Apricots and Lost Love

Bill and MaryAnn sent me these.

I’d been complaining about the lack of apricots on the East Coast. I mean, there are apricots, but they’re inedible. The packers pick them when they’re still green on the tree. Apricots don’t ripen off the tree.

In heaven, the angels eat ripe apricots.

I’m luckier than most in my choice of X-Husbands. I had to laugh at the way Bill had prepped the jars for shipping. They were armored in duck tape and esoteric types of packaging foam I had never seen before. The package would have survived a nuclear explosion. Very Bill. Very sweet.

###

Dunno whether this was the impetus for the very long, labyrinthine dream I had last night, but I dreamed about Matt who was my main boyfriend between my two marriages.

The dream took place in the first apartment I lived in on my own on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, above a storefront that was sometimes The International Driving School and sometimes Hott XXX Videos HERE – it seemed to change on a daily basis. That apartment haunts my fiction as well.

Of course, the dream apartment was not the real apartment.

The dream apartment was very long, shotgun style, with dozens of rooms, and I was there with Matt’s current girlfriend (not his girlfriend in real life) who was nice enough so that I didn’t feel any kind of resentment toward her, just a thought that’s always in the back of my mind with not-quite strangers: Wouldn’t it be fun to fuck with her head?

Matt would stomp in and out of this ménage at intervals.

Anyway, he stomped in, and his affect was odd – mechanically energetic and cheerful. Whoa! I thought. He’s doing speed again! And he’s not sharing!

So I told the girlfriend: “You know, Matt does this thing. It’s not exactly a problem, but it could turn into a problem…”

We were surrounded with packing boxes over-spilling with books, amulets, strange art objects. They were moving out or moving in – I couldn’t tell which.

I wandered off into a room, and right away, I realized the room was Matt’s private sanctuary. So I decided to spy – which is another one of my character flaws, I suppose: I really like spying on people.

I found a manuscript that Matt was writing, and I began reading it eagerly – Matt is a really good writer! And there was a plastic baggie on the desk filled with old subway tokens and chicken bus transfers and one very beat-up-looking cigarette. I heard footsteps at the door, and realized in a panic that I was about to be discovered in Bluebeard’s secret chamber! I made up a hasty cover story – I was looking for cigarettes! And see? I found one!

And then I woke up.

###

In real life, Matt tracked me down some time back after 15 years or so of silence.

I was shocked.

Wow! I wrote. I can’t believe I’m hearing from you. If I exist at all in your life, I must be a ghost.

He wrote back: Of course you exist in my life. I can't imagine that any of us could reach this age without being acutely aware of the existential overlap of aging, much to my surprise. I should recognize it myself, since I'm constantly telling Sam that I was 13 once, too (one of the stupidest things a parent could ever say, if we don't bother explaining that we're still 13, and all the ages we ever were), just as I'm still the guy who fell in love with you at MaryBeth's house, and still the one who fell out of love with you in Oakland, and still every other happy idiot I ever was.

We remain in sporadic communication. Mostly about books. I don’t think he’s happy.