We meet, have dinner along El Camino Real, and then watch a movie not too far away in Mountain View where we are thinking, again and again, for three hours while sat in our seats, about what it would be like to hold each other’s hands, right here, and right now, although we don’t end up getting around to it, in the end, at least not for tonight. We simply part instead, in Palo Alto, without any kind of touch at all, but soon enough, in no time, see each other again anyhow. This time, we have lunch in Menlo Park, we chase after the morning Caltrain and make it by the last second, and we end up all the way in San Francisco where the sunshine’s the same but the wind feels just a little closer, and cooler. We walk along King Street, and then turn onto Third Street, to visit the Museum of Modern Art, to look at all the Rothkos and Kusamas, to ask ourselves something simple such as, for instance, what might a color even be, or how we may go about seeing one differently than before. We then go down to the Westfield, the one on Market Street that will eventually close down and be renamed to the San Francisco Centre, but for now, while it’s still open in every sense of the word and right as the evening turns into something else and long before everything has gone awfully wrong in our love, we sit in dimness of the food court, underground, utterly caught beneath its miserable lights with barely anyone else sitting around. We then ponder our feelings, first privately and then aloud to one another, after which everything soon takes on the sensibility of a dream—or maybe it was more like a fugue, in the end—like in, for instance, the way you run out in joy onto Market Street afterward and nearly get struck by a car but not before I grab you by your arm and pull you back into me and somehow, right here, and right now, everything is just perfect even though we’re standing, together, among the broken glass of a San Francisco street, even though the B.A.R.T. has since stopped running at such an hour and we don’t know how to get back down to the South Bay, and even though, by the summertime, without either of our knowing, you will commit something so unspeakable to me and that will really be the end of everything as we know it. Until then, however, we do dream that dream, the one that Faye Wong sings about but in a language that only you understand, and we do find our way home, in the dead of night, when there are hardly any cars hurtling down the Lawrence Expressway and you can almost hear a pin drop in Sunnyvale, and we do spend the months of spring falling asleep together, and making Chinese food, and shopping for groceries, and arguing in the car ride to Lake Tahoe, and pouring the same old coffee, and watching American television, and talking about each and every one of our dreams, and listening to “First Love” by Hikaru Utada in your car, and doing it all again and again, until the coming of the end, after which time we can now only ever think about each other, privately, to ourselves, again and again, about whether any of this could have turned out a little differently, after all, or whether there may have been a way to skirt the violence of those winds blowing all the way from Paradise—or at least I know that I still do, even after all of this time, even though I have no sense at all, in the world, of what may be on your mind these days, or what I might even be looking at when I am looking backward, again and again, at you.