Seasonal Condition

Graphic by Gill Kwok

Two weeks after he left, I noticed the rash. It started subtly, just two symmetrical crescent moons of red under my baby blues, until itchy lagoons spread across my cheeks. My mystery ailment burgeoned painfully, stinging more with each passing day until I awoke one morning unable to open my eyes. At this point, my best friend accompanied me to an urgent care clinic. An overwhelmed doctor diagnosed me with a form of dermatitis, a skin condition exacerbated by changes of season and periods of high stress, easily treatable with a week’s dosage of oral steroids and an overpriced prescription cream. 

My diagnosis was, perhaps, the only objective evidence that I had healing to do.  Given our circumstances  —  best friends for five years, partners for three and a half of them  —  my condition following our breakup was surprisingly tranquil. My friends commended me, telling me how proud they were of my strength, how much worse they would be handling my new position. Though it was sudden, we had been apart before, a long eight weeks that tutored me in the art of losing someone. But he had come back without much consequence or the need to reacquaint ourselves with each other. My mind was simply somatizing a pain I could not otherwise express. 

It was a strange summer. I was one of the few people unbothered by our months-long house arrest because he was my home. When we weren’t physically together, we were updating each other on what we had eaten, our worries about the world, our bellyaches. While trapped in quarantine, we went on a string of nights during which we’d listen to the same album simultaneously, a tradition we had acquired while apart for school. I was infatuated by the idea that he was synchronously hearing sublime shades of The Velvet Underground and Sufjan Stevens and The Talking Heads, a momentary attachment in a world that had grown lonely. We once stayed on the phone together until sunrise. The home that I, that we, had built stood tall amidst a crumbling world, and we remained inside of it, comforting, protecting, loving. 

Dreams, however juvenile, are pieces of ourselves, little lights in the apocalypse. Mourning them is a difficult burden to bear, but it consoles me to know that we once believed they were possible. 

Just as suddenly as he had returned to me, he was gone again; and though I knew how it felt to lose him, I felt ill-equipped for the emotions that followed. I had known sadness, but not resentment; I had known loss, but not grief. I had to introduce myself to a world without him, a world I had not known since I was 15 years old. So much of him  —  his baby pictures, his letters, his Mickey Mouse pajama pants  —  lingered around me, quietly awaiting the proceeding stages of my heartbreak. I could no longer tell him about the mundanities of my day, that I had finally finished “A Clockwork Orange,” that I loved the new Phoebe Bridgers album and declared my English minor. I couldn’t ask him for the name of that Russian post-punk band that he showed me or if he had gotten the back window of his car fixed, and I was envious of those who could. My heart cracked, not because of what he had done, but because I knew I’d never have that exact relationship again, one with a man who had seen me get my driver’s license and graduate, a person I had allowed to touch my insides and hold my hand. 

My first love taught me grief, how it presents in funny ways in our hearts and on our faces. These organs are not temporary, but facets that we must carry despite the wounds that lovers and best friends may leave. There are many wonderful people in my present and future, but they will not be him; they will not bring me to the movies on Christmas or witness the damage of my first car wreck. It was, is and will forever be different. If you’re lucky, loving feels like dreaming, and dream we did: of a shoebox apartment, of trips to Spain and Japan, of babies and German Shepherds. Dreams, however juvenile, are pieces of ourselves, little lights in the apocalypse. Mourning them is a difficult burden to bear, but it consoles me to know that we once believed they were possible. 

I once wrote that I knew I loved him because I showed him my favorite poem, “Oranges” by Gary Soto. It tells the story of a first date between two young lovers, during which they go to a drugstore. The boy realizes he does not have enough money for the chocolates his beloved has chosen and silently offers the clerk an orange as a trade for the goods. I wonder if he remembers this, and I hope that I told him why I cherished it, not because of young love’s sweetness, but its sacrifices. 

In my mind, he is still the summer, that sweet season when we slept naked and licked ice cream off each other’s lips. Loving is a seasonal act, one that marks time on our skin, its ebbs and flows bringing us together and afar endlessly. I saw him for the first time since he ended things, now under a January hue that I was virgin to. We went to a diner, and though we weren’t together anymore, we were for three hours, laughing and crying and sharing the books and albums we had consumed while habituating ourselves in two lives apart. I recited my list of the little moments he had missed  —  “A Clockwork Orange,” Phoebe Bridgers, an English minor. There was so much more I wanted to tell him: how different our songs sounded in his absence, how I wished I could grow a new heart, how I would have sacrificed my orange unceasingly. I couldn’t find the words, so I swallowed them, enjoying the new momentary attachment we were coming to know. The world continued to disintegrate outside, but for a little while, we were safe again. When we parted, that familiar grief returned, only this time in the tears I held back and the smile I offered him; that acquainted stinging sensation reminding me that what we had was real. I’d be seeing him again, but I wasn’t sure when or how; maybe at another diner or in a distant future or in another song. 

Plenty of things have changed between us, but many haven’t. Case in point, he assigned me an album to listen to, instructing me to wait until it was snowing. A storm arrived two days later, and listen I did, another 43 minutes and 51 seconds without him. I watched each flake fall and couldn’t help but cry at their instinct to return, to find home again in their source. They reminded me that I had forgotten to ask about his back window. I prayed that it was fixed, knowing all too well that the last thing the world needs is another little crack, a further fracture that lets the cold and wet into the warm and beloved. 

It’s still winter. Soon I will return to another home I’ve found, a city where the snow turns black with age. But it’s still beautiful to me because I’ll know he’s being blanketed in white, at least for now. My rash is gone. I’m unsure if it will return; perhaps it only existed to acknowledge our long and changing season, another mark he left on my surface, another piece of him that I will have to grieve. I’m still waiting to find out.