My Computer Cart and Me

I am hopeless. I realize that now. Dan was sitting in here and saw my computer cart and said, “After all that, you ended up with computer cart.”

I was printing out something he’d emailed me to print for him, so I didn’t catch on for a moment. Computer cart. Then I realized I was sitting at one. And I remembered that I’d had another, slightly larger computer cart, back when Dan and I lived together. That one, I got because the old pressed word one at our old place was too yucky to come along to the new condo we were buying together. I wanted all new and streamlined things.

We ended up buying two identical metal computer carts at Ikea. We had this vision of rolling them around in our new condo, working wherever we felt like it. Complete and total freedom. That was before we realized that the carts were too wide to fit through any doorways. And ultimately, that bright shiny new condo, with its freshly sanded floors and sparkling windows, became just another home that was too cluttered, too inconveniently laid out, too full of memories. When in doubt, just add a period and move on.

Dan had moved out one November morning, then moved back in “as friends” until he could find a new place. Meanwhile, I started dating Dave, and a year later Dave and I moved into a bright shiny condo about two blocks from the old one. On the fridge is a list of things we want to do to this place. Dan looked at the list when he came to visit today. “You want to retile the kitchen floor?” He looked at our floor. “Why?”

“We’ve had that list up for a while,” I said defensively. It’s a perfectly good floor, after all. “I want it to be warmer in here, not all white and antiseptic.”

Dan makes me feel like I have my priorities wrong, for caring about the feel of a floor when I could be living instead. But he makes me feel sad too, like he is a drifter looking for a place to call home. It’s hard to believe we were once a couple. We’ve hardened in different molds since then. He lives in Pilsen with a girl just out of college, and Dave and I are here, in a place with a to-do list, a place that is already nice enough as it is.

Dan called this morning at 9:30, to see if I wanted to meet at the dog park. He had to drive Qarly (her real spelling) to a workshop downtown and had a few hours to kill. He wouldn’t like that use of the word kill. I eventually always end up not being able to breathe around the man I love because I take it personally how they’d take offense at my use of the word kill in the wrong context, or how I’d disapprove of theirs, or how they’d take offense at my honesty, or how I’d be destroyed by theirs. Somehow Dave and I keep a respectful distance without being cold and insular.

So I met Dan at the park. His dog Franklin (once ours) ran up to me wearing his little red coat from the Land’s End thrift store, that has “Lama” embroidered on it. The Land’s End thrift store sells new Land’s End merchandise that’s been returned, so either someone had a dog named Lama but the coat didn’t fit, or the embroiderers at Land’s End spelled Lana wrong and had to eat the mistake. My dog Django (also once ours) liked Franklin’s coat because she could grab it and pull him around when they ran. She’s a cattle dog and likes to pull things around. The faster the better.

Dan and I walked and talked, sometimes but not really much taking each other in. More trading information. He told me about his new show that opened last night, and how he drank afterwards for the first time in a long time and it made his head hurt today. And I told him how last week I had a fancy beer at a fancy restaurant and how that hurt my head the next day. It’s like small talk you’d have with anyone at the dog park but it’s not just anyone, it’s a previous part of yourself.

We ran into my friend Rokko and his dog Cinnamon. Rokko recently broke up with his girlfriend and they are now being “friends” and he and I have talked about the many-layered difficulties of this situation, and here I was with Dan. I saw Rokko eyeing him with his half-closed eyes and wondered if he knew who this was. Then Dan asked about some guy who used to come the park, “that big guy who used to come with the big dog who worked in the basement of Marshall Fields?”

“He doesn’t come around anymore,” I said. “His wife left him and he moved to Lincoln Park for a change of scene.” Rokko started backing away. I felt like he somehow thought I was making an analogy to him. Odder still, I felt like I was, but couldn’t think of exactly what the analogy would be. That we all get hurt? And move on?

Anyway, we moved on. Said goodbye to Rokko and kept going. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to get away from us or walk with us so we just headed for the trees. Dan said Rokko was eyeing him, and imitated him. We saw the guy whose wife died last year—though he doesn’t know I know this about him—and his dog Misty, whom Django used to go ballistic at but now just eyed warily as she begged treats from the guy. In fact, there was one horrible incident years ago, when Dan I were together, and the guy’s wife must have still been alive but probably ill, when Misty attacked Django and Dan threw down his coffee and got them apart. The guy didn't help, and it made Dan livid. Now here we were and they seemed like they’d never met before. Am I the only one who thinks this matters?

After the park, Dan and Franklin came over and we all went out for breakfast. We went to a diner in the neighborhood and bumped into neighbor Dave. (We call him neighbor Dave to distinguish him from my Dave.) He’d just sat in a booth and invited us to join him. Breakfast was excellent, and neighbor Dave was the perfect buffer to turn a potentially awkward breakfast with boyfriend and old boyfriend into a cozy breakfast of folks who care about each other in this city of strangers. Dan and neighbor Dave discovered a fascination with scientific theories of what’s going to destroy the world as we know it, and my Dave was informed and interested in all things as he usually is, and I sat back and felt safe and loved.

We left neighbor Dave there to play Sudoku before he left for his haircut. Dan came in to pick up Franklin and his printout. He said how cozy our house is, in a way that made me feel he either pitied me for wasting my time creating coziness when I could be making art, or pitied himself for his headache or his restless spirit that keeps him so much on the move. And I wondered when I’d started reading judgment into everything he says. Because it wasn’t always like there.

Once I was just a woman waking up in his bed one morning to fresh pastries he’d brought me from the Greek bakery down the street and a mug of coffee he’d made. Three or four baklava and other honey-drenched goodies in a little foil container. I was still asleep and he placed the container on the pillow next to me and woke me up. That’s right, it wasn’t coffee, it was a cold glass of water which I crave when I wake up.

His bedroom was in the sunroom of an apartment he shared with two other actors, and the light was beautiful. I feasted on those pastries and basked in the glow of being surprised with a treat. And a few years later, we were at the park, me telling him I made banana bread and him singing me the Farewell to 2005 song he’d written for his show, and neither of us exactly listening but in another way listening hard, to the people we’d become and the friendship we are possibly, or impossibly, trying to have.

Why did I say I am hopeless? If anything, I am too full of hope. I seem to believe that old lovers really can be friends, when everyone knows it’s not that simple.I started out wanting to write about this because I felt angry at myself for feeling defensive about my repeated purchases of a computer cart. But we all have our weird little obsessions. Dan’s recent decision never to cut his hair again no matter what. Neighbor Dave putting notes on the windshield of cars that don’t park in a way to make room for a second car. My Dave and his perfectionism with whatever his current project happens to be. These are not limiting factors. We are each of us too complex and also too self-involved to really take in the whole of anyone else, so we pick up on patterns and obsessions, and trade jokes and intimacies on them to show that we see each other, and remember.

It’s not even sad, except maybe in that time-passes sort of way in which everything lovely is sad. But if you buy into that time-is-cyclical and doesn’t actually pass, but rather each moment is laid out side by side, all right now, the storming of the Bastille and the first man on the moon and pastries in bed and the first time Dave kissed me and the moment Dan dropped the coffee, all moments happening now, all folded into time because that’s the only way we can experience it, then it’s really all quite nice. Maybe you haven’t loved and lost, maybe you’ve just been given a hell of a lot of nice moments for one person.

So what if I want to admit right now that this computer cart isn’t quite right either, because the tray keeps sliding back in while I type and it’s just a little high for my wrists? You’ll understand, won’t you, that I’m not obsessing for the wrong reasons. I’m not living a metaphor. I’m just kind of picky about my computer cart interaction. Period.