Lately, I find myself drifting in and out of some kind of altered state of being that has me staying out later and later nights, playing pick-up sessions with improv players at after-hour places or at someone’s loft South of Market, or driving out to Ocean Beach after attending a show as critic-at-large and walking along the water until three, four, sometimes five in the morning. I’m finding myself drawn to more music, more independence, more time with friends and away from our Potrero Hill apartment. It’s as if I’m avoiding what I know is waiting for me at home, whether Evelyn’s in town or not: an aloneness and disconnectedness I never anticipated.

Though we didn’t know it all those years past, didn’t have a clue, Evelyn and I always had this something, this natural chemistry or attraction (maybe just that two-against-the-world sense of trust, reliance) that tended to make everything seem worthwhile, no matter what the outside world had in store for us.

With all that’s happened now, though, all these changes Evelyn’s undergone and, I guess, I have too, whatever that something was, whatever chemistry or make-up it had, is beginning to dwindle, dissipate back into the earth or atmosphere or where ever that kind of magic comes from. All I seem to be able to do now is remember it, look back at what it was and what it felt like, and wonder whether lightning can strike twice in the same damn relationship or in the same lifetime, for that matter, which I all too often doubt that it can.

There are other tensions, pushes and pulls, passing between us, too. Some of those hidden things you only get a weird, vague sense of over the phone or when you’re on your way to or from the airport. Lately, I’ve been thinking that it’s very possible, even probable, Evelyn’s testing the waters with some tall dark microbiopaleo-Einstein in Kamchatka, Russia, or Indonesia or wherever else she goes. Though this would be something very unlike the Evelyn I’ve known, there have been a few telltale signs: a couple of travel days missing here, a handful of unanswered phone calls there, an unexplainable bounce in her step at times.

Of course, that goes both ways. There has been a sudden, unaccountable uptick in the number of women my age—not that far from the half-century mark––and younger whose alluring, mascara-lined eyes catch mine out on the street or even in a shared cab and seem to be trying to say something to me. It’s as if they see something, a void, an emptiness––maybe that missing something––and they’re more than a little interested in helping out.

How many after-hours sessions can you play, how many walks out along the beach can you take, before it all gets to you and you can’t help but let go?

I wish I knew.

***

We have finished with the slides and Falcon tubes, the little Igloo packed full from top to bottom with what look like crudely rolled joints of aluminum foil. We decide to take a break and stretch the kinks out of our knees and ankles, and go to our packs where, in the increasingly brisk, numbing wind, I finally put on that Gore-Tex shell I’ve had in mind. Evelyn puts a rain jacket over the wind-resistant fleece she’s been wearing.

The sky has gone purple-dark over the wooded mountain peaks to the east, and the meadow, which is more marshy bog than meadow and equal in length to maybe fifty football fields lined up end to end, is blanketed in grays and cerulean blues. A herd of buffalo that live here, forty or fifty large hump-back adults and a handful of quick flighty adolescents, has moved our way without our having noticed. They are beginning to settle in and hunker down for the night in an area less than fifty yards away, giant black lumpy rocks in the tall grasses. The buffalo are rarely a threat here or anywhere else in the park unless you’re foolish enough to get within ten or fifteen feet of any one of them. They graze and meander about the valley as a herd and sometimes come up close and take a look at you, but they really have no interest in humans, none whatsoever.