Tonight, I put Mel’s sketches up on the bulletin board above the desk and I stare at them for a long, long time. I’m not looking for answers. I’m not looking for absolution. I’m looking for a feeling: not nostalgia, no cheap, tin-foiled remembrances, but the element that will bring her back into the room. A distant sniff. The sound of a foot slipping out of a shoe. A smell from far away.
I sit down and I finish Mel’s story, again and again and again, toying with a hundred different endings, an infinite future in which we have all the time in existence to live out our stories. It is my own personal shoestring theory, each narrative fraying at the ends to make for a thousand more stories in which we both live. In one, the stroke kills me—not as sad, of course, because Mel lives. In another, we make Irrefutable Love and we take it on tour, going to Europe, going to the West Coast, but in this world, we opt out of San Francisco’s party and return to New York to find the studio lacking enough space to hold the both of us. We cease to have ideas together. In this world, we return home to find our way separately, each forgiving the other for the things she could not give. In this world, we see each other occasionally: a friend, a touchstone to whom we both return, the heartbreak we both bravely revisit.
I work steadily into the night, gray sky deepening to black, Brooklyn dimming to a single light hovering above my drafting board. I work through Danny coming home and putting his hand on my back, through my wake-up alarm and the first jogger to clap down our block. I work until the night dies and the morning is born at the waterfront, that familiar itching at the base of my spine ramping, the adrenaline peaking at the unspooling of images. The hunt for that hot and nameless thing is on, and I am certain only that the old impulses are not dead, that the voodoo does not die.