Nathan Xie
1. THE DISPATCHPlaces We Don’t Go
I’m going on vacation with a lover for the first time. L’s my lover here. He’s driving, I’m sitting in the passenger seat, and we’re a few hours away from Montreal. I believe there’s magic in the province of Quebec, in everyone else speaking French, in the two of us not understanding a thing together.
Can you talk to me? L says. He’s friendly as always, though the wording carries a kind of pressure.
As a kid, if my parents talked to me in the car, it always meant I was in trouble. Silence was a good thing. I stare out the window, trying to find something of note. I say, Look, a crow.
It could be any nondescript black thing with feathers. It flits by like a fast shadow. I’m not even sure it actually flew past.
Ooh, he says, twisting his head where I point.
Oh, you missed it. Then I ask, Is it bad that we don’t have much to say?
I have things to say, he answers. But he’s focused on driving because the traffic’s heavy and a series of turns are coming up. So he doesn’t say anything yet.
Perhaps I should talk about my parents. Because that’s what people do. They talk about themselves. It should be the easiest thing to do; while few people can claim expertise in some kind of art or study or hobby, everyone can pretend they’re an expert about their own selves. But here I am, not-thinking about my parents and how they would both be back in their dingy Queens apartment by now, my mother cooking red spinach trying to keep the oversensitive smoke detector from crying, my father lighting a cigarette behind a lamp where he thinks she can’t spot him—they ought to be divorced but still cling together after I’ve abandoned them.
This’ll be our first time living together, L says.
We’ll share a small Airbnb on Sainte-Catherine for ten days which shares the same glazed ceramic tiles as my parents’ apartment. It’s kind of a trial then, isn’t it? I say.
Let’s call it a new experience.
So neither of us is wrong, which is better than neither of us is right, which is how I feel about most unresolved arguments I’m still in.
We pass a lake, big and blue. Look, I say.
Lake George, L says.
You know it?
I cried there last year, he says. Sometimes I think about going back and crying there again.
I imagine him sitting on the dock at blue hour, the yachts bobbing in the waves, the mansions lit up effervescently for wealthy people's parties, and I know I would hate crying there.
Aren’t you gonna ask why? L asks. Again, there’s pressure in the wording, but he’s smiling.
I don’t want to pry, I say.
Well it wasn’t anything serious. I was thinking about how shitty the world is, and I wasn’t even high. A friend of a friend was sleeping on the streets, and another friend’s partner sank into a deep depression and refused to seek help, and then another friend’s brother’s wife wanted a divorce and he didn’t have anywhere to go, while I was sitting by this lake where dudes in Ray Bans and rose gold swim shorts sail into the sunset and somehow I started crying.
Do you cry easily? I ask.
The last time I cried I think I was like fourteen. Men should cry more, I know, L says. It feels good.
I don’t tell L I wake up every other week with tears down my cheek and no clue why. It doesn’t feel good at all.
L then asks me to type Lake George into the GPS. Let’s go, he says.
I taste the no in my mouth, but I’m also imagining crying that apparently feels good, and what if my parents sat in front of Lake George too, what if we all held hands on the pier and cried together, what if the strangers all around us, instead of gawping at us, joined us in crying—we’d perform a hysterical weeping ceremony, and maybe the magic I’m looking for in Montreal is right here over the water, like a scarf of mist after rain.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYSpeaker usually blasting The 1975
Second monitor to watch Twitch streamers
Vitamin D gummies
Cup of water I don't drink from enough
Whatever I'm currently reading (pictured is Outline by Rachel Cusk and Camera Man by Stanley Delgado in One Story)
Noise-cancelling headphones
Unopened envelopes
Pale pink mouse
Pale pink mousepad
Pale pink keyboard
3. BIOGRAPHYNathan Xie is a recipient of One Story's 2023 Adina Talve-Goodman fellowship and a Periplus Collective fellowship. His writing can be found at nathan-xie.com.