by Jacob Park for the Summer 2026 issue
We must’ve met through Elle my freshman year in college. You were both in the year ahead of me—just a couple of years older than my daughter is now, come to think of it.
You owned a sensible, red compact car that was kept uncommonly clean, and gave several of us a lift out of the Berkshires that first Thanksgiving break to drop me off in New Haven. I was visiting a friend from Jersey City, this girl I hadn’t spoken to since she left for college herself the summer before who used to live upstairs from me.
The drive ended up taking twice as long as it should have, which you charitably attributed to all the bad weather that would blanket the state in snow over the next five months. Elle sat next to you in the passenger seat, keeping the mood upbeat with her endless stream of effortlessly engaging patter, while I sat in the back beside a faceless person without a name, who was dropped off first at a busy bus stop somewhere en route and never heard from again, at least not by me.
The streets were desolate by the time we arrived in New Haven, though it couldn’t have been much later than nine in the evening, nine-thirty tops. You’d abandoned all well-laid plans to reach New Jersey before nightfall over a hundred miles ago, and with such intentional cheerfulness that it soon became clear how determined you were to preemptively quash any passive passenger guilt either of us (Elle and I) might have felt. The memory of that snow continues to fall—even after the mind has been successfully, if temporarily, emptied of its contents—through some unequivocally social substrate that remains itself unshareable, flickering for a fleeting instant in the butterscotch glow cumulatively cast by the neat & endless rows of wrought-iron streetlamps lining the streets of New Haven, before claiming dominion over all that has been subdued into wintry silence, undoing the diligently shoveled lanes, and gently covering up evidence for anyone unlucky enough to have been forced out into all this precipitating loneliness.
There wasn’t a single other car out on the road that evening as we circled the city trying to make sense of the directions I’d begun to suspect having gotten crucially wrong, and now after thirty-two and a half years—nearly a lifetime for those crucified for their crazy beliefs concerning love—can finally confess having kept this guilty suspicion to myself. I remember you ignoring the suggestion I’d made at some point to just drop me off at the next corner with a payphone, even though you were nearly running on empty. Funnily, I don’t remember ever reaching our destination. My mind just draws a complete blank whenever I try to picture myself exiting your car that night. What I do remember is you waving off my contribution towards replenishing your tank to make it the last leg home. That obviously left an impression for me to remember after thirty-two meandering years. For whatever reason, probably a habitual lack of sufficient funds, it was always important for me to pay my own way.
…
I liked visiting your studio in the new art building on the edge of campus across the road from the bar we frequented overlooking the cemetery. I always ordered a Long Island Iced Tea. I can’t remember if you had a preference, but if you did, I’d guess it’d be something straightforward, like a gin & tonic or a Jack & Ginger. You introduced me to the works of Yayoi Kusama and always seemed to have a spare pack of cigarettes when everyone else had run out.
I went to all your shows. The conversations were reliably enriching, plus there was always free wine and cheese courtesy of the art department. Your work reflected an obsession with pattern and repetition and seemed painstakingly labor intensive.
We must have spent some time when it was just the two of us, but I’m afraid I’m not able to recall a single scrap of dialog from those private conversations. Most of my memories of you seem to involve other people.
…
You and Elle were inseparable in those days, and I’d often thought we were more comfortable around each other when it was the three of us all together rather than just us two. The two of you were like an old married couple, though you’d just met the year before. Her extroversion levels were off the charts, and she effortlessly established instant rapport and intimacy with perfect strangers. On the other hand, I wouldn’t say you were introverted exactly, maybe a bit reserved, but certainly more guarded with who you let in. You were very grounded, stable, more self-assured than your average teen in a way that made you seem more grown up. Anyway, it was, and I hope still is, a very unique friendship, the kind that I’ve only seen up close echoed in my wife’s relationship with her best friend.
…
You had two older sisters, and me having two older brothers, we must’ve talked about growing up the youngest. I later learned that that was where the similarities in our upbringings ended. I found myself sitting in your parent’s living room one summer afternoon when we were upperclassmen. They lived in a large house, not quite a mansion, but as close to one as I’ve ever stepped in, with a private outdoor pool in a wealthy New Jersey neighborhood. I had no idea. Not that it changed anything between us, but I thought it was cool how indifferent you were to money.
…
We both moved to Brooklyn after graduating. You’d landed a job designing sci-fi book covers at a major imprint, and I entered the book publishing industry, first as an intern at a religious imprint, then as an editorial assistant to an independent publisher. There were a lot of us in New York at the turn of the twenty-first century.
…
You never had a boyfriend in college or your time in New York, though I know for a fact that you were never short on suitors. You just never met anyone you liked, whereas I seemed to fall in love several times between meals in those days.
I remember smoking so many cigarettes—outside dining halls, on the way to class, in bars where they didn’t card us, at outdoor concerts, on walks, on long drives to and from New Jersey.
I wonder now what we talked about. Your art? My writing? The common set of people in our circles?
I’m able to conjure a discussion of relationships on one of our drives back to Jersey that I imagine must be on more or less friendly terms with the forgotten facts. I can picture you in profile, taking your eyes off the road momentarily to reach for the pack of American Spirits on the dashboard; me lighting your cigarette before my own.
You’re saying something like, The landscape of love can be conceived as a series of multicolored concentric circles, with everyone you know mapped somewhere, and it makes me wonder, Who’ll usurp the bull’s eye when my daughter falls in love for the first time, though of course she hasn’t even been born yet. It doesn’t surprise me then, doesn’t produce the slightest eyebrow twitch, to look over and see you gripping a detached steering wheel in your hands like a familiar prop at four & eight. And then I’m saying, not quite in response, No space for hate—haters relegate to the outer edge where you pay no mind. And then we speedtalk in unison, Are you up for the challenge to grow the innermost circle, that molten core of love, and extend the warmth of your hearth, for the center to encompass more of the map, to cover all the aches & acreage of your secret garden? It was a metaphorically rich, if mixed and daydreamt, conversation.
…
Now you’re married to a man you met on a girl’s trip to Brazil. He was doing graduate work and lived on a boat. One of the last conversations we had must’ve been about him, how you met, and how you were preparing to leave New York. Next thing I knew, you were posting pictures from his boat on social media, moved to Portugal where he’s from, birthed a beautiful daughter, and are now living in Porto somewhere, presumably on dry land.
I don’t think you ever met my daughter, who’s turning eighteen this year, so we’ve been out of touch for at least that long. I’ve certainly not met yours, but looking out my window, at this silent, gray curtain of falling snow that reminds me of New Haven, how can I begin to explain this uncommon faith that one day I surely will? 🏁
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