He always texted when he was outside. No call, no knock. It was just a message and then the soft sound of my door opening. He moved like someone practiced in disappearing.<\/p>\n
His name meant \u201ccomplete\u201d in Arabic, which is what I felt when we were together.<\/p>\n
I met him the way you meet most things that matter in Los Angeles \u2014 without intending to. In our senior year at a college in eastern L.A. County, we were introduced through mutual friends, then thrown together by the particular gravity of people who recognized something in each other. He was a Muslim medical student, conservative and careful and funny in the dry, precise way of someone who has always had to choose his words. I was loud where he was quiet, messy where he was disciplined. I was out. He was not.<\/p>\n
I understood, or thought I did. I thought that I couldn\u2019t get hurt if I was completely conscious throughout the endeavor. Los Angeles has a way of making you feel like the whole world shares your freedoms \u2014 until you realize the city is enormous, and not all of it belongs to you in the same way.<\/p>\n
For months, our world was confined to my apartment. He would slip in after dark, and we\u2019d stay up late talking about his family in Iran, classical music and the particular pressure of being the son someone sacrificed everything to bring here. He told me things he said he\u2019d never told anyone, and I believed him. <\/p>\n
The orange glow from my Nesso lamp lit his face while the indigo sky pressed against the window behind him. In our small little world, we were safe. Outside was another matter.<\/p>\n
On our first real date, I took him to the L.A. Phil\u2019s \u201cAn Evening of Film & Music: From Mexico to Hollywood\u201d<\/a> program. I told him they were cheap seats even though they were the first row on the terrace. He was thrilled in the way only someone who doesn\u2019t expect to be delighted actually gets delighted \u2014 fully, without guarding it. I put my arm around his shoulders. At some point, I shifted and moved it, and he nudged it back. He was OK with PDA here. <\/p>\n I remember thinking that wealth is a great barrier to harm and then feeling silly for extrapolating my own experience once again. Inside Walt Disney Concert Hall<\/a>, we were just two people in love with the same music.<\/p>\n Outside was still another matter.<\/p>\n In February, on Valentine\u2019s Day, he took me to a Yemeni restaurant in Anaheim. We hovered over saffron tea surrounded by other young Southern Californians, and we looked like friends. Before we went in, we sat in the parking lot of the strip mall \u2014 signs in Arabic advertising bread, coffee, halal meats, the Little Arabia District \u2014 hand in hand. I leaned over to kiss him.<\/p>\n \u201cNot here,\u201d he said. His eyes shifted furtively. \u201cSomeone might see.\u201d<\/p>\n I understood, or told myself I did, but I was saddened. Later, after the kind of reflection that only arrives in the wreckage, I would understand something harder: I had been unconsciously asking him to choose, over and over, between the people he loved and the person he loved. I had a long pattern of choosing unavailable men, telling myself it was because I could handle the complexity. The truth was more embarrassing. I thought that if someone like him chose me anyway \u2014 chose me over the weight of societal expectations \u2014 it would mean I was worth choosing. It took me a long time to see how unfair that was to him and to me.<\/p>\n We went to the Norton Simon Museum<\/a> together in November, on the kind of gray Pasadena day when the 210 Freeway roars in the background like white noise. He studied for the MCAT while I wrote a paper on Persian rugs. In between practice problems, he translated ancient Arabic scripts for me. I thought, \u201cWe make a good team.\u201d Afterward, we walked through the galleries and he didn\u2019t let go of my arm.<\/p>\n That was the version of us I kept returning to \u2014 when the ending came during Ramadan. It arrived as a spiritual reflection of my own. I texted: \u201cDoes this end at graduation \u2014 whatever we are doing?\u201d<\/p>\n He thought I meant Ramadan. I did not mean Ramadan.<\/p>\n \u201cI care about you,\u201d he wrote, \u201cbut I don\u2019t want you to think this could work out to anything more than just dating. I mean, of course, I\u2019ve fantasized about marrying you. If I could live my life the way I wanted, of course I would continue. I\u2019m just sad it\u2019s not in this lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n I was in Mexico City when these texts were exchanged. That night I flew to Oaxaca to clear my head and then, after less than 24 hours, flew back to L.A. No amount of vacation would allow me to process what had just happened, so I threw myself back into work.<\/p>\n My therapist told me to use the conjunction \u201cand\u201d instead of \u201cbut.\u201d It happened, and I am changed. The harm I caused and the love I felt. The beauty of what we made and the impossibility of where it could go. She gave me a knowing smile when I asked if it would stay with me forever. She didn\u2019t answer, which was the answer.<\/p>\n I think about the freeways now, the way Joan Didion called them our only secular communion. When you\u2019re on the ground in Los Angeles, the world narrows to the few blocks around you. Get on the freeway and you understand the whole body of the city at once: the arteries, the pulse, the scale of the thing. <\/p>\n You understand that you are a single cell in something enormous and moving. It is all out of your control. I am in a lane. The lane shaped how I drive. He was simply in a different lane, and his lane shaped him, and those two facts can coexist without either of us being the villain of the sad story.<\/p>\n He came like a secret in the night, and he left the same way. What we made in between was real and complicated and mine to hold forever, hoping we find each other in the next life.<\/p>\n The author lives in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n L.A. Affairs<\/a> chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com<\/a>. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He always texted when he was outside. No call, no knock. It was just a message and then…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":749801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,2451,1576,308768,19909,18044,168845,2961,224,2444,5337,4818,24569,308769,6475,3546,149123,14164,186988],"class_list":["post-749800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-city","tag-classical-music","tag-different-lane","tag-freeway","tag-kind","tag-l-a-phil","tag-la","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-losangeles","tag-love","tag-matter","tag-most-thing","tag-night","tag-people","tag-ramadan","tag-way","tag-whole-world"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116459640140982586","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/749801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}