Have a Nice Mistake

a letter addressed to 2-5 people

Letting go of you was a mistake. It’s a contender for the nicest mistake I’ve ever made. 

But it’s not necessarily the winner of that competition, which I’ve been privately adjudicating lately. 

Sure—that particular mistake has a certain heft. There’s a big hollow sound it makes in the dark when it knocks against the silence. It points towards long empty spaces, like those signal batons used by air traffic control guys.

And it’s nice in that it demonstrates my power. I’m shocked that I could have the temerity to do such a thing, to allow a person with your immensity to just disappear, off to a town somewhere I’ll never visit. How could I do that and live? How majestic is my endurance, how complete is my stupidity. Pretty amazing stuff, me just cleaving through the emotionality of my entire future like that. 

However, smaller mistakes I’ve made are also praiseworthy. There was that time I tried to speak French in Montreal, and told a waiter that I used to be a pig’s foot. He wasn’t thrilled by my story. 

In retrospect, I feel he was wrong to be unimpressed. I think that there’s something elegantly false about that statement, the obvious, picturesque fallacy of it. Next time I’m at a party, when asked about my profession, I might say that I’m retired, but that I used to be an eyelash you wiped off your cheek.

I remember you sitting on a bench and laughing. It was deep autumn. There were stereotypically excellent leaf smells and lamps in the park. You didn’t see me passing, you were talking to someone else. Now you know I was there, although you’ve probably forgotten this occasion.

Other mistakes. Once I was riding my bicycle, and, over my shoulder was draped a book bag with a wood saw sticking out of it. The saw didn’t have a safety cover on it. The reason was… I don’t feel like explaining the reason, it’s a whole separate discussion, let the reason be that I was seventeen. Anyway, I hopped a curb and the saw swung forward and struck my wrist. It wasn’t a bad cut but it left a scar. In the years following, I was asked a couple of times about what provoked my suicide attempt.

Some mistakes, like two pieces I wrote for a major publication, have a glinty, zingy quality about them. They provoke tension and cortisol. When I close my eyes, they light up like gold leaf on velvet. Whereas the mistakes I made with you provoke sighs and long pauses. They are cobalt blue sequins that flash upon the vagueness.

Of course, more recent mistakes are also worthy of distinction. They show that, as much learning as I’ve done, I’ll still screw a lot of things up. Like my final cocktail last night at this speakeasy in Mexico City. The bartender said it was his favorite recipe, and the uptempo music gave me a feeling of universal permission. The glass was rimmed with a weird seasoned salt that tasted like a shipwreck, perhaps in tribute to rising sea levels. The drink itself tasted like childhood orange drink with a hint of spoilage. It made me stumble, it did not make me happy. I came home and thought of—well, not you in particular, but the shrouded sea of history to which you belong, and protrude from.

Perhaps you made a mistake too. We let go of each other, in a way. Either of us could have turned around and said, no, this is a mistake. You could’ve made a speech like Ryan Gosling from some movie featuring his rousing declarations. But you didn’t, and neither did I.

Another nice thing about this mistake is that it gives me a very plausible alternate life to reflect on, when I need to escape this one, for a moment. That imagined life is perhaps a more coherent, dreamy one than the life I actually would’ve lived with you. In the imaginary one, you blush and laugh a lot, and we often make time for long dinners in a backyard somewhere.

Once in Kathmandu, at a shady hotel, I left a $100 bill and my passport in my room. As I walked away, I thought, ‘oh, those items will definitely be stolen by the staff,’ but I didn’t return to the room to rectify this. They were, in fact, stolen. I got the passport back. So that mistake turned out okay—and I like that betrays a certain devil-may-care attitude, which is to say, a brazen foolishness that does expand my horizons.

Letting you go of you is a mistake I’ll never make again, because I’ll never have the chance to. That’s all gone now, along with you. The best I can hope for is another opportunity to make a mistake of such excellence. Maybe, this time, I’ll decide not to.

If you too, come to such an opportunity, and you take it, I hope that you’ll carry your mistake with you to some distant plateau, and sit by it like it’s a small fire.