Vita Nuova

by Greg Freed

Act I is Manhattan and we’re in at the curtain—the heavy, gold one that used to merit mention on the radio. A piece of luck, this anvil of a metaphor. The nonfigurative curtain has fallen on Eugene Onegin, the first opera I ever saw in New York and now the one we’re at hours before I get on a westbound train. Remember the time I moved away forever? Picture us, afterwards, in the plaza: you’re standing two steps down to apologize for your height or mine, and I’m leaning forward and weeping, unexpectedly, on your shoulder. Years ago, you had been the one to cry when we stopped saying love where we meant friendship. I had told you I was moving across the country with your…successor? in a tiny restaurant at an overcrowded table, mostly people I barely knew, friends of yours who heard and wished me contentment in a new place and maybe a new life and didn’t know it was a tall order. I had thought the sting had gone out of any parting then for us. It had not. 

Act II is Oakland and we’re mostly here for the prelude and the last few notes. At first sight of the bay, I had felt a pang of dread and ignored it, which tells the larger story. He had come out first to find us a place. For him, a westerner, it was loosely a homecoming, the water on the right side at last. All I would ever feel here was alone and allergic to the air. It would take years, but my uprooted personality, brittle and litigious, would pull the curtain down on things. 

I am thinking of nights in the middle, too, though, I suppose–when things have fallen only halfway apart, and will hang there. You’re asleep on Eastern Time so I can never call and get you to find the bleak joke in it.

Act III is a town I had never gotten over. (To name it is to lose it.) Suffice it to say, the air is warmer, even in October, and the light goes later. 

I always give my apartments estate names and I dub the place I land The Pine Box but the friend I tell finds this upsetting and I rename it. On one of my visits back here, I had bought a tiny volume of untranslated verse at the used bookstore I’d gone to in college. I’d never get much past that first sentence. 

Incipit la vita nuova. 

“Let the new life begin,” does it mean? Or, factually, “the new life begins”? On that trip I reconnected with an old love, and in a whiskey bar that told a story about the life cycle of towns, he sang a phrase from the song “Moments in the Woods” (offhandedly, to make a point), and I thought: what if I don’t get on the train back west? It will be three rough years, though, before I spend my first night on a pile of clothes on the floor of Vita Nuova. There is then a fair amount of aimless driving around while my career, such as it is, finds its legs and I have a nervous glut of leisure. In the car, I try to listen to music with no recent associations. The day it breaks a hundred degrees, a hypnotic song in a genre I hate suddenly becomes the soundtrack of the mostly lucid dream I am in. 

On the same roads after sunset, when it is scantly cooler, I recognize a house where friends had gathered or even just a bend in the road and say to the place that once was home “I know you are still here.” Out loud, like a crazy person. 

I go to the park with resident peacocks, sit on a stone bench on the edge of it. Wait for the end credits to roll. When you leave a place for very long, your presence there is not recorded. You have to admit this and then start something new. 

The first time I read the expression “home is the sailor” I parsed it wrong, thought it meant that home was something elusive, always apparently in watery flight. Every night that summer I will float on my back in the pool, breathing loudly, finding the few constellations I know. I will forcibly imagine the distances, and tell myself that, no matter what happens, I cannot ever be that far from land. Some pain eases here. You and I now are something warm but never again urgent. In another life, where things have lives and inside jokes and regrets and maybe even jobs, a curtain might dream of being a blanket.