First Love and Snowy Parks

January 31^st

I woke up in Central Park house, a hotel on the Upper West Side my friend stayed in, cold and stressed. It was nine a.m. and I had less than four hours to ride the A, grab breakfast, board the metro north, and get to work.

With only a collared shirt and a leather jacket to cover my dry skin, I speed walked- not like a New Yorker, but like a South Floridian trained from birth to get the fuck out of the swampland- down Central Park West, breezing through white slush. I passed old rich woman, who were once the glamour pusses of their day, stroll with their dogs as their long coats drape across the pavement. If they were downtown, they’d blend in with the homeless men in Avenue City, but they’re not, so they’re just rich old vamps, future fossil fuels that once roamed this city and have seen all the faces of this place.

As I get on the A and realize it doesn’t stop at Grand Central, I remember the last time I got this lost and felt so cold. That time, on a cold morning in November, I left a boy’s apartment, thinking he would return my call, and dashed through Chelsea, smiling like a dancer from the dance. But then, like Malone or Sutherland, I felt rejection, hopelessness, and stupidity two weeks later, when I never saw him again. I thought I was a boy of the future, incapable of loneliness, but I’m just a boy. Nothing changed since all those seventy novels I love, that the old ladies, full of morals, used to hate.

It’s funny, I thought, as I exited the A and climbed the staircase out of the subway and walked, regrettably, into Times Square, ready to trample through midtown all the way to the train station on Lexington Avenue. People always say that they can kiss someone, without feeling or hope, but even a peck on a cheek or a simple goodbye means something. Maybe- I hate to say this, but it’s human nature to care after a little touch. There’s no way not to crush.

And there’s no way to avoid the feeling everyone gets when someone refuses to crush back, because they find you ugly or smelly or stupid or smart or glittery or masculine. It sucks, because it’s all, constructed or natural, fate.

Standing outside of Chevy’s and Riply’s Believe it Or Not, two corporate mega giants who, with the help of Mickey, took over the midtown reigns from the sleaze joints my LGBT literature and history class loves to hate, I regret that last November never transformed into a first love. Images of Mr. November and I strolling down Central Park West, cold and covered in slush, play in my mind until my mind says PAUSE.

Remember the age of eight, Mitchell, when you lied on a bed in the plaza like Eloise, flipping through the program you bought at The Lion King. You met your first love eleven years ago on a sunny day, during a long walk half way across the city.

When I was eight, I met New York.