The electricity went out last night at Ryan's house. We were sitting on the couch, my legs propped over his lap, and I told him I was emotional, scared, because my best friend from college had a baby on Saturday and described the labor and birth - she pushed for an hour and had to have a C-section - as the worst pain of her life. They pressed on her uterus three times during the C-section to free the baby and she felt it, intense pain. I wanted to cry on the phone at work as she talked. I felt faint. I can't handle stories of childbirth. I don't know if I can handle childbirth. So I told him I was scared of having children. And he joked, "well, making them is the fun part." And then I cocked my head to the side and narrowed my eyes in his direction and he said, "look, it'll hurt, but if it's something you want to do, it'll be worth it. Is it something you want to do?" For me the conversation was hypothetical - hypothetical children with a hypothetical man - and I worried that for him it wasn't. He's been saying, "Care about you," at the end of phone conversations with the same intonation usually reserved for "love you" and sometimes I'm afraid he'll say it.
"I think I want to," I said pulling my legs in toward my body and then the TV blipped out and the whirring of the ceiling fan hummed lower, the sounds of his apartment slowed and stopped. "Is it a breaker?" I asked.
"No, the whole place is out," he answered, clicking light switches in the bathroom, then farther back in the kitchen. He went out the back door to see if the neighbor's lights were out, too.
I stretched out on the couch and thought of Costa Rica. The electricity went out one night as Angie, Andrea and I ate ceviche at a beachfront cafe. "It's out in the whole country," the bartender told us, "happens way too often." He would continue serving drinks, he assured. After another round of mojitos, we took a cab to the hotel lobby, borrowed a votive to make our way down the gravel path to our villa and lit three more candles that sat on the kitchen table. We pulled the beer we'd bought that afternoon from the refridgerator, the outsides of the bottles moist with perspiration. Andrea remembered that her iPod speakers ran on batteries and we carried the candles, the beer and the speakers to the pool outside our backdoor, shed our clothes in the dark and waded into the water.
"It's really the only thing to do," I said, "it's too hot to just sit inside."
"And this beer'll go bad," Angie said, cracking the top off a bottle.
After an hour or so, Andrea got tired and went inside. Angie and I bobbed in the pool, keeping our beers above water and she said, "so this new guy, you like him?"
"I guess," I said, "I mean, yeah. I'm spending lots of time with him."
"You see a future with him?" she asked.
"Not really."
"I guess I just feel like what's the point then?"
"The point is I'm biding my time. Like I know eventually I have to deal with the fact that J and I are probably over forever. And that if I want to have a husband and a family that I'll have to eventually start looking for a new relationship, but right now I just don't want to. But I don't want to be alone either. It sounds sort of pathetic, I know. I guess it's all I feel like I can do right now."
"I get it. I just feel like I don't have that kind of time anymore," she said and the lights on the back porch blinked on and things started moving again and I instantly longed for the darkness, the stillness, the feeling that the only thing to be done was to float in the pool and drink a beer and sing along to that Kanye West song that I hate to love. But it was late and the air conditioner was working again and so we went inside.
Now on the couch, I heard Ryan calling from the backyard. Bring his guitar. Bring some beers. Electricity's out in the whole neighborhood. So we sat on the wrought iron chairs in the backyard and he played songs he's too shy to sing the words to and I threw the tennis ball to the dog and it was the only thing to do. And it felt better, our conversation about children and fear halted in the stillness. The lights came back on a little while later and we watched Entourage and went to bed.
I had a dream that I'd removed the glass face from the big, round clock that hangs in the copy room at work and put my finger on the long, thin hand that ticks off the seconds. I woke this morning in Ryan's bed with this image still behind my eyes - my finger pressing down as the second hand pulsated against it, trying to continue it's inevitable trip around the clock.
After breakfast, I dropped him off to go golfing with friends and went home. I checked my email and had a message from J, asking me to return an old photo I'd taken from his bedroom years before. A square photo with the coloring that dates it from the seventies. He is a child, maybe a year old, in a diaper pulling himself up on a crate full of vinyl LPs. He's been surprised by the camera. I can tell because his eyes are wide, the way they become wide with surprise still. I've thought of returning the photo several times. It's the only copy. J and I talked on the phone last weekend for about two hours. I told him I'm lost, confused, in every facet of my life. I'm unfulfilled at my job and don't know what I want to do and he said, "you just have to take small steps, you just have to try different, stupid little things until something clicks and you groove on it for a while and see what happens. It's not like you just start doing something and instantly feel fulfilled." And I felt better. I told him I couldn't believe we broke up so long ago.
"It doesn't feel like it's been almost a year," I said.
And he said, "it feels like it's been twenty years."
I emailed him back this morning and said I could send him the photo, but would need his new address. He's moved apartments since we broke up. He knows I'm seeing someone new and thinks this means I've moved on, feels this means he should too. The truth is I've been lying motionless, comfortable only when everything else stops - when the lights go out and the fans stop oscillating and the clocks stop ticking. The truth is I've been holding my finger down on the second hand and wishing that everyone else - J and Ryan - could stand still with me, could understand that there's nothing more that I can do right now, could just drink a beer and wait for the electricity to come back.
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