I’m in Wilmington, North Carolina. I write this on an empty beach, while the sunlight glitters on the sea, and I feel so alone.
We make it up as we go along. Don’t we?
Monday the 3rd
I was in Baltimore, standing on a sidewalk in the light fall rain, wondering where I was going. I think I saw Scarlet in a car, coming toward me. She was a passenger. I could not see her face, but her hair was red. The woman who drove the car, an elderly pickup truck, was fat and happy, and her hair was long and black. Her skin was dark.
I slept that night in the house of a man I did not know. When I woke, he said, “She’s in Boston.”
“Who?”
“The one you’re looking for.”
I asked how he knew, but he wouldn’t talk to me. After a while he asked me to leave, and, soon enough, I did. I want to go home. If I knew where it was, I would. Instead I hit the road.
Tuesday the 4th
Passing Newark at midday, I could see the tip of New York, already smudged dark by dust in the air, now scumbled into night by a thunderstorm. It could have been the end of the world.
I think the world will end in black-and-white, like an old movie. （Hair as black as coal, sugar, skin as white as snow.） Maybe as long as we have colors we can keep going. （Lips as red as blood, I keep reminding myself.）
I made Boston in the early evening. I find myself looking for her in mirrors and reflections. Some days I remember when the white people came to this land, and when the black people stumbled ashore in chains. I remember when the red people walked to this land, when the land was younger.
I remember when the land was alone.
“How can you sell your mother?” That was what the first people said, when asked to sell the land they walked upon.
Wednesday the 5th
She spoke to me last night. I’m certain it was her. I passed a pay phone on the street in Metairie, LA. It rang, I picked up the handset.
“Are you okay?” said a voice.
“Who is this?” I asked. “Maybe you have a wrong number.”
“Maybe I do,” she said. “But are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Know that you are loved,” she said. And I knew that it had to be her. I wanted to tell her that I loved her too, but by then she’d already put down the phone. If it was her. She was only there for a moment. Maybe it was a wrong number, but I don’t think so.
I’m so close now. I buy a postcard from a homeless guy on the sidewalk with a blanket of stuff, and I write Remember on it, in lipstick, so now I won’t ever forget, but the wind comes up and carries it away, and just for now I guess I’m going to keep on walking.
HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES
“Come on,” said Vic. “It’ll be great.”
“No, it won’t,” I said, although I’d lost this fight hours ago, and I knew it.
“It’ll be brilliant,” said Vic, for the hundredth time. “Girls! Girls! Girls!” He grinned with white teeth.
We both attended an all-boys’ school in south London. While it would be a lie to say that we had no experience with girls—Vic seemed to have had many girlfriends, while I had kissed three of my sister’s friends—it would, I think, be perfectly true to say that we both chiefly spoke to, interacted with, and only truly understood, other boys. Well, I did, anyway. It’s hard to speak for someone else, and I’ve not seen Vic for thirty years. I’m not sure that I would know what to say to him now if I did.
We were walking the backstreets that used to twine in a grimy maze behind East Croydon station—a friend had told Vic about a party, and Vic was determined to go whether I liked it or not, and I didn’t. But my parents were away that week at a conference, and I was Vic’s guest at his house, so I was trailing along beside him.
“It’ll be the same as it always is,” I said. “After an hour you’ll be off somewhere snogging the prettiest girl at the party, and I’ll be in the kitchen listening to somebody’s mum going on about politics or poetry or something.”
“You just have to talk to them,” he said. “I think it’s probably that road at the end here.” He gestured cheerfully, swinging the bag with the bottle in it.
“Don’t you know?”
“Alison gave me directions and I wrote them on a bit of paper, but I left it on the hall table. S’okay. I can find it.”
“How?” Hope welled slowly up inside me.
“We walk down the road,” he said, as if speaking to an idiot child. “And we look for the party. Easy.”