He spells “museum” with his fingers over and over, standing naked in my kitchen, squinting at the little postcard I gave him minutes ago. We have known each other barely twenty-four hours but already, he is communicating more than most men I let inside. It will be hard to forget him. He might become a haunting. For now, he is a simple delight.

“M-U-S-E-U-M. M-U-S-E-U-M.”

I collect postcards. They always have the manual alphabet for American Sign Language on them, twenty-six stenciled hands all in different shapes. A and S look interchangeable if you don’t pay attention to the thumb. I only collect the postcards. I never write on the blank side of them, but sometimes I am tempted to; someday, I might. The manual alphabet is only the beginning for ASL students. Some people think it is the only thing worth learning.

I always give the postcards to men who stay the night. I like the morning light to come in with this new information. A new day brings a new discovery of yourself.

He looks up at me as I move from the doorway into the kitchen, to the coffeepot. He teeters on the balls of his feet for a second. He is off-balance, and I fight the smile that always comes when they stumble and reorient themselves. The mouth is not the center of communication any longer.

He touches my shoulder. His flat hand’s fingertips move from his chin towards me. “Thank you,” he signs. Then he straightens up and fingerspells “museum” again, this time to me. His eyebrows rise in a query afterwards—I am not sure if he is asking to take me or asking if he is right. I nod anyway, because I have no plans.

It is Saturday in Larchmont. I rarely make plans on Saturdays; it is always a day where I rest after the week’s teachings and gradings. The sun is streaming through tree fronds, and it already feels a degree or two warmer this April midmorning.

He gives an excited thumbs-up. His name is Nate. He is all olive skin and big brown eyes. He is rail-thin and a head taller than me. His hands are exceedingly careful.

Nate’s eyes widen when I show him the sign for “museum.” I show the handshape first (the letter “m”), then the motion of the sign (making a doorway with your hands). He nods and dutifully, quickly copies me. I let the smile grow on my face when he does it correctly. I nod. He takes the cup of coffee I silently offer him.

(Advice to ASL students: If the deaf person teaches you a sign, do not thank them again and again. Simply repeat the sign and remember it.)

Nate spends the next half-hour staring at the postcard, spelling out words with his fingers. “C-O-F-F-E-E. A-P-A-R-T-M-E-N-T. N-I-C-E.” I show him the signs for those words and know I’ll have to reteach some of them.

In the shower, by myself, I take stock of the warmth bubbling in my chest. I lift my face to the shower spray, willing my excitement to dissipate if I just look high enough. I know what is likely to happen. But even now, after so many disappointments, the thrill of possibility remains hard to ignore.

My hearing aids sit on my bedside table. I dawdle too long, standing and staring at them, debating while Nate showers. When the bathroom door opens and Nate emerges, toweling off his hair, I put them in and move to get dressed.

The hearing aids are the chief reason why Nate and I connected at the bar. Other deaf people at the bar didn’t wear them or didn’t bother to communicate beyond their deaf conversation groups. Other deaf people at the bar didn’t bother to lipread or pull out their phones to communicate. But, last night, Nate and I had locked eyes. He had taken me in and smiled, and I had been powerless to resist. His smile would make me do anything.

Now, he hums a little with each letter he makes with his hand: “R-E-A-D-Y.” I nod.

Peter was always silent. He always held little intervals of immobility after certain letters, as if he needed time to let his hands breathe. He always told me that I signed too fast, communicated too fast, walked too fast. I was impossible to keep up with.

There had been one night when we had been walking around Forest Lawn, weaving between the different gravestones, laughing and joking about unseen ghosts. I climbed to the crest of one hill and looked back. Peter was struggling to keep up with me, and his face, approaching mine, was shiny with sweat.

You always are a bit out of reach, he told me with his mouth later that night, as the diner waitress brought us our coffees. You’re just going and my hands can’t grab you.

◆

Nate tells me he lives in New York City. He is an actor. He clumsily fingerspells, “N-Y-C,” and I nod as encouragement. There are signs he could learn for NYC, for places like Brooklyn and Queens, but he will learn them from New Yorkers later down the line. If there is a later.

I both sign and speak to him, “Why are you here?”

Nate has to get his postcard to remember F. But then he spells out that he’s here for family. He looks up at my ceiling instead of down at his postcard, and I feel the warmth inside me keep steady, a winding highway without end.

(ASL students: Fingerspelling is the act of spelling out words using the manual alphabet, until you learn the sign. You should fingerspell every name and every thing you possibly can, especially in the beginning. Garbage can. Kitchen sink. Compost.)

After the museum, Nate cancels his hotel stay and brings his bag over. He is only here for two more days, and he wants to get to know me better. I teach ASL students in three different classes and he has family; his mother is bedridden, and his father needs relief. Other than that, he and I spend time together. We have sex, and he, curiously, barely talks with his mouth during it. When I am on top of him one time, a quick little round the first night before we both settle down, he squeezes my hips and spells out, “B-A-T-H-R-O-O-M.”

He pulls me to him, even when we are both floating along in sleep. His feet slide along my feet. His cock stiffens against me then goes flaccid. I know he’s awake when he peppers my shoulder blades and neck with kisses. It is all much closer and more intimate than it was with Peter.

I text friends about him the next morning. I ask, carefully, about resources for a friend in New York City to learn ASL. A couple send me classes from the Sign Language Center. Others tell me about nonprofits and freelance instructors in the area. More ask about this friend, why he’s looking to learn ASL. They say there doesn’t need to be another student who only shows up for a month or two. We need folks who are committed.

When I talk with Nate over our cups of coffee and I give him information about ASL classes, he pulls out his phone and opens the links I text him. The expression on my face makes him point at me, then fingerspell, “C-A-T-A-L-Y-S-T.”

He switches to talking and tells me, I’ve always wanted to learn ASL. You’ve just brought that desire to the surface.

I nod. I turn away from him and don’t pay attention to the face floating in my mind’s eye—a pale face, with brown hair and light eyes. Peter had said the same thing in the beginning, how he’d always wanted to but never truly had a reason. Truly, there was no real desire until me. Peter’s face materializes now in the shadows of the kitchen, his mouth downturned with uncertainty and exhaustion.

(ASL students: Don’t say you’ve always wanted to learn ASL. If you did, you would have done it already. Talk about the person who was your reason, the person you fell in love with, the person who fucked you silly enough to make you come scrabbling back for seconds.)

◆

On the last full day, Nate is called to lunch with his parents. My best friends, Paige and Riley, text and say they’re going to a flea market. Do I want to join? I say yes; while Nate is getting ready for his lunch, I meet Paige and Riley outside. Paige hops out of the car and hugs me.

Riley waves apologetically from the driver’s seat. “Give me another five minutes,” he signs. “Parking’s a bitch lately.”

Worry dissipates in my stomach. The only deaf person I trust to be gentle with Nate is Paige. Riley is not someone I want to introduce to him. Riley is too direct, too observant, too probing; he grew up in a Deaf family, while Paige and I, the only Deaf people in our childhood lives, know how to soften emotional disturbances. With luck, we will avoid a confrontation.

Paige demands a stronger cup of coffee. As Riley drives off, we enter the building. We enter my apartment, we see Nate come dressed out of my bedroom, his hair wet, and Paige immediately flashes a smile.

“Nice to meet you,” she signs. She winks twice, once at Nate and once at me; she makes sure both of us see what she’s doing.

Nate blushes. Nate is enamored, as most people are. Paige has full tattoo sleeves on both arms and a buzz cut. Even in sunny weather, she wears all black. But Nate has family to attend to, so he must go.

After Nate puts his sunglasses and an ibuprofen bottle in his fanny pack, he waves goodbye to me and signs, “See you,” then spells “L-A-T-E-R.” There is little hesitation in his spelling now, and Paige, leaning against the kitchen counter, notices.

“You really are good,” Paige signs and talks. “How much did you know before this?”

Nate shrugs. “Thank you,” he replies with only his hands. Paige and I are not sure if he is showing what he knew before or merely acknowledging the compliment. When we both receive the sound of the door closing, Paige pulls out her hearing aids. They are neon purple. They go in her jacket pocket. I feel my shoulders drop.

“He is good, though,” Paige signs. “He’s a natural signer.”

I shake my head. I don’t believe in that phrase. There are only learned expressions and learned rigidities. Paige sees me shake my head and knows the reasons why. She rolls her eyes.

“I’m paying your boyfriend a compliment,” she adds. “Where does he live again?”

I do the “y” handshape, sliding back and forth atop open palm like the subway, and I watch Paige’s face take it in. She understands how her words might hurt in their banality, in their impossibility. There is nothing natural about this relationship between me and Nate. This intimacy won’t be remembered. Her mouth purses, her eyebrows slant, but her hands offer nothing. Regret is something she barely knows how to communicate, but I see it when it’s there.

“He leaves tomorrow,” I sign. “Then it’ll be back to normal.”

“You give up on people too easily,” Paige presses. “What if it’s not the end?”

I shake my head again. I have nothing more to offer. Our phones buzz simultaneously and we are both distracted: Riley has texted that he found parking, and he’s walking over. He texts that he needs a cup of coffee too, if he’s going to take on LA freeway after LA freeway to get to the flea market. As Paige and I wait by the door to meet him, the memory of Peter remains in the space between us, an uncertainty from my past, always in my mind.

◆

On our last morning together, Nate brings out his bag, all packed and zipped, before he gets his coffee. I watch him move between the bedroom and the front door. Then he walks up and stays, smiling, in the kitchen doorway. The sunlight through the kitchen window shines on linoleum, on the walls, on his face. He signs “good morning,” an open hand coming down beatific then showing the sunrise, and shock flashes like lightning in me. My face must show it because he asks, What?

I shake my head. I don’t remember teaching you that, I say.

Nate laughs. He says something I don’t catch, and I automatically nod. I step aside to give Nate access to the coffeepot. It is another cloudless day. It is a day that is perfect for flying. It is an ideal day to go back to where you came from.

Peter moved north to Monmouth, a small town in Oregon, several months after we broke up. I still have his name in my phone. I still could text him if I wanted to. I still feel equal parts fury and regret.

I don’t remember the last time he signed “good morning.” I know these times existed, but they remain indistinct, blurred behind moments of sourness and uncertainty. I only remember his face peering at me, awestruck about me in the mornings, hesitant to discuss this situation we found ourselves in.

I don’t remember when the disappointment towards Peter started. I just remember signing, “It’s fine, it’s fine,” as much to myself as it was to him. He said it took up so much time to learn. He asked to take things slow. Eventually the slow creep of hopefulness stopped, but there was still him in the mornings—even if I had to redirect him, often, into the light.

Nate touches my shoulder. I startle back to the now between us, in this kitchen. His eyebrows knit together with equal parts worry and curiosity. The question there is clear.

“I’m fine,” I reassure him, gently.

He stares at my face, searching it for every emotion behind my smile. I know I am a terrible liar, but I don’t want to elaborate. I don’t want to bring my past into the room, not with my own two hands. Instead, I lift my eyebrows quizzically and sign, “Coffee?”

He takes the bait. He fingerspells, “T-A-S-T-Y,” and signs, “Thank you.”

◆

Nate leaves not long after he finishes his cup. His flight is at 10 AM. I offer to drive him, but he insists on an Uber. He points at me and fingerspells, “S-H-O-U-L-D W-O-R-K.”

I think about the signing videos from students I have to grade, I think on the papers about Deaf culture from hearing people, and I still follow him down to the first floor, to the building stoop. We stay in the shadow of the building, looking at everything except each other. The breeze carries the smell of smoke and motor oil across our faces. Two girls in short-shorts and neon-colored shirts pass us; my hearing aids pick up their chatter, but I can’t make out the words. A man on the other side of the street pulls on his dog’s leash, as the dog, a black Labrador, shrinks from the sun.

The Uber sidles up to where we are, hazard lights flashing. Nate and I step to the curb, to the road’s edge, and face each other. We hug. He kisses my neck, twice. Goosebumps erupt where his lips touch.

I can’t quite look at him, at his smile and eyes for me, but I talk to him: We’ll see each other again, I’m sure. My words could either be a blessing or a curse, a sign of steady faith or overt eagerness.

Nate’s face doesn’t change. He keeps on smiling. His hair gleams gold in the sunlight. I’m sure we will, he replies.

I hug him again. He is taller and skinnier than Peter. He holds something different from Peter, I tell myself. We kiss. Then he picks up his backpack and duffel bag, and he takes them to the car. I watch him put his luggage in the trunk. I watch him get in the backseat. I watch him go.

He trades glances with me after the trunk closes, before the car door closes, when the car is pulling away. He rolls down the window and waves, then he is gone.

(ASL students: Don’t underestimate the power of eye contact, of subtle expression, of keeping your heart open. Don’t underestimate the act of keeping attention, keeping it direct, keeping a promise.)

◆

Nate texts me just two hours later. He misses me, already. I read the text and bite down on my bottom lip, but I still smile. It is impossible not to smile. We are both still woozy and drunk off oxytocin, from the past couple days. There is always a phase of radical optimism. When that optimism is replaced with reality, we will see what truly happens.

I put my bedsheets through the laundry. I wash the mug Nate used every morning for his coffee. It has the Golden Girls on it. Dorothy judges me from her place on the drying rack.

(ASL students: Make sure there is something else, anything else, rather than just one sole reason to learn. If there is only one reason to learn, then it becomes a fairy tale, with only love’s true power driving you. If that reason ever changes, your motivation could disappear. After the motivation disappears, the language becomes nothing but a ghost story.)

Peter remains in my cell phone. I thumb through my contact list until I come to his name. I delete it. I don’t want to think about him anymore.

I go to Nate’s contact information. I don’t remember learning his birthday, but there it is: July 18. I put in his address as only New York, New York.

Nate had told me he moved to New York City ten years ago. “I G-E-T N-O-T-H-I-N-G H-E-R-E,” he spelled out. He had held up his hands in placation. He was only in Los Angeles to see loved ones, those closest to him. His heart remained in New York.

Peter and I had both grown up in LA. We’d bonded over how much the city had changed, how we saw it and remembered it, how it was always changing. We both remembered it as a place where impossible things happened. We both saw it as a place where people’s dreams slowly, surely became reality. But nowadays, earlier and earlier in the spring, smoke choked out the sun. It became harder to breathe. It became hotter and hotter. It became impossible, for longer and longer, to venture out and chase what you wanted.

(ASL students: It is better to take signing slow than to rush and make your signing look good. If you want to look good right away, you will not know anything.)

“What do you want?” I’d asked Peter once. It was near the end. In a fit of late optimism, I’d given him places where he could improve his ASL. I’d made a list. There were in-person classes. There were private lessons. Hell, there were even minute-long videos on YouTube, if you were pressed for time. It was all written down. It was all available. It all seemed to frustrate Peter, in some way or other; it was too expensive, too confusing, it flattened the experience too much.

Peter’s signing was shaky: “I want to be C-L-O-S-E to you.”

I shook my head: “That’s going to take time.”

(ASL students: You cannot look good. You can only get good. To get good, you have to stay the course. Sign language is not a one-night stand. You have to want it past the first morning, and the next morning, and the next.)

I can’t stand how long you made me wait, Peter. And you knew that. You were ready to leave me waiting, knowing I always came back to you.

I put my phone on the counter, shaking my head back to this moment alone in this kitchen, beyond Peter’s curling fingers and watery gaze. There was always so much uncertainty in him around me. Even in those moments, in diners and bars, he often looked down at the tabletop. I had to duck my head when watching him speak, which filled me with shame.

I leave my phone in the kitchen. I get to work.

For their final project, the ASL students must sign little stories of themselves. They talk about their houses. They talk about their families. They talk about their spouses, how they met them. As always, I take off points if the orientation of any sign is wrong.

(ASL students: Remember where your hands are placed. Remember where your hands should be pointing and moving towards. Meeting someone in ASL is a vertical action. Fucking someone is horizontal.)

At gay bars and Deaf events, I always tell men who sign “meet” horizontally that they need to buy me dinner first. They always blush and giggle, and some of them apologize. Surprisingly, quite a few of them offer to foot my drink or an appetizer. I always accept.

Students in my Deaf Culture class write papers on the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are an equal number of papers on Deaf representation in the media. Fewer write about Gallaudet University and the demands for a Deaf president in the 1980s. A scant number earn an A.

There are always people in every class who disregard the papers on culture and ignore the history lessons. This is a grave mistake. In order to learn sign language, every ASL student learns where it came from. They must understand why our culture and our community has a reluctance towards hearing people who learn ASL. We welcome you, but we don’t encourage you.

◆

Nate has signed up for an ASL class, two days after arriving home in New York. I read the text he’s sent and feel, again, warmth bubbling in my chest. I ask him which one he picked from the choices I gave him.

I got a recommendation from someone else, is his response. He saw me fingerspelling in a bar and asked me if I was learning ASL too. He got into ASL after his best friend’s daughter got excited about the ASL performers on Sesame Street.

I laugh at the last sentence and text him as much. I think about Nate signing more, signing with other people, and feel a knot of anxiety in my chest loosen. It is good that Nate is going out and making his own choices about ASL. It is good that he is going out on his own. Even if it is not what I know, it is still a way forward.

Peter hadn’t been able to gain any confidence in his signing, ever. I often invited him to Deaf socials and events, and his response had always been, Next time. I need to be better.

(ASL students: Remember, above all, that fluency cannot be achieved in isolation. We all get better with each other. We all learn from each other.)

Final grades are due in a couple days. I need to finish the last batch of papers. There are papers on the writer Sara Nović, on the actor Nyle DiMarco, on how Deaf culture is part of both social media and the Super Bowl. It all piles together, sentences upon sentences about the past and the present, with not nearly enough thought given about the future.

When I finish the last essay (a B- given to a paper about deaf YouTubers), night has fallen outside my bedroom window. I take the four steps from my desk to my bed. My pillow smells like lavender detergent.

Paige has texted, ASL night at Rooster. I’ll be there. I don’t bother to respond. My bed feels both too big and too small. I miss Nate, how he fit so perfectly against my nooks and crannies, and the ache of missing and wanting sits above my pelvis.

I press against that ache with the palm of my hand. I want to acknowledge it as I fall asleep. I also want to keep it small, keep my feelings under control. There will always be people from afar who I don’t see and who I miss.

The ache turns over under me, a sudden shape, a warmth. Fingers intertwine with my own. The ache is replaced by a clench of surprise. I look into the darkness that occupies my bedroom. My closet doors are a strange, grinning face. My dresser is a hunched, squatting troll.

I turn on my bedside light. No one is beside me. No one holds onto me. There is only me in the room, but I feel electricity shiver and skate under my skin. I am too alert, too on guard, and I can’t sleep now.

Paige’s text was sent two hours ago. I text her back, regardless. I’ll be there soon.

◆

The bar is crowded, as it is every time I go there. It is always a wall of chatter, punctuated by the thud and pull of bass. I survey the packs and circles of men, and I can’t figure out how I met Nate in this mess of bodies and mouths and hands.

I let the door close behind me and take a deep breath, before I dive in.

There is a small circle of students in one corner of the bar, all their hands timidly following the ASL teacher’s own. The teacher himself is a sweet man, giving up energy for people’s idle curiosity. The ASL students always come together in the back, always in this particular corner, and the Deaf people hover and watch without watching. They form a barrier between the class and the other hearing people in the bar. The other hearing people—the rest of the world—keep to themselves and what they know.

I find Paige after a minute of looking. She nurses a beer, her chin propped up in her palm. Her glassy gaze is on Riley; I immediately recognize his red hair and sharp jawline. I step into Paige’s line of vision, and she sees me and waves. Riley turns and sees me too, and I must go over and join them, now.

Paige hugs me. Riley pats me on the shoulder. They resume their conversation, a discussion about social media’s downfall. I look at them both, in this bar where I have met so many people. Behind them are men I don’t know, men who know as much ASL as Nate does. I do not know a single one of them, but I know the two Deaf people in front of me. Riley and Paige have known me for over a decade, from my twenties to now, my mid-thirties. They stayed through the mess of my graduate student years, through the adjunct haze, and now, when I am slow and steady on the track to tenure, they remain steadfast. They are the constants in my life, more than any man or any student. They should take up more space in my head than a stranger does.

Paige rolls her eyes at a comment Riley makes. She laughs, and the amusement crinkling up her eyes is enough to end the conversation. Once Paige laughs at your point-of-view, there is no defending it. Riley knows this and changes the subject. His gaze swings upon me.

“We were just talking about you,” Riley signs.

A knot forms in my stomach. “About what?”

“Your friend. He’s back in Philadelphia, isn’t he?”

“New York,” I correct him. “He just signed up for an ASL class.”

Riley nods, slowly. I am aware of tension in Paige’s shoulders.

“Did he know ASL before he met you?” Riley asks. I shake my head. Riley purses his lips, already descending into thought, and I try to trade looks with Paige—only to find her already out of the conversation. She is heading back to the bar, empty pint glass in her hand. She pushes her way through bodies. The men look at her. The men look at me. None of their gazes linger.

“Are the two of you dating?” Riley wants to know. “Officially dating?”

I shake my head, even as lightness corkscrews towards my pelvis. I try to not let excitement show. Riley takes another gulp of his dark IPA, the liquid swirling nothing but black upon black under dim bar light. His gaze is not fixed on me anymore, but beyond me.

“I just wonder how long you’re going to wait for this one,” he signs. “The longer you wait, the longer your heart needs to heal.”

I shake my head again. Nate is still new. Nate is still learning. Nate is still full of possibility. I think back on Paige’s question: What if it’s not the end? I want her back here now, instead of at the bar; I want her to shut Riley up.

“I don’t want to assume the end is imminent,” I sign. “Hearing people always need time.”

“That’s what I’m asking.” Riley leans forward. “How much time before you call it quits? You gave Peter years. You shouldn’t drag out the same old story again and again.”

“Peter tried.” I feel my hands move faster and faster. “Peter tried. So many different things.” I feel the lie in my fingers as the signs leave my hands—they become fists by my sides.

Riley arches a brow. Behind him, the ASL students laugh at something the teacher signs; some of them are doing the sign for “work,” one fist tapping atop the back of another fist. Paige comes back with honey-colored liquid in her glass.

“Peter didn’t try hard enough,” Riley signs. “You know it, I know it, and Paige knows it.”

“But everyone has—”

Riley holds up a finger and I stop signing. There is disbelief in Riley’s face now, clear in the curl of his upper lip and the furrow in his brow. Paige looks at me too, her eyebrows slanting upwards and her lips parted. She never wants to see unnecessary wounding, but she doesn’t interfere.

“You’re defending a fairy tale,” Riley continues. “You’re defending an illusion. You have met so many men who have promised and failed and promised and failed. Before Peter, there was Wyatt. Before Wyatt, there was Allen. There have always been dates and one-night stands who want to learn but never do. Why is this one different? Why is this one worth your time?”

My hands come up, but I can’t grasp a reason. Nate’s face, his sweet smile and beautiful eyes, floats in my mind. I find nothing in it but pretty promises.

Riley laughs, but it is a mirthless action. “You understand, don’t you? New York boy is another illusion,” he signs. “Sure, the two of you had sex. But I can’t find a reason for a three-day fuck to stick around longer than he needs to. There’s no reason for a hearing person to learn ASL for a deaf person who lives across the country—and no one else. ASL is a full language, not a home you visit. Friends or not, lovers or not, it’s ridiculous for a hearing person to commit to ASL after a visit with a Deaf stranger. R-I-D-I-C-U-L-O-U-S.” Riley fingerspells as emphasis, and I can’t help but think of Nate that first morning, naked and brilliant in the light.

My hands gather in fists then unfurl back into hands. Gather. Unfurl. Gather. Unfurl.

The longer I flounder, the more I understand Paige’s face and the emotion there. She stares at me with contrition. She stares at me with worry. There is nothing but truth in what Riley gives me from his hands, and she knows it.

I reach for a defense: “He signed up for an ASL class. He met someone in a bar and they’re going to learn sign together.”

Riley grimaces. “Why bother anymore? You were an experience for him, that’s all. You are across the country. He was a visitor, and you are more than an escape. You’re human and you’re here. He will ditch the class, like all the others before him, and you deserve better than texted updates and texted failure from someone two thousand miles away.”

“Stop going for the worst-case scenario,” Paige jumps in. “It’s not your job to remind Avery how things could go wrong. Things could be different.”

“They could,” Riley shrugs to Paige. “I wouldn’t hold my breath for your boy, though,” he signs to me. “You’re a party trick for the summer. I guarantee you, six months later, he won’t remember any ASL. He won’t even remember how he started.”

I leave then. I leave the half-drunk glass of cider, the ASL students working, the hearing men looking at me and not seeing me. I leave it all and walk out in the night.

In my mind, in the darkness, Nate and Peter both linger. In my mind, they become one. It becomes difficult to distinguish between them.

When it becomes difficult to distinguish between them, it is impossible to not think of Nate giving up on ASL. It is impossible to not know, in some way, that we will fall apart.

◆

I walk home. My apartment is a mile and a half from Rooster. Cars whiz past me on the street. I frequently pass slow couples and teetering singles. I feel unsteady, too; embarrassment sits small and hard in my stomach, and it is the worst kind of anchor.

I think about Nate’s fingers, how he signed to me, “C-A-T-A-L-Y-S-T.” I think of a catapult, a cannonball. I think about the upswell of joy I felt in the beginning. Right now is the arc downward before the explosion. Right now is the time to see it right. Right now, I am starting to see the harsh reality. I know this, I think this, and my throat thickens.

I duck into a small park. I sit on a bench. Trees loom and sway above me and around me.

I go through my phone. I delete all the pictures I took of Nate. I make sure there is no trace of his smile and his eyes in my phone’s memory. I need to forget him.

I go to my phone contacts. I think of Peter and of deleting him when I am scrolling down to find Nate. I had waited for Peter to do something, for so long. I had wanted something for so long.

(ASL students: Give us communication and clarity, above else. There are only so many broken promises before you become someone impossible to forgive.)

Peter, tell me that communication is worth it. Tell me I’m worth it.

I find Nate. I scroll down past his address and his birthday.

The trees keep swaying. Behind me, the cars move past, always past, always somewhere away from here. The streetlight to the right of me flickers. I see the “Delete contact” button, but I hesitate. I still ache for something. I still want there to be time to see what Nate does, what he could do, even when the end appears more and more certain. I still want hope.