tomorrow, probably. I think we'll all be okay at dinner tonight, and tomorrow will be our day to mourn.’

I topped her drink off, drank some more myself, and said, ‘I won't be at dinner.’

She drank her drink, glaring at me over the rim of the glass. She lowered it from her lips, licking them gently as she did so, and asked, in a controlled but interrogative tone, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I have to go out with Nicole today.’

‘Who the f*** is Nicole?’ She asked, in monotone.

‘I love her.’

She sighed and looked into my eyes, her face disgusting with pity. I reached out and took her empty glass from her, saying, ‘He was an awful, ignorant, hateful man.’

‘I know.’ She laughed to herself and started to leave, shaking her head as she walked out.

By the time Nicole was outside my house in her car, the bottle was almost gone and I couldn't walk straight. I brushed my teeth and splashed water on my face. As soon as I got in the car she told me to get out.

‘I'm fine, I'm not that drunk.’ She was staring at the snow in the headlights at night falling on the long street in front of us. Not saying anything. ‘My grandfather died today.’ Her head snapped at me and she wore a face of disgust.

‘Get out of the car. Now. Be with your family.’

I left and that was the last time I ever talked to Nicole.

It is still windy and cold, and I'm starting to feel a little drunk. Victoria is quiet and has noticed now how much I've drank, but I know she won't say anything. “It's only ten. Would you like to get some food?”

“That would be wonderful.”

We walk down Franklin hill, slowly descending from the fog into the shadow of a cloud. Stepping heel first to the ground, then laying our toes down, heel first, then the toes, just the same way as the other person we walk with, as we had both been programmed in Basic Training to walk. We liked to run down the really steep block, as if we were going down a slide in a park. On the way back up though, we knew it would seem to be an asphalt and cement wall, obstructing our journey home, that we would have to climb over. Things in this world were like that sometimes. Just as tobacco smells so sweet and soft before it is lit, then after it is bitter and harsh and strangely erotic in its discomfort. It is the same as the careless freedom of the night that is followed by the duties and restrictions of the day. Things in this world have a tendency to cycle between extremes in their very selves on regular schedules.

I think perhaps this will happen to the relationship we have. In fact, I am certain. I can only hope she knows as well. That is how people fall apart. Love is not always destroyed by a lack of love, or a lack of effort on one or both parties. If two people love each other very much, they can still fall apart just from the ignorance of this basic law of reality. Things will not always be good, and the bad lasts the same amount of time as the good. It is only fair.

“Will they take your phone from you when get there?” Victoria asks me as we walk down the hill. Victoria walks with exaggerated arm swing, which I always found adorable. It was as if she was always on a quest, and just like Dorothy when she first found the Yellow Brick Road, Victoria walks everywhere with a buoyancy in her gait and a decent nine inches to the front, six to the rear arm swing. When going downhill though, as such, leaning back more to keep her shoulders from slouching, for some incomprehensible purpose she excessively exaggerates her arm swing until her arms are nearly level 90 degrees to her shoulders.

“I was told they wouldn’t. But I doubt I’ll be able to talk to you during the duty day.”

“That shouldn’t matter because you’ll be on East Coast Time anyway.”

“Where should we go?”

“I just want somewhere to sit down. I want to be able to be alone around a bunch of other people, does that make sense?”

“I think so.”

“It’s nice to just be around other people, that you don’t know. Just to be acknowledged for your existence.”

“That is nice, isn’t it.”

“I think it is.”

We walked on down franklin and then turned onto Alvarado street. In exulting morality the retrospective street lamps lining each measure of sidewalk illuminated the restaurants and people in a soft gold as we walked down the streets. My senses were combined to identify the feeling of that place. The thermal aroma of Blues music partnered with a forte of bright lights strung over each dining patio like a frieze, and around everything voices of comforting enjoyment painted the scene. Tonight, we absorbed the amorous streets of Downtown Monterey differently than we had before. We passed down a street of normalities that had once been impressive and provocative. The slip of dusk into darkness struck a chord of melancholy that now rang through the glowing lights and each note of a Miles Davis cover, accompanying the voice of Almighty Time to whom we were forfeiting ourselves in useless hours.

We sat in a coffee shop I never cared to remember the name of-just that it was owned by Jewish Israelis who had no right to make cappuccinos. They made them alright though. It was dry and smooth and the espresso was sweet. The milk calmed my nausea some from all the gin. That was all I had, while victoria enjoyed a chocolate crepe.

“I always feel awkward ordering certain things from people that come from a different culture than the one that created that product,” I say, attempting to make conversation.

Victoria separates another portion of crepe from the main body with the side of her fork, then pierces it with the prongs and places it in her mouth, almost sexually, while responding to my comment with her eyes and chewing slowly and analytically.

“That’s because you’re used to living in Brooklyn, where you go to certain a neighborhood and a certain type a people live there and and they serve a certain type of food from their countries.”

That makes sense. I drink the cappuccino then order a tonic water from the Jewish cashier, drink a third of it, and refill it with gin. Still Victoria says nothing and I am grateful. I drink my c***tail and listen to her talk about her cat “back home”. “ Back home” means nothing to me. There is Clifton Park; a seventeen-year stain in my memory. No, I will not return there until I have to bury my father. And then Brooklyn. I had not lived in Bay Ridge long enough for it to be called my home. Also, I love it too much for it to be a home to me. Pain is home. Home is where I learned from mistakes and was beaten into the form I've become. That is not what home is supposed to be though. So I do not have a home then, or home is at the most wherever I am. This makes sense to me. I always call the barracks “home” whereas Victoria calls it “her room”, like it is a hotel suite, not a dormitory. Home is a place of warmth for her. Yes, there are her share of bad memories embedded in the paint on the walls of every room in her old house, but she has the love of a family that expressed their love for each other and in there lies the familiarity of a desire to be in that place to some extent.

We sit silently after that while she finishes eating and for some time after. It is nearly midnight now and we are the last patrons still in the café. We watch people walk by outside the glass windows of the facade on the sidewalk. Anyone still out after eleven is either drunk, about to get drunk, or tired and heading home.

“I really don't mind this place,” I resolve to Victoria.

“It is nice. A clean, well lighted place.”

A bit taken aback, I look to her approvingly. “You've finally read some Hemingway. “

“That's all I know,” she says. “Don't expect anymore allusions for a time.” I smile and finish off my drink, then stand up. “We should go before it gets too late.”

Suddenly dismal again, Victoria nods solemnly and follows. We walk out and down Alvarado, holding hands and avoiding conversation. The silence is better than discussion when the reality is awful. In the morning I will be gone. How awful it is to think about that. Better to walk in silence with nothing but our love between us, then ruin it with foolish talk of reality.

At the intersection of Franklin and Alvarado we take a taxi up the hill to the gate of the post. At the gate we swipe our military ID cards on the magnetic scanner and pass through the turnstile. It is evident in Victoria's body language as we walk that, nearing the barracks, we will need to discuss the coming month.

“It will be good for me. I mean I don't need it, but I don't have a choice so maybe I'll make the best of it.” I say, optimistically.

“How can you say that right now?” She says, accusatory.

“Sorry?”

“You're talking about rehab and you're drunk right now.”

“Oh, shut up.” I regret that immediately, but I can see on her face it is too late. I stop walking and let go of her hand. She continues on but stops eventually and turns around, several yards ahead. Looking to me with pain and love on her face, she stands with her arms crossed and the moonlight dances on her long, full brown hair, flowing past her shoulders almost to her waist, glimmering like the stars above us.

I walk towards her and wrap my arm around her waist. Pulling her body close to mine, it is as if she forgets everything in the world except us and embraces me tightly, pressing her face into my chest. We are fickle in our passions. Let us stand here in the moonlight among the trees and forget everything in the world together. To love like we do in this moment is rare and must be seized without hesitation. Hold tightly to it for it will slip away as quickly as it comes. I sway a little to the sides and she sways with my drunkenness. There are no tears yet. There is not happiness. We are both appreciating this moment as if we are admiring a painting together.

I bury my nose into the curve where her neck becomes her shoulder. Her hair smells of the memories of love and of passion we share together. I settle myself in this moment, it will fleet away soon, I know. I know.

I let her go. I loosen my hold to her, and take a step back. Her head held firmly by my unfaithful hands, her moist eyes looking into mine, mine into hers, we exchange our souls for a brief moment, then look away at almost the same time. We begin to walk on again. The soft strokes of  a breeze sweep the cement sidewalk before our feet. A few dead leaves slide along the width of the sidewalk in front of us. Past these leaves, like dead memories fleeting through my internal vision, onward into the inevitable end of night; we carry on.

We have been flying by for months. All of us, we've been accelerating and strengthening, jumping ambitiously into the current with conscious neglect for the rocks and crags foundered in these rapids. In our pursuit of a wizened and memorable youth, it seems; we have forgotten we are mortal. In a way, we have also been searching for relief and contentment in everything we do which has produced only disappointment. It was too late for us when we all realized together at once humans are ultimately polar animals, often characterized by a fragile rage and chronic pain. We are all radicalists, servicemen to our own emotions, and above all: lost. We are built of measures of thread, initially free, that are then suspended as we grow until wrought to their limit, and when they snap open they all snap simultaneously. When we witnessed this the damage was crippling. Those that did not snap were strung tighter afterwards and it was too late to repair the past. Then everything halts. We witnessed multiple breaking points shortly following one another and I was in a Roman cathedral, the Della Vittoria, staring at a Bernini, and everything burning to ash around me. When it has finished, we come to a gradual balancing point and stand ourselves up in our minds and we try to make sense of it all.