“It was a romance that started in the modern way that’s cute in how uncute it is,” I start out with a whirl of my hand, cigarette trailing smoke that hangs against the cool black sky. 

“All meets are meet-cutes if there’s something there.” Gabriella says this because she met her husband after blowing him in a bathroom stall at Paolo’s. She looked up from his pubic hair into his eyes, cock in mouth, and thought to herself: I’d like to really get to know this man.

“Untrue, what if it’s forced?” Jep wanted to be cynical about love so badly because his heart was still broken from a woman twenty years prior.

I chuckle smoke from my nose, “All love is forced until it isn’t.”

“Untrue,” Jep repeats, “Some love is there from the start. Explain love that is never acted upon.”

“Love is like food,” Gabriella looks like a blind person as she elaborates, looking inward for her words as they come to her. “Acquired tastes, and all that. I hated broccoli as a child, and now I don’t. I love the way in which I hate tequila, I hate that I love sweets.”

“I am allergic to shellfish,” I add. “I have never held down a lobster. My cousin is beaten by his boyfriend weekly. Still, I think I’ll have at least one more lobster before I die.”

“That is not love,” Jep says.

“Passion is love,” Gabriella edits my thoughts, “and passion takes many forms.”

Jep: “Hate is passion.”

Me: “The ugliest form of love.”

Jep: “You two make no sense. You two are trying to make sense of the loveless world we’re living in by romanticizing hatred.”

Gabriella removes a small metal tin from her purse and produces from it some papers and some herb. “Better than romanticizing love, I say.”

“Gabriella,” I strain to see stars in the sky with no results, “you are the only one of us who is married. I’ve come close, so that puts me in second place, I suppose, with Jep dead last. What keeps a marriage thriving?”

Gabriella places some herb in a paper as she thinks. She has this slow, methodical way of speaking about things very dear to her so as to minimize filler. She detests um, well, and above all like. “A good marriage, or at least my marriage, which I consider to be good, and I’m not saying this to spite you, Jep, but a good marriage thrives on hatred. The comfort in screaming at someone you love, knowing they’ll still love you.”

Jep digs deep in his stance, believing a sob story will save his argument. “I hate the cancer that took my mother’s life, what love could possibly be found there?”

“We love our mothers,” I suggest, knowing already this isn’t the answer. “But more than that,” I struggle here, “we love to hate our mothers. We scream at them as children, of course growing to appreciate all they do later in life. That love comes from hatred. ‘Hate’ is never the wrong word if it comes to mind, and everytime I said I hated my mother I meant it. I hated her then and there, and the love I have now is built upon that hatred. When we grow desperate, lonely, loathsome at the world, we push people away, isolate, contemplate suicide.” I think I might have it, but I envy Gabriella’s brevity. “Your hatred at the cancer that killed your mother is borne of the world you imagine at the worst of times, devoid of anything like love.”

“Nonsense!” Jep sneezes this word. The woman he loved was named Rachel, she was a dancer. “What sort of mental gymnastics do you have to do, Ramon, as a Jew, to say you love the Nazis?”

“He’s not saying you should love the cancer,” Gabriella spits out some herb as she licks the paper. “He’s saying hatred is what we get when love is perverted, but it’s still there in some form or another.”

There’s that moment of silence that isn’t uncomfortable or awkward because everyone is simply reviewing all that’s just been said and preparing for the next shift in conversation. It’s a good conversation, as far as they go, between three friends who are of like values; similar enough to talk for hours and different enough to make it all night.

“Tell me again, Jep, about Rachel.” I say this.

To me, Jep proves Gabriella and my own point: that to feel bad is to have felt good. That sorrow is not the absence of joy, merely the recollection of it. That nostalgia isn’t toxic in and of itself, only a soft smile and a brief exhalation through the nose. That was then, this is now, and so on. Jep is capable of this, he is so close.

“What more is there to say?” He always begins like this. “The last time we spoke, I said I’d never love again.”

“And how long ago was this?” Gabriella knows it’s been twenty years, and she knows I know, but we’re synchronized in our prompting of Jep.

“Oh, twenty years or so, something like that. You said that all meets are cute, but we met when I walked in her riding my roommate. When we locked eyes, her facing me, bouncing up and down on his lap, him laying down, eyes closed, there wasn’t any room for anything besides embarrassment. I didn’t think she was cute or ugly. I couldn’t tell her interests other than my roommate, I couldn’t even really take her in as a human being. She was merely an extension of my roommate in that moment, a reason he needed me to turn around and head right back out the door. There was no hatred, no love. Nothing besides her need to yelp and mine to slam the door shut again.”

“Maybe a little jealousy too, no?” I ask, taking Gabriella’s joint as I extinguish my cigarette.

“I’m jealous that anyone has ever had sex other than me, who cares about jealousy?”

“Mmm,” Gabriella nods.

“We met again a week later, she was leaving my roommate’s room as I was making dinner. She was carrying a book I had read and we talked for oh, I’d say two minutes about it before she left. I next saw her the following year in line at a coffee shop, and tried to avoid her. I succeeded. I then saw her the next day sitting near me at a park and the serendipity of these two chance encounters combined with my having masturbated only twenty minutes prior gave me the…not courage...I’ll call it resignation to say hello.”

“Twenty minutes ‘after-the-fact,’ no better time to introduce yourself to a possible mate,” I think it’s me that says this, but it could be Gabriella.

“We went out a few times, the whole thing only lasted about three months, but I fell quickly and deeply in love. It’s criminal how simple this great love story ends.”

“She just wasn’t interested,” I finish for him. Jep can never bring himself to say this last part without his voice doing a warble and the windows to his soul fogging up. Condensation, I’ll swear it for him.

“That’s right,” he says, smiling at my assistance. “But I knew. I knew she was the one for me, and that it was nothing more than a damn shame that I wasn’t the one for her.”

“I still disagree, Jep,” says Gabriella through the cotton-balls accumulating in her stony mouth. Perhaps the herb is why she drops the charade that it’s the first time she’s heard this tale of woe. “Even if I did agree with the delusion that there’s a ‘one’ for each of us, certainly a stipulation would be that they have reciprocating feelings. How can you love her so unconditionally, even swear off love after her, if she does not feel your interests, passions, whathaveyou, are worth that love?”

I wonder as I pass back her joint if she’s dropping the charade to build back up her initial case on love and hate. Sacrificing the queen, so to say. Jep does not smoke. Anything.

“She told me it was because,” Jep swallows hard. I’ve never heard this part of the story. “Because to love me the way she should would be to open herself up completely to me. That she couldn’t. Couldn’t love the way I loved her. And if I’m foolish or naive to say this, so be it, but I respected that.”

I look over at the rising sun, we talked all night again. No one speaks until the joint is finished. I remember the story I started, never finished. It was about the girl I’d loved when I was a young man. Said again: I was a man, she was a girl. It was perfect in everything, save for pretty much everything.

“I love you, Jep.” Gabriella says. “And I love you, Ramon.”

“I love you Gabriella. And I love you Ramon.”

“I hate the both of you.”