I saw the pink magnolia trees blooming today and I thought about loss and how it was really just time.

As spring rained into summer, I played love like a tambourine, shaking and rattling it – but it was music all the while.  It was a time when I was mad.  Crazy mad like a starved fox in heat.  Mad for really good sex and tequila and rock’n’roll and a man that wouldn’t shy away.  I wanted a love that was as fierce as I felt when I walked down the street in my black boots.  I wanted a love made from sweat and teeth, ripped lace and walking shoes.  And I drank because most nights I couldn’t find it – and because, some nights, if I drank enough, I would think I did.  But, in the sunny, sober, morning hours, I would remember that it wasn’t love that I was looking for – it was timelessness.  It was that ever fleeting, ever forever, feeling of a first wine-drunk night and a great first kiss and the luxurious carelessness of youth.  It was a time when I was becoming aware that every night as I was getting drunk -- and every night I wasn't -- I was also getting old.  And the feeling I had once had of endless possibilities and infinite passion, was dying as fast as the minutes and hours of the night. So I had to drink and have sex and dance and cry and scream and listen to really good music because in possible self-destruction, there also seemed to be a kind of self-resurrection; a kind of saving grace -- as I think there is in most madness.

That spring I had a man who was whiskey and weed and a stubborn instance in god.  He was dying of the same nothingness – or everything-ness – that I believed was killing me.  I was wine, white paper, and blue ink one April night at a bar on Park Avenue in the Thirties where I kept telling him that I was dying, that I was like him.  But he kept telling me that I was so much better – maybe it was because I kept quoting Joan Didion. That’s how it happened.  We left and the bar and shared a taxi uptown and we shared a need to feel – something, better…  And then he kissed me like I was the best damn thing. 

Every past moment of that evening and the previous six months flashed and sped through me.  His hand on my wrist, my shoulder, my knee.  Jokes and secrets and small things -- the way he said my name.  His hands sliding up under my jacket, on my hips, warming me through the chiffon dress I wore.  A thought that had crept into my mind the first day we had met -- something about souls.

His life was all longing and voided hope but for the moment he was enough for me.  I had known enough men who were enough like him to make me feel like I knew a thing or two.  And from the way he was talking  I got the feeling he had known a handful of women who were almost like me.  Hungry women.  Women who came at him with fox fierce eyes and dagger tongues.  Women he enjoyed filling with sex and wine and cigarette smoke and fine food.  But he and I were insatiable. 

That spring I could have told him anything and he could have understood because we were both members of the same late night, lonely hearts club – both veterans of our own secret wars, wearing our damages on our sleeves like purple hearts.

“You’re in love with me,” he said as he held my hand inside his apartment, standing next to a bookcase that held the Torah and the Talmud and every book Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote.

“You don’t know what love is,” I replied.  And what I meant was that I didn’t know what love was, so how could I be in it with him.

Outside, on Park Avenue, pink magnolia trees were in bloom. 

On a Sunday I told him that I think life is simultaneously too long and too short until one day it’s one or the other and we have to do what we can to save ourselves from time.  To which he said, “If you’re looking to be saved, don’t look to me.”  And then he took my hand in his.  And I thought about the difference between the things that save us and the things we’d die for.

Time is such a curious thing.  There is always too much or never enough.  And it’s never quite right.  And we’re running out of it, even as we try to kill some more.  We think we’re killing time with drugs and TV and sex and conversation but time is killing us.  We were dying for something.