Love at First Listen

On the first day of 2009 when I was only twenty-one, I got a message from a girl who'd stumbled over my writing in passing. She wrote from some distant suburb of Chicago, in breathless and fearless paragraphs of passion, pages of wild emotion. Her name was Susy, and a grainy webcam video of me reading an early poem called "Zipper Catches Skin" had caught her in its wake. She wanted me to know just how it moved her; a deeply shaking, heartwaking hit that she'd rarely felt before. My chest felt tight while reading her message, caught in a nervous fascination that someone could feel so freely. I'd never read such honest ebullience, almost too much to be believed.

 

I took a scatter-shot approach, in restrained replies to each of her incredible essays of emotion. Every small encouragement I gave her came back in bigger expressions, another message that ran off the page. Susy overwhelmed my concept of naked individuality, painting herself with the wide brush of world adventurer, absorber of cultures and art, telling tales from a Cuban childhood. Her first ten years as the daughter of a foreign country took me back to book-bound journeys my heart had carried decades earlier. She made my imagination real, and I couldn't believe it, like she was a living story I'd spent a lifetime writing, come alive and telling itself back to me. Susy's words on the screen were like hearing the speaking of my smallest self, a young joy with no fears of growing older. She was a deep feeler, like me, but spoke of a faith unrestrained, not squirming and doubting like the one I held.

 

When words in text began to fail me, I asked for her phone number. She gave it up with no hesitation, and we set a time to speak. I tapped my toes in a nervous wait, as my clock traded numbers till 10:00 PM. I entered her area code at the second that 59 flipped to double 00s, never more eager to hear a voice for the first time. When the sound of Susy came live and human in my ears, it tore through in a way that nothing had. She was girlish and energetic, easily laughing, kind in the margins no matter what words she was saying. Her warmth gently burned off the blackness of bleak midwinter, and for all I knew, it could have been summer outside my bedroom window. That conversation swallowed all of me, broke down the distance I'd felt forever. Everything between us was asked and answered, saying thoughts out loud I'd barely admitted to myself. We talked until night ran out, around the bend of morning before passing out together.

 

I woke with the phone still stuck to my face, impatient dial tone whining that I was still wide open. I sat on my bed in blue light sifting through the blinds, and out to the street corner, black silhouettes of power poles cut up a bloody sky. I felt drained out, passionately splattered like some willing victim of crucifixion. It made hurting worth it, there was finally an upside to being myself. I slipped on some protection from the chill, and took my camera down Inglewood in the calm before dawn. The echo was worth hearing, each swish of my sneakers shifting depending on which sleepy home or tree I passed. I walked to the space where no structures or power poles stood, and let myself be still with the naked fields. Everything seemed backwards in the coming morning, I hadn't seen a dawn in years. The sun set in reverse, and all my hopes stood on their head so smoothly. Wind was absent in the open, swaying with hands in my pockets, listening for birds singing in tongues.

 

For nearly every day after, I wrote poems as a reason to pick up the phone, new words as excuses for communion with Susy from Chicago. She was a strange salvation in the inadequate night, a voice of pure soul with no distraction from the face-to-face. I'd seen her now in scattered pictures over the wires, but for most of the distance, she was a ghost in my mind (love at first listen). When we talked, I felt a drunkenness I'd only known alone, at the brightest moments of self-expression. I found joy in the easy clichés, passion when I'd never felt it, proof that I was more than the personification of total isolation. Susy gave me everything, for as many hours as I needed, until I finally shattered and fell apart so often that the places I was broken were perfectly apparent. It gave me the energy to see deeper in pictures, write more than my fingers could handle, exist absolutely in the aching open. For once, I listened without waiting to be heard.

 

I fell in love with Susy, but kept it close in metaphors and codes of poems, locked in explicit secrets. I wrote a line that said: "You can't take it with you, I can't take it without you." I asked myself what love really was, and finally settled on no doubt. For her, I had no uncertainty remaining. I couldn't imagine an end coming, no death of a friendship pending.

 

This storm of emotion between us kept growing until summer 2010, when we pulled together every penny, and flew Susy to Nova Scotia for a ten-day vacation. The sunset showed the way to greet her; on a buzzing drive, two hours east, light fading as excitement rose to the end of the highway. I stood aching at the gates of the Halifax airport, swaying from toe to toe, shaken like some sci-fi scientist who'd just discovered how to electrify imagination to life.

 

Susy was different and familiar coming out of the crowd, moving and breathing and beautiful. She came down the stairs in waves of curly black hair, greeting me with an honest smile and dark eyes flashing sharply. She was nearly a full foot shorter than me, but I didn't mind the distance. I could never hope to contain her. I led her suitcase from the airport like I was dreaming, pinching away in case I'd inherited my schizophrenic uncle's paranoid fantasies. The city was gone in minutes, streetlights spreading out as we sped back to the Annapolis Valley, each town getting smaller in passing. Susy rolled down the window and leaned out on the highway, seeing more stars than since a distant Caribbean childhood. We pulled up to the dark Hampton Mountain lookoff near home, swayed backlit against the million points shining, then again at the Fundy shore. She put her toes in the summer ocean, laughed at the joy of it, and her white smile was the only thing I saw in shadow.

 

When everything was over but a long-delayed sleep, we stood in my living room under almost-darkness. Susy came close as she could with her eyes still in focus, and all I wanted was a method to fuse the shards of friendship, blur away the difference of being apart and together. I said, "I know how", and wrapped my arms around her, holding tight until the space between us felt seamless. I held my heart to her heart and felt them stutter strangely until they both began to beat together. We lost words for minutes until one of us kissed the other. I couldn't tell which, with no certainty of individuality, none of the desperate disconnection I'd always felt. There was one thing about us, her as much as me. I finally said it, maybe I asked: "You know I love you?"

 

Susy whispered every affirmative, in waves of dark joy, overwhelming a background blackness that I'd never lived without. We lost time like the distant nights before, sitting close in soft silence until the hot sun rose with the August dawn. I walked barefoot beside her on warming asphalt, drunk on human company, better than being alone for the first time ever. I felt saved, not by the abstract concept of a distant deity, but with incredible, irreplicable closeness. It swapped being loved for feeling loved, last gasps of a drowning doubt. Words from one of her own poems wormed into my brain, and I was gentled by the echo.

 

He whispered in my ear:

"You're so normal, Kiddo, so frail,

So much that you fade into walls."

I no longer crash into them.

 

September 13, 2025

Beaconsfield, Nova Scotia

 

Year 18, Day 6516 of my daily journal.

 

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