Lightning
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Iron. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
When I walked into a dining shed outside a cocktail bar in northside Williamsburg on the sun-soaked evening of July 30, 2022, life was a rumble of questions.
I’d just started writing this newsletter, after a dizzying job rejection. I’d made it through one triathlon but not seriously thought about the future landmarks of marathon and Ironman. After a troubled pandemic fling, I’d kept some space around intimacy—embracing a tender and sustaining situationship with one lover and (transparently) fielding other encounters in the queer mecca of north Brooklyn. I tended to think that I didn’t need and wouldn’t ever want anything serious—but also understood this to be in tension with a prominent part of myself: the wall-to-wall, part-the-heavens romantic.
So the questions sort of added up to: Who am I, and what will I do? They fell silent, for a time, when I saw the face of my date. It was familiar beyond photos.
James was in the city for work. He and I had fluttered through each other’s periphery for years, mainly in an abortive exchange on Hinge. By the time of the date I knew him chiefly as a Hot Guy on Instagram. He seemed to live in Memphis, despite some relationship with New York, and he’d recently taken his mom and brother to Disneyworld. I knew he engaged in our DM conversations selectively but with pockets of high enthusiasm—regarding the set design of the newest Batman movie, for example. After he posted a picture of himself tucked up on the hood of a car in neon-green shorts, I knew meeting him would be justified at least on the basis of his legs. (He foiled me there, showing up for drinks in a heavy jumpsuit.)
What I remember about that first evening is that we talked about magic—what humans of all stripes have always used to conjure their realities—and our creative endeavors, and that he kept announcing but also postponing excuses to leave. We ended up sitting on my couch, where I kissed him. Soon he was back in Tennessee, and for at least several months we didn’t go a day without texting. From all that distance he began to make himself essential to me—and, dare I say, I to him—so that when he returned in October it was only a matter of days before I told him I loved him. “You really don’t have to say it back,” I said. And he did.
Early in those first weeks he represented his mood one night with a photo of a bat hanging upside down from a staircase. Since then he has been—in my phone, and in my description—James the hot bat.
Here’s what I can tell you about James now: He’s a storm and song, a sweetheart, barbed and elbowed, lilting, and eerily extra-scale, like a marble statue brought down off its plinth. The plainness and clarity of his speech subdues big forces. (More than once, I’ve watched him on a Zoom call unwittingly channeling Don Draper almost word for word, vibe for vibe.) He’s anywhere from very to uncanny-AI handsome. He’s a seismic creative talent whose work includes A-list immersive marketing events, top-secret theater projects, and the house in the Hudson Valley that he bought last year through force of will alone. It will become a place where other creators go for a few days to meet and battle the monsters that haunt them. His sense of humor, a gift of his mother, has no off switch. It has never—not in our darkest moments—lost its ability to cut and shine.
We’ve had the kind of dark moments you reasonably hope a relationship will never see. This spring and summer, James attended the worst hours of my life—“like we walked into a horror movie and we’re still in it,” he said of the time following the May phone calls about the homicide-suicide that claimed my brother’s and nephew’s lives. It’s a credit to James that the worst of these days has never lacked at least a little patch of blue sky.
On Saturday, a few days before the anniversary of our meeting, when I’d planned to, I sat him down on the living room couch. We were about to have a little argument, and it felt unworthy of a home into which had come with me that day an engagement ring. The ring is unconventional, a gold bat with ruby eyes. I pulled it from its hiding place in my Ironman backpack, while the chicken teetered on the edge of over-roasting in the oven, and said, Will you marry me? And James said, Are we really doing this right now? I’m cooking chicken. And I said, Yes. And he said, Yes.
To me this is a fairy tale, but I haven’t gotten yet to what I love the most about him, which is that he shares the view of our relationship as something worth supreme effort—and something that not only shouldn’t be by the books but can’t, something we’re making up with all our generative forces, something that repels us from our own reflexive smallness. That’s what we’ve been doing these two years: writing new. And gosh it’s had some awful chapters. But those have come mostly from outside. From inside has come, again and again, the kind of love that leaves you blind for a few seconds and puts the taste of metal in your mouth. Lightning. I knew him when I saw him, that first moment, because the force of it reached back and struck me.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram.