How to Stay, When to Vanish

The year before, we’d dressed up for a party in a fancy hotel ballroom: champagne and caviar, a live jazz band, dancing, the whole thing. In between, we’d broken up and gotten back together a half dozen times. The future of the relationship? We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk much about the past, either—we’d dated, for a short time, a few years back. However pleasurable, our connection had always felt volatile, precarious. Half our conversations seemed to take place in doorways, with someone putting one of their shoes on: pretending to leave, wanting to be asked to stay. Something kept returning us to one another, a magnetic force I couldn’t seem to resist. Maybe it’s like what Bi says about watching his films. Some things are meant to be felt, and not understood.

Three months into the new year, the city went into lockdown in response to a deadly global pandemic. All of sudden, the future—what I thought I knew of it—was unequivocally canceled. All of a sudden, the present was all we had, and it was a dear, precious thing. I held on to it. The man and I stayed put. Time, suspended.

One night after dinner, I suggested watching Long Day’s Journey into Night. Sure, he said, giving no indication of remembering that we’d once planned to see it on the big screen, a year ago. We made microwave popcorn and dimmed the lights in the living room, creating a cozy theater for two. In the dark, we waited for the movie to begin. I reached for his hand. Had the future arrived? Together now, after so much time spent falling apart. Those early months in quarantine, we spent more time together than either of us had ever anticipated. But that summer, he disappeared again.

I didn’t hear from him until a year later. My childhood best friend had passed away, from suicide. She had turned forty-one not long before. I’d known her since the seventh grade. He called to offer his condolences. On the phone, I asked him to come see me. I don’t think that’s a good idea, he said, after a moment. He was back in New York and dating someone new, he told me. Just a month ago, he’d been in LA, visiting his family with his girlfriend. Stunned into silence, I listened to him talk on about grad school, the books he was reading. He sounded remarkably sanguine about life, and I said so, adding quickly that I was glad for him, before we hung up.

A few days later, I asked him again to come to LA. He didn’t answer for a while. I can’t, he said finally. It’s not the right time. I knew what he meant, of course, and I couldn’t disagree with him. But it didn’t match up to the certainty I had in those surreal days and weeks after my friend’s death that time was something we made up, to give or take as we pleased. It was malleable, like clay—but only while we were still alive. Only death could remove time entirely. In mourning, I wanted time to stop. Rewind.

The summer before, right before he vanished the last time, I’d asked him about our future. I want us to stay together, for real, I said, my heart beating fast in my chest. Let’s be a family. For all the anxiety and despair caused by the pandemic, I felt brave enough at last to say those words, to start a conversation about what might come next for us. He said he needed time to think about it. He kept saying, I don’t know. After a while, he said, I don’t think I’ll ever know. I’m sorry.

Time pressed on. So it goes.

“Dipping water with the point of a knife, examining snow with a microscope. Doing this over and over,” Luo says in the film’s final moments. “One still wants to ask, have you counted the stars in the sky?” To live minute by minute, day by day. Time, sublime and infinite.

However far one travels, no matter how many time zones crossed, the future is constantly arriving. I feel it. All the time, I feel it.