Vow #1: No more getting high.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I’ll say it until it sticks.
Last time, it was a resolution. Everyone was making them. A month, I could do a month. One week passed. I’d had a rough day, and I soothed it with my old potion.
Last night I woke at 3 a.m., chest screaming, mind flipping through a Rolodex of regrets, amassing evidence against me until it was clear beyond a reasonable doubt that my life has gone nowhere and will go nowhere, and why did I have to say that thing at last year’s office holiday party? I’ve been having nights like this more frequently again, and when Gabe wakes up asking what’s wrong, I don’t know where to start. So here I am, starting. Again.
No resolutions this time. Resolutions are trendy. They smack of gender reveals and avocado toast. A vow is ancient. I need time on my side. I need vows.
I need this early morning drive from Boston to Maine, trees swelling like a crowd around the interstate as the city recedes. Gabe in the driver’s seat of our rental car. Gabe, healthy. Gabe, mentally stalwart. Gabe, my boyfriend of more than five years, one eye green, the other hazel, sneaking glances like our love is a new and marvelous discovery.
“This car makes me feel like I’m in a sci-fi movie,” he says. “Watch.”
He takes his hands off the wheel, and it steers on its own, aligned precisely in the center of the lane, keeping a steady space between the car ahead. I imagine a future operated by the cool logic of machines, the gradual decline of human error, progress like a river, and people like stones polished smooth. And me, the hermit clinging to old devices, proud of my car back home, its lack of technical magic, its CD player.
Thank god for Gabe booking us a week away. It will mark my fresh start. The new me, the healthy me, optimistic about change. As we drive north, leaves progress from yellow to orange to red as if autumn were a spool the road unraveled.
“Can you pull over?” I ask.
“It’s an interstate,” says Gabe.
“Just for a second.”
“For what?”
I hold up the camera.
“No way.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s dangerous, that’s why.”
“I’ll be quick.” But my words are lost in the revving of the engine.
Why are you being such an ass, is a question I keep to myself, aware it might be a side effect of Vow #1. Instead, I snap a photo of the passing trees. It looks more like a red-and-yellow smudge. Not bad, actually.
Lesson from a college photography class: Lengthen the exposure and an object in motion will blur, but move the camera to match the path of the object and it will appear in focus while the world around it blurs. What if I’m the one moving? I adjust the settings. Focus on a stand of trees and follow them as we pass. There’s a brief moment between the clicks of the shutter as the mirror gathers light.
“You OK?” Gabe asks.
I turn the camera so he can see.
“Wow,” he says, “it looks like a painting.”
A painting, yes, streaks of color supported by ghostly limbs. Another abstraction, then another, until the rest of our drive is punctuated by clicks of the shutter. If it annoys Gabe, he doesn’t show it. If I’d been driving, I’d at least have put some music on. He appears unfazed, smiling and nodding as if the clicks of my camera mark the beat to his favorite song.
I marvel at the photos. Maybe I’ll post some of them to Instagram later. Maybe they’ll get a lot of likes. Getting a lot of likes feels similar to getting high. It promises happiness on a string. Next time, next time, come back and try again.
Vow #2: No more Instagram.
We arrive in Portland where a game ensues in which we spot an open parking space just as someone pulls into it. After thirty minutes, luck remembers us, and we scan the QR code to download the app to pay the meter. We walk Old Port as cruise ships unload tourists by the thousands, shuffling in search of lobster rolls, lobster bisque, and lobster-shaped hats.
Gabe makes a face and says, “When I pictured Portland, I didn’t think Carnival Cruise.”
Somewhere, an ambulance wails. A passerby wonders aloud if someone ate too much bisque.
Bakery, cocktail bar, dispensary, bakery, brewery, dispensary. Portland is not the place for vows. It feeds on splurging. A birthday card costs eight bucks. It is cute, though, that little lobster in a sailor’s hat. And locally printed.
Meowy Jane, Fire on Fore, Black Bear Bud. Bongs in their windows like jewelry. I imagine lighting a joint, holding it between my fingers, and smoke rising like incense. It’s medicine. I have the card to prove it. Gabe always says he understands, though he doesn’t indulge. He says he understands, and the face he makes is the hospital kind of empathy, like he just wants me to get better, whatever it takes. Recently, I’ve had this cough, these breathing problems. I’ve had these 3 a.m. interrogations with my mind. It’s medicine until the side effects hurt more than the wound it’s supposed to heal.
“Doesn’t the air feel fresh here?” asks Gabe, and we take a collective breath. It fills my lungs with the tinge of ocean and baking bread, and I imagine the air infusing the blood in my lungs, turning it a healthy shade of red that travels the course of my body and improves even the dark parts. But that’s just because I don’t really know how lungs work, or blood.
Gabe doesn’t know about the vows. Not yet. If I tell him, it will turn into a whole thing. If I tell him, I won’t disappoint only myself when I break them. If I break them.
For the rest of the day we buy frivolous things and stay out until midnight. I’m stuffed on Japanese fried chicken and fries, but we stumble across a late-night dessert spot offering cake. I’ve been good. I deserve it. A person can’t be good all the time. A little bad has to ooze out eventually, otherwise where would it go?
When the cake is gone, I turn gloomy. Regret grumbles in my stomach as I take mental stock of everything I’ve eaten in the last twelve hours. Normally, I can blame it on being stoned.
“We’re on vacation,” says Gabe, the voice of reason, and my inability to let the feeling go makes me feel worse. “Don’t cry,” he says. “Why are you crying?”
Vow # 3: No more crying when you’re supposed to be having fun.
Another day, another drive. We push farther north in search of Maine’s best lobster roll. The best lobster roll, according to our Instagram research, comes from a red shack on the edge of a river. When we arrive, the line stretches around the shack and along the water. Across the street, another shack, this one with no line. Cars pass. Their drivers regard us with pity.
“Are we sure these lobster rolls are worth the hype?” I ask.
“That’s what that influencer couple said.”
“Look at their menu. Lobster roll with butter or lobster roll with mayonnaise.”
“I see it,” says Gabe.
“And look at the menu at this other place.”
He reads aloud: “Lobster roll with butter or lobster roll with mayonnaise.”
“Exactly.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying fuck Instagram.”
This is the closest I’ve come to telling Gabe about the vows. I consider it my little test to see how he reacts. He just shrugs.
Works for me.
The rolls cost thirty dollars each and arrive in red-and-white paper trays with a plastic ramekin of butter and a slice of lemon. We eat them at a wooden picnic table overlooking the water.
“I have a hot take,” says Gabe between bites.
“Let me hear it.”
“Lobster is just okay.”
“You know,” I tell him, “I was thinking the same thing.”
“Now crab,” he says, “I can fuck with some crab.”
“You could what with some crab?”
So much of what we say, think, and do seems to come from the people we know only through our phones. How will I change without them? What if they change for the better, and I for the worse? On the drive back to our vacation rental, I pinch my stomach trying to determine if I’ve gained weight in the twenty-four hours since we’ve arrived.
“What are you doing?” asks Gabe.
“Nothing.”
“Do you want to grab dessert?”
“Honestly?” I say. “I just want to go to bed.”
Vow #4: When I get back, I’ll exercise every day.
I wake from the first dream I’ve had in months. Something about it reminded me of what I like about being high. I like the slowing of time, which makes the world different and therefore interesting. I like the way music feels and food tastes. Sometimes I get anxious, and, like a scale out of balance, I drink a beer or some whiskey to get right again. I like best achieving the perfect blend of substances that clicks the present into vibrant focus—vision, heartbeat, and cosmos gather like a drop of water clinging to a faucet. Even the dust glistens. Never mind that it won’t last. Never mind that the shine will fade and shame, the sour of sickness, will take its place. I remember the bad but not as convincingly as the good.
To distract myself, I look through the photos of the leaves and houses we drove by, some parts clear, others blurry, verging on both the familiar and the spectral like my dream. When Gabe stirs I feel his stare.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“What’s that face?”
“I’m just happy you found something that makes you happy.”
“You make me happy.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“But it’s true.”
“He inspects his pillow. Are you okay?” he asks.
“Of course.” But my voice doesn’t convince him.
“You know that I love you, right? Like, all of you?”
I inspect my pillow. “What about the parts of me that I don’t like?”
“Give me an example.”
“Well… like how I’m a mess.”
“You mean your desk?”
“No.”
“Because I do wish you’d clean your desk.”
“Gabe.”
“What? It’s messy.”
“I mean a mess, like, emotionally.”
“You’re not a mess.”
“I feel like I am.”
“Well, then I love whatever part of you that you think is messy.”
“Why?”
“Because without it, you wouldn’t be you.”
“I’d be better.”
“How do you know?” he asks, his eyes childlike in their kindness.
I think of the influencers and Peloton instructors with their beautiful bodies and perfect habits. They resemble the future to which we are hurtling. Time rushes past, and they ride it like a wave. I don’t want Gabe to realize I’m holding him back. I don’t want to be left behind. A polished stone, that’s what my vows will allow me to be. Cool, logical, precious.
I just know.
Vow # 5: I won’t forget.
On the drive home, we avoid the interstate for the scenic coastal route. The road cuts through meadows and marshes, high grasses the color of sand, and white birds on stilt legs. I could ask Gabe to pull over. We have time. But I’m enjoying the sense of motion, the upward ticking of miles.
I imagine my desk drawer and the jars within, the rolling papers, and the lighter with stickers of hamburgers. How my hands prepare with practiced grace the source of fascination and terror, pat it like a good dog before the flame. I imagine the relief, the regret, and a rush too fast to hold onto.
“Look at that, isn’t it beautiful?” asks Gabe, nodding to the last patch of forest before it gives way to city. Soon we’ll be back in the same apartment with the same couch in the living room and the same chocolate in the pantry. The same path to the desk with its drawer slightly ajar. It would be easy, so easy, to go back.
Derek Maiolo
Derek Maiolo received his MFA from Chatham University, where he served as the 2021–2023 Margaret L. Whitford Fellow. His writing appears in The Baltimore Review, The Denver Post, The Portland Review, High Country News, and elsewhere. He lives with his boyfriend in Pittsburgh, where the two argue over curtains, stoneware, and the culinary merit of walnuts.
