Empty Chairs

meditating on love’s aftermath

Excerpt from Louie, Season 4, Episode 10 ("Pamela Part 1")

L: I'm too sad.... Look, I liked the feeling of being in love with her. I liked it. But now she's gone and I miss her and it sucks. And I didn't think it was going to be this bad, and I feel like, why even be happy if it's just going to lead to this, you know? It wasn't worth it.

B: You know, misery is wasted on the miserable.

L: What?

B: You know, I'm not entirely sure what your name is, but you are a classic idiot. You think spending time with her, kissing her, having fun with her, you think that's what it was all about? That was love?

L: Yeah.

B: THIS is love. Missing her, because she's gone. Wanting to die.... You're so lucky. You're like a walking poem. Would you rather be some kind of a fantasy? Some kind of a Disney ride? Is that what you want? Don't you see? This is the good part. This is what you've been digging for all this time. Now you finally have it in your hand, this sweet nugget of love, sweet, sad love, and you want to throw it away. You've got it all wrong.

L: I thought this was the bad part.

B: No! The bad part is when you forget her, when you don't care about her, when you don't care about anything. The bad part is coming, so enjoy the heartbreak while you can, for God's sakes. Pick up the dog poop, would you please? Lucky sonofabitch. I haven't had my heart broken since Marilyn walked out on me, since I was 35 years old. What I would give to have that feeling again.... You know, I'm not really sure what your name is, but you may be the single most boring person I have ever met. No offense.

Pictured: B&W Blurred Photo of Photographer in Training

It’s finally cold in New York. Enough so that I can wear a jacket as I walk around Brooklyn and not overheat. But still, it isn’t frigid, it’s the kind of cold that makes you feel alive or at least give you a greater awareness that you are an animal that needs shelter from the elements. I don’t layer up so that I can feel it a little more. I’ve been suffocating, and the chill almost gives me the ability to breathe.

I am in Park Slope. It's been a while since I’ve been around this part of Brooklyn. Normally I find myself wandering around Greenpoint, or Bushwick, or sometimes in the impossibly inaccessible Red Hook. If money were no object, I’d live in Red Hook. The rich people are there…I get it. No one is around. There are really only a few places to go, and the water. It’s the spot.

Park Slope is families and brownstones and townhouses. It’s women in athleisure pushing around babies in four-thousand-dollar strollers. It’s men dressed, embarrassingly, exactly like me. There are others in Patagonia vests that were made special for their tech company, or law firm, or brokerage. I can pretend to be better than them but I pay the same eight dollars for my oat milk latte.

It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The city is a little more emptied out, and the storefronts are closing down early. It will be pitch dark in just a few hours. I am looking for her.

I know she isn’t here, there’s no way she is. She is on a bus back home, or in a car, or a train. There’s simply no way.

Park Slope is bordered by Prospect Park to the east, Fourth Avenue to the west, Flatbush Avenue to the north, and Green-Wood Cemetery to the south. Forty blocks of space. Even if she were here, I probably wouldn’t run into her. It would be statistically unlikely.

She moved out on Saturday. I never asked for her address. I don’t think I really wanted it.

“Where is it?”

“Park Slope.”

“Nice. Good.”

She likes the 2/3 subway line. We lived off the 2/3. It’s an express, so convenient, sensible. So, I assume… Bergen? We would hop off there sometimes to go to Cobble Hill Cinemas. Closer to downtown? I don’t know. I don’t know why I am doing this. As if something will change in the highly unlikely, borderline impossible event that I run into her. I think, maybe the universe will tell me something interesting.

I think I hope that, if our eyes meet here, it will be a definitive message in a world of grays and indecipherable layers of meaning. But would that mean the opposite is true?

In 2021 my ex-girlfriend died of a drug overdose. At that point, we were very much not together. We had broken up about two years prior. We had stopped talking a little over a year prior. There was a lot left unsaid. A lot I didn’t get to say. A lot she probably didn’t let rip on me. And I always saw it as unfinished business. When she died, that was the end of that. Unfinished business was now concluded business. I guess that makes this situation particularly scary and tenuous for me. Not to be macabre, but obviously the idea is present in my mind. It makes it a little harder to walk around in the unknown.

This has been the longest we’ve gone without talking, and it has only been a few days. We lived together for over 3 years. It’s a very strange adjustment. When I think about it, it’s actually the most jarring adjustment I’ve made in my adult life.

I think, for a moment, how it’s the longest we’ve spent without talking in the entire time we’ve known each other. I also wonder if the metric is meaningless. It’s also the longest amount of time since I’ve gone without talking to my deceased ex. And every day it grows. And so every day I get further from people I love.

There are two main drags in Park Slope, each about a mile long. I walk them both. I peer inside every single coffee shop. Maybe this one will be it. It’s funny that I keep thinking that to myself when I know it isn’t true. Maybe this one. Maybe this corner. Maybe this stoop. Maybe.

I let myself pretend.

There’s something comforting about retracing old steps, even if you know you won’t find what you’re looking for. It’s like the streets themselves hold versions of you that aren’t quite gone yet. I wonder if we revisit these places because they hold pieces of us we’re afraid to lose—moments we can still feel if we just keep walking.

I often think of myself as a spirit. I am generally a stranger to those behind the counters at the coffee shops I float in and out of. I keep to myself. I have a small circle of people in my life. I try to look forward to new experiences but often find myself lamenting their end before they’ve even began. There is one particularly expensive restaurant in Manhattan I have been to only once with her. When we finished our first course I pointed to the stairs leading out of the strange basement like structure that felt like a luxury bunker. “We’re already walking out of here,” I said. That’s almost the only thing I recall of that memory.

I suppose we are still sitting in that restaurant, inside that moment. We are having an argument somewhere else. We are holding one another, one last time, on the tiny couch in the living room of our apartment. We are meeting for the first time on the corner of 114^th Street in Morningside Heights.

Today I watched a man outside a rare bookshop stage a photo, presumably to share somewhere for whatever reason. He pulled out a book from the three-dollar shelf so you could see the title and snapped a picture on his phone. I thought to myself: why? Rich coming from someone like me whose entire life has been curated. But still.

I think about the curation of lives turning into the curation of our memories. Do we even do this when we don’t think we are? I could have gone down to Park Slope and kept the sad fact to myself. Did I do it so I could write about it? Is that actually an experience? Why do I do anything?

Time is a strange thing. It drags when you’re in it, but when you look back, it feels like a sleight of hand, like something important got stolen while you weren’t paying attention. Each day pulls me further from the moments I thought defined me—moments I’m scared to forget. And yet, forgetting is what time does best. These old forgotten places let me feel like I’m still close to something, to her, to us, to whatever that was. Maybe time doesn’t heal as much as it sands everything down, making it harder to see the edges. I don’t know if that’s a gift or a curse, but I know it’s always been hard for me to let the edges go.

Walking around Park Slope might not be about finding her—it could be about finding myself in the aftermath. The pain, the longing, the absurd hope of running into someone who isn’t there, that’s all part of love. It’s not the bad part; like the cold, it’s the part that reminds us we’re alive. We hold on to the ache a little longer because it means we cared, we risked, we felt something real. The bad part is forgetting.

Pictured: B&W Blurred Contemplative Woman in Kitchen. I love this photo