February 15, 2024
So, Ezra Walker,” said Dr. Arroyo-Abril, one of the top-rated life coaches in her field, “when are you going to tell that adorable florist the truth?”
Ezra’s life coach had the excitable, rah-rah energy of a top-performing Mary Kay sales rep. With her skunk-streaked shag and stretchy capris, she projected a distinct Midwestern grandma aesthetic. No one would guess that fifty-seven-year-old Dr. Pilar Estefania Luz Arroyo-Abril was born to an aristocratic family in Barcelona, spoke four languages, and had a PhD. Her look was intentional. Dr. Arroyo-Abril wanted her clients to think she was a harmlessly goofy boomer—that way, her sophisticated wisdom would be a shocking reveal.
The most shocking reveal, however, was that she’d once served time for selling fake magic water from the Fountain of Youth in Saint Augustine, Florida. Her con artist roots came in handy when performing favors for clients in need. In her many years as a certified Perennial life coach, Dr. Arroyo-Abril had posed as an ex-wife, a co-op board president—and, earlier that month, Ezra’s “assistant.”
Ezra slunk into her office on the forty-fourth floor of the Chrysler Building. He was not in the mood to talk, nor to be assaulted by her office decor. From the purple mohair rug to the hot-pink couch in the precise shade of rest stop liquid soap, it looked like a set from Clueless. As usual, Shania Twain’s greatest hits floated softly into the room from a portable speaker.
Despite his mood, Ezra offered her a pleasant smile and shook her hand before taking a seat on the couch, which broke protocol. Dr. Arroyo-Abril encouraged her clients to lie down on the couch. The better for her to assert dominance as she swiveled about in her leopard-print office chair, delivering insightful declarations regarding their mental health.
But Ezra never lay down. He never laid himself bare at all.
Usually a paragon of composure, Ezra had lately been… not himself. According to Dr. Arroyo-Abril in their last session, he was Laden with regret! Paralyzed by indecision! Lost in a sea of confusion! But it wasn’t his fault. Years ago, he’d received a diagnosis that had altered the course of his life, rendering him incapable of committing to anyone or anything for very long. But what was he going to do, wallow? Of course not. Instead, he’d gotten used to it.
That’s the thing about resilience, he thought. With enough time, even the most bizarre circumstances become banal.
But now he’d met Ricki. He couldn’t think of anything but Ricki.
For her protection, he had to smother their spark before it caught fire. And he had no clue how to do this on his own. Good thing he had a life coach. Ostensibly, Ezra liked to think of himself as an evolved, modern man. In fact, he actually enjoyed his sessions with Dr. Arroyo-Abril.
Well, he tolerated them.
I hate them, thought Ezra, massaging his brow with his fingertips.
But he trusted the good doctor. She’d gracefully and thoughtfully ushered him through one of the most harrowing times of his life. And now he’d come to rely on their bimonthly visits. Putting his mental health in her hands was a fucking relief. Like paying someone to clean your house or do your taxes. Outsourcing your dirty work.
A confirmed stoic, Ezra wasn’t built for self-examination. When faced with his own Big Feelings, Ezra froze up. He didn’t cry (it was unsatisfying and aggravated his sinuses). He staved off anxiety by cooking for hours (don’t let the brawny build and big hands fool you; he julienned with the precision of a Bocuse d’Or chef). And, as a rule, he allowed despair to linger for only one business day (after that, he’d bury the pain so deep, he’d forget where to find it).
Ezra didn’t need Dr. Arroyo-Abril to tell him that emotional blockage had everything to do with where and how he was raised, in a town stuck in quicksand, sinking backward into time. His dad, his granddad, and so on—all the musically gifted Ezra Walkers before him—their philosophy was, if you’re gonna fall apart, you better just stay in pieces, because whatever happens tomorrow might be a thousand times worse. Don’t weep—make songs! So he’d retreat to the keys and bang out what was coursing through his veins, shaping his rage, sadness, and grief into something beautiful.
But that gift had stopped giving long ago. Ezra hadn’t finished an original composition in years. Instead, he’d play snippets of the same half-written song floating around in his head. And recently, this almost-complete melody had been positively haunting him. Keeping him up at night. He just couldn’t connect the dots, couldn’t make the song work. He was still embarrassed he’d played some of it in front of Ricki at Bar Exquise. Ezra had never played anything unfinished for an audience.
How dare Ricki Wilde make him feel so settled, so at peace, that he forgot himself?
Ezra couldn’t create his own music anymore, so these days he worked as an anonymous journeyman, playing backup for other artists. And since composing had been his coping mechanism, he now had no tools to process his swirling confusion over Ricki. Ezra needed Dr. Arroyo-Abril’s help, desperately.
Right now, she was peering at him through her flame-red bifocals, all gleefully judgmental smiles and dimpled enthusiasm.
“I repeat,” she said. “When are you going to tell that adorable florist the truth? Because if you do not, I will! Which will be strange for her, as I am sure by now she has forgotten me. How long has it been since I spoke to her?”
“Almost two weeks,” he answered glumly.
“So right now I am just a foggy memory to her. Soon, I will have vanished from her mind completely!”
I know the rules, he thought, trying to remain calm. Can we please get to the part where you help me?
Ezra leaned forward, manspreading with his elbows on his knees. “What I’m supposed to tell Ricki, exactly? This is all your fault, by the way. I gave you cash to buy the painting for me. Not to give her my number.”
Dr. Arroyo-Abril gasped, mock offended. “I was just speeding up the inevitable. My thinking was the sooner you two spoke, the faster you could find a solution to your… conundrum.”
“She showed up to my house,” he said indignantly. “She knows where I live. Do you understand how wrong that is? The less she knows about me, the better.”
“Too late,” she said with a cheerful shrug.
He shook his head, frustrated. “I can’t keep pushing her away, and my whole ‘I’m private’ excuse feels so stupid. I think she can tell how I… the way I… She knows…”
“Yes, Ezra, I am sure she can sense how you feel about her.” She sighed. “Tell her the truth.”
“I can’t do that.” With miserable finality, he flipped up the hood of his Kenzo tiger sweatshirt and then slowly pulled the laces until it closed over his face, shutting out the world.
“Well, you cannot do that.” She waved her hands toward the lump of indulgent sadness sitting on her couch. “Listen, I know how hard Februaries are for you. Especially this one, it being a leap year and all.”
Ezra nodded, sliding off his hood. He opened his mouth to speak, and then shut it again.
“Talk to me,” she ordered, tapping a glitter-sneakered foot. “Come on, how do you feel?”
“I feel like another tragedy’s fixing to happen,” he pronounced with grave finality. “I know it will. And I can’t hurt Ricki. I couldn’t live with it.”
Dr. Arroyo-Abril pursed her lips and nodded. They were finally getting somewhere.
“I am proud of you, Ezra. You have done a lot of work to get over your ex’s tragic death.”
He flinched. After all this time, it still stung.
“I just want a day where I don’t think about it,” he said quietly.
“I want that for you, too,” she assured him. “Did you do your homework? The hug experiment? Finding one person to hug, as often as possible?”
“Absolutely not,” he said petulantly. Ezra didn’t hug. He didn’t understand it. How long was he supposed to stay in the embrace? Was there a standard time that was acceptable? Why wasn’t a handshake sufficient?
Hugging suggested safety and comfort, which, in his experience, had always been a lie. A cruel hoax.
“Hugs are a simple, easy, safe way to get endorphins and serotonin.” She rolled her chair closer to the couch, wagging her index finger in his face. “Stop being so change resistant, Ezra!”
“I am what I am. You shave a tiger, and its skin has the same stripes as its fur.”
“Sure, but then you will have a furious tiger.”
He blinked. “That… doesn’t mean anything.”
“Well, have you taken any of my advice regarding self-soothing? Have you tried the anxiety app? What have you been doing to de-stress? Have you heard any of my advice?”
“I heard you plenty,” he drawled, the picture of sullen sadboi energy. “I’ve been watching these YouTube videos of Muslim people putting their cats on these tiny prayer mats, to pray with them. That’s comforting.”
“I see. Well, whatever works, I suppose,” Dr. Arroyo-Abril said with a frown. “Talk to me about these encounters with Ricki. What happens when you run into her? How do you feel?”
“I’m just fucking… Pardon… I’m just drawn to her. No matter how hard I try to avoid places I think she’ll be, we always end up together.”
Every day, Ezra would leave his house to go to his part-time job, dog-sitting, and invariably, he’d collide with Ricki. Or sometimes she’d collide with him. He didn’t just feel pulled in her direction; he felt yanked. He’d be walking down 141st, then he’d blink, and he’d suddenly be headed up 127th. It was science-fiction bizarre.
And I knew it would be like this, he thought. I was warned this would happen. But it doesn’t make it easier.
“It’s terrible. But seeing her is also… It’s also…”
Dr. Arroyo-Abril made an encouraging gesture. “You have come so far with your communication skills! Keep going. It is also what?”
“It’s also the reason I wake up in the morning,” he said, his voice solemn, tortured with longing. “Even if it’s just bumping into her outside Duane Reade. My life orbits around her. Around those moments.”
He pined for those encounters; he ached for them. His entire day was spent manifesting a sixty-second run-in with the most radiantly irresistible woman he’d ever met. He was drawn to her as helplessly as if he were pulled by a string.
Ricki’s face was like a goddamn beacon for the lost.
And what hurt, what truly killed, was that Ezra had to convince her that he wasn’t ravenously desperate to learn everything about her: her diner order; every patch of her skin; which songs made her cry; what her voice sounded like at 3:00 a.m. when she was sleepy, unguarded, and breathing the same air as him. All he wanted in the world was to take her on a normal date: to sit across from her at dinner, listening to her talk about her favorite movie, her job, her dreams. To catch a matinee with her and share Junior Mints or Twizzlers, or maybe she was a Sour Patch Kids person—who knew? He wanted to find out.
Ezra longed to do regular stuff with Ricki. But he wasn’t a regular dude. And if he revealed the real reason why he wasn’t regular, she’d never believe him. Worse, she might call a psychiatric institute.
“Earth to Ezra!” Dr. Arroyo-Abril waved a hand in front of his face. “Where did you go?”
“Oh. Apologies, Doctor.” Shaking himself out of a daze, he sat up straighter and looked her in the eye. “The other day, I remembered this time I was in DC for a July 4 club date. That morning, I was hanging out with the bassist, this fella called Big Arkansas. Ever notice that only the hardest guys are named after states?”
“I have always found that to be true, yes.”
“Anyway, that afternoon we were eating at some spot on Georgia Avenue, smoking a joint… er, a doobie… no, a blunt…”
“It is okay, Ezra. Linguistic glitches are normal for people with our particular diagnosis.” She patted his knee. “The technical term is ‘linguitches.’”
He eyed her with skepticism. “You just made that up.”
“It is a fact. Clearly outlined in the Winter 1974 Journal of Perennial Sciences. Page thirty-seven, paragraph four. Classic text, classic!”
She was so tricky, you could believe only eighty percent of what came out of her mouth.
“Anyway, the weed was laced with something. It was potent. I couldn’t move. For hours. I sat in a bar in the grips of wild paranoia, just waiting for it to pass. Finally, I got the nerve to leave, and the second I stepped outside, the actual second, the entire Howard University marching band charged down the sidewalk. Cymbalists, majorettes, drummers—it was a stampede.”
Dr. Arroyo-Abril threw her head back and cackled.
“I was terrified. But then I got out of the way, paused, and listened. I was like, this band is tight. That’s how I feel every time I see her. Like I’m being trampled by an elite HBCU marching band.”
“Mmm,” she said, nodding supportively. “Ezra, I know you like to pretend you have no feelings. But what you have described? You have fallen for her.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Yes, you have. Receive it.”
“No, I haven’t.” He took a beat. It should’ve been impossible to feel what he felt for Ricki after knowing her for two seconds. It should’ve been impossible. But denying the truth was futile. Especially in front of a licensed psychotherapist.
“You know what? Yeah. I’ve fallen for her. Bad.”
Dr. Arroyo-Abril cheered, waving her fists in the air. “Beautiful work! Take a deep, cleansing breath, and hold space for this emotion.”
He held up a hand. “I told you, I draw the line at ‘hold space.’”
Soulfully, the doctor placed her palm over her heart, nodding with understanding. “Now that we know you are crazy about her, let us talk solutions. You have two options.”
“I’m listening.” Ezra sat forward again, clasping his hands together eagerly. Finally, the advice he paid her for.
“Option one is to tell Ricki the truth so she has a clear understanding of why you cannot be together. And then book her a flight out of New York City.”
“Emphatic no. What’s option two?”
“Same as option one, but no plane. Instead, Ricki stays here, and both of you figure out how to solve your problem. Together, as a team!”
“So, either way I have to tell the truth?”
“Communication only works when you say what you mean.” Dr. Arroyo-Abril pointed in the air for emphasis. “Anything less than the truth is a lie.”
Ezra shut his eyes and sank against the back of the ultra-pink couch, trying to process this information. When he opened them, he looked defeated. “I suppose I’ll tell her the truth, then.”
“Wonderful!”
“But what if I start linguitching?”
“Do not make fun, Ezra. It is a real word.”
He chuckled. He loved lightly roasting her. Few people in the world understood him like his eccentric life coach, and he appreciated her for it.
“You should go visit her at her flower shop. As soon as possible.”
“I can’t meet her there,” said Ezra, sinking back into seriousness. “You know I can’t.”
I’ve managed to avoid that block since that terrible February, and I’m not ready to face it, he thought.
“You will have to face it at some point,” said Dr. Arroyo-Abril, reading his mind. “And speaking of, when was the last time you played music? Your music?”
I can’t tell her I spent Wednesday night playing TV show theme songs to an invisible audience, he thought. It’s too embarrassing. But quietly? It felt good hearing the reaction upstairs, through the ceiling. Making strangers laugh and stomp and sing. For a little while, it was fun to connect to a crowd again. It’s the best feeling in the world. The only feeling in the world. But I can’t fathom playing anything of my own ever again. I’m too numb to play. No inspiration. No hunger.
Ezra remembered the first time he heard Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia.” On a frantic high, he named his new Doberman pinscher puppy Tunisia (RIP). He ate at a local Tunisian restaurant exclusively for six months. He was ready to drop everything and relocate to Tunisia. That was the transcendent power of a song! The really good ones could rearrange the topography of your soul. It was what drove a musician’s sublime hunger.
But no one had prepared Ezra for when it would vanish, when he’d no longer leap out of bed with a thunderous urge to play till the world fell away. No one had warned Ezra of the bleak nothingness that would blanket him when that appetite evaporated.
“You know I don’t play anymore.” Ezra’s tone made clear that the conversation was closed.
“But that is not exactly true, is it?” Dr. Arroyo-Abril wouldn’t be Dr. Arroyo-Abril if she didn’t push.
Ezra let his head fall back against the wall. “Whenever I see her, I hear the pieces of that song in my mind. It’s frustrating. I can sense the melody just on the edge of my brain, but I can’t grasp it. Can’t put it together.”
“Hmm,” she responded. “What do you think it will take for you to complete it?”
Instead of answering her pointed question, Ezra changed the subject.
“You ever think about the fact that your whole life is a memory?” he asked. “Everything is past except for right now. And right now’s gone in a flash.” Slowly, Ezra scratched the back of his neck, musing on this. “What’s the point of anything?”
“Ezra, listen. You have set up your life to be temporary. I know why you have done this. But that florist does not. Tell her the truth.”
And then, because it bore repeating, Dr. Arroyo-Abril placed her hand over his and said, “Anything less than the truth is a lie.”