wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it
was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the
season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of
despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we
were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other
way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that
some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for
good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
-Charles Dickens in the real Tale of Two Cities
From the sky, Phoenix, Arizona is a grid. It is calculated. Someone
decided to slice the land into perfect squares inside perfect squares
so that no matter where you are, you are always on the corner of the
vertical and the horizontal.
From the ground, Phoenix is wide open. Nothing inhibits the sky except
for the grandiosity of naked mountains which only makes the sky look
bigger. It gives the illusion that there is the possibility of
something more than having everything.
Atlanta is surrounded by a highway that runs in a circle. You can exit
at any point and move further inside, or you can drive on it long
enough to realize that there is no such thing as north and south, east
and west. There is only one direction: forward.
So, it makes sense that when he traveled the 1852 miles from Phoenix,
Arizona to Atlanta, Georgia and we saw each other for the first time
in four months that he would be standing on the corner of two
directions while I continued to have faith in the promise a circle
makes.
And so we sat once again across the table at the restaurant with mojitos where we invented the mythology of Lexington, that suburb of love where everything slides off the table. We went to a hotel where a man named Mr. Chestnut asked that we slide him something under the table, which had to, not inconspicuously, actually be handed it over it.
We drank the profanities of fucking champagne and bloody marys at the sacred place where the light is both too bright and too dark, depending on your angle, and we went somewhere new where the wind blew and napkins unfolded like white flags in the air.
In an act of obvious improbability, the mythological and the literal were joined in such a way that we were standing on the corner of what is actual and what is possible when he admitted he had found the price of one way fairly inexpensive, if also a potentially terrible gamble in which he could lose everything, as if choosing the actual means forgoing what is possible and not the other way around.
And so, there are no answers or outcomes. This is a tale of two people in two cities who have each lived in both, but only find home in each other. It is a circular tale where the ending looks just like the beginning--south becoming north--and a tale where the ending will forever be a right angle--east becoming west. It is a love story and a mystery, the twist is not in the ending, but is that there isn't one. It goes on, it comes around, and then it loops back. It hovers at the corner like suspense but never moves.
If the ending were there, it would look like this:
Two people from two cities sit across a table and pass a watch back and forth. He wears it in his city and she wears it in hers, but they never adjust for the difference in hours. It is some kind of promise and also the very thing that defeats the promise, but they continue forever passing the watch back and forth across the table while time itself passes under it, as if it doesn't end.
