If as time passes memories delude us with their transience and telescopy, be pleased that the only change in Catherine is a faint grace added to the fundament of her beauty. If eye contact proves too powerful for everyone’s tastes, look away then immediately look back again. If effects precede causes in some inertial frames, your glasses could cloud the knowing before you. Crush them underfoot.

One: If here comes her ghost again and her peacoat is free of detritus as her peacoats somehow always are, and you wear a younger man’s clothes, and there you stand on Bleecker Street in the fixity of your fiction suits, press your palms against her hips, which hips you once complimented as “ample,” and while she’d said this was not a compliment per se, you’ve forever remained unconvinced.

Two: Should a joke seem necessary to leaven the tension of a reunion fifteen years in the making, speak the words, “Our long national nightmare is over—Abraham Lincoln said that. It sure is nice to see you again—I said that.”

Three: Though you find the substance neurotoxic, get unethically-traded coffee in a multinational franchise, and while no more cosmopolitan than all the franchises from Seoul to Sault Sainte Marie, it is in Manhattan and contains the girl to whom all your longings speak, thus fulfilling a promise once trod into the soil of a St. Joseph’s Island farm with her as sundress’d Juliet and thee as the holy fool, Balthazar.

Four: If still at a loss for words, but in a high comradeship of spirit, do not be romanced by the ceilings of the NYPL’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Don’t pontificate on man, blessed man, 19th century Giuseppe or whomever, up on some literal latter to the stars sculpting those ceilings to resemble the Sistine Chapel’s. Because if you get distracted photographing the ceilings you may lose her again. She could step away and leave you nothing but the ceiling, and then the pictures of the ceiling, which is one of the most photographed ceilings in America, meaning it’s there but no one can really see it.

Five: Do not have a religious experience at a Bob Dylan concert lest those similarly-afflicted congregate at The Dublin House where she will make friends, as her winsomeness not only allows but dictates, where if her past precarity is any indicator, she will flit maddeningly on the periphery like a ‘floater’ caused by clumped vitreous in the agèd. If a suave Bobcat remarks, “Your girlfriend and I should get a motel room,” punch the man’s chin such that his brain collides with his skull, sending him out of that evening’s sex economy. If asked to decamp by Dublin Mike, a sixty-year-old bartender in the Irish Mickey Ward vein who’s seen so much he appears bored even in the act of breaking up a fight, then place your forearm on Mike’s bar and sweep a dozen pints and shots and snifters crashing to the ground, causing Dublin Mike to raise his fists in the classic ‘put your dukes up’ position, a posture that would seem hilariously Vaudevillian were he less hell-bent on pummelling you.

Six: If pulled to safety by Catherine, recite the last two verses of Oh Sister from 1974’s Desire to reassert your sensitivity after the recent milieu of general beastliness. If she finds your earnestness wearying, double-down on your gratitude that she’s been mysteriously saved.

Seven: If you and Catherine have never sampled the delights of the marriage bed, and Catherine seems more inclined towards the solitary restfulness of the Airbnb’s living room couch, ask her, “Wouldn’t it be sad if the memories from the old life had to last us our whole life?”  

Eight: If Catherine’s moral virtue supersedes yours, she’ll reject your dawntide repackaging of the night’s transgressions and insist you return to The Dublin House to apologize. If your usual strategy of avoidance—minimum one year—hasn’t been knocking it out of the park lately, why not give this contrition angle the old college try? With every nerve ending frayed and afeared of more raised dukes, approach Mike to say, “I was an asshole.” If Mike then looks into your blood-red eyes with more empathy than you’ve deserved in many years and quotes[1], “A man's attitude… a man's attitude goes some ways. The way his life will be. Is that somethin' you agree with?” and you quote back, “Sure. Sure.” And Dublin Mike continues: “Now…did you answer cause you thought that's what I wanted to hear, or did you think about what I said and answer cause you truly believe that to be right?” and you say, “I agree with what you said, truthfully,” and Dublin Mike replies, “What'd I say?” his smile should reveal that this is a rib. If Mike says “Hadn’t seen the old full bar sweep in some time,” what Mike must mean is, ‘This has happened to all we intemperate individuals before, and the Infernal Serpent knows it will happen to all of us again, so if we won’t forgive what good is even being alive?’

Nine: If St. Patrick’s Cathedral is a free and ornate place to request penance for all the cardinal sins recently committed, a desanctified place where tourists take altar selfies during communion, and no one knows the head-tapping maneuvers required for the responsorial psalms—yet if you are holding her hand again after all this time, the cloud of forgetting behind you, and the neo-gothic setting is like Batman’s house, bloody palm wounds on the stained glass, Jesus pretty adamant about having died for our sins, then get down on your knees and pray, for if the psalmist speaks,

Then Jesus answering, said to her:

O woman, great is thy faith:

be it done to thee as thou wilt.

then that means she must choose.

Ten: If a father and son band play Dixieland jazz by the central park pond from which Holden Caulfield’s stupid ducks once migrated or perhaps froze to death ☹, lie your hoodie on the cold wet grass for her to sit upon, enfold your legs into hers, place your forehead against hers and say, “Those hair vitamins you buy are worth every last dime.” In the Guggenheim, take pictures of Orpheus in Hades (1897) by Pierre Amédée Marcel-Béronneau. Take pictures of Jean Delville’s Portrait of the Grand Master of the Rosicrucians in Choir Dress by Joséphin Péladan (1895). Buy postcards of the paintings even though the pictures already exist in higher quality on Google Images, because when the mystical symbolists were convinced to convey the peculiarities of God, they weren’t conveying anything so peculiar as a disappeared loved-object. If you recall that not Lincoln but Gerald Ford spoke the words, “Our long national nightmare is over,” and that your photographic memory should not have permitted you to forget this, understand under your sweaty blogger’s bedsheets, back in the corporeal world in which the spiritual world subsists, that this is another cruel dream, as she was never yours for more than an evening at a time, for just as she might have been, another man, perhaps needing her as much, but certainly not more—maybe only a man who believed his own gimmick more concretely than you—came along and spoke the words, “You’re always running away from things.” Other-directed as she was, and no less impressionable, Catherine couldn’t run away from such a declaration. If this is the case, try to discontinue consciousness to find some last remnants of her to be stolen from the mouths of the M’Wasis at the Bronx Zoo. If as ever these vestigial dreams involve only the loss of the loved object across subway platforms, losing Catherine in the crowded bar, losing Catherine to the circus fiend, to superior causes, to all the hard-luck wolves of the night, losing her at Calvary and in the demilitarized zone and in crummy old Windsor, Ontario, then hang down your head and cry.

[1] (Lynch, Mulholland Drive, 2002)

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