It was 1999, and I was acclimating to Park Slope and brownstone living pretty well. I’d begun teaching writing workshops in the public schools through two great organizations: Teachers & Writers Collaborative and Arts Horizons. This meant I was traveling far from Park Slope four to five days a week to teach in places like Far Rockaway and Staten Island with many other boroughs in between. None of them very close to where I lived. The experience was wildly varied since, on a basic level, I loved stepping into most of the classrooms to lead fun writing workshops where the kids would spin yarns from pictures on postcards, make up stories based on their names, and generally find some joy in being silly with words. Where the fun failed, it was either because the teachers were beyond exhausted (I mean, of course) to the point of using writing as a punishment (i.e., my visits were met with a kind of harsh “unless you write and share, I’m not letting you have recess,” which one teacher actually told the class, thereby setting me up as a carrot and a stick) or it was a high school class (gaah, this felt like my punishment for being a hard-to-handle teenager although that wording is perhaps redundant).

Anywho, there I was traveling all through the boroughs getting to know the subway and bus system like it was my home and, because I was always nervous about money, taking on perhaps two or one hundred too many workshops so that it felt like a life endurance test. In the meantime, the guy was working his steady job, and we were getting to know the neighbors. Starting from the garden apartment, there was a friendly guy who’d lived there for years and years and who was a kind of de facto landlord since the owner of the building lived elsewhere. Above us lived a young couple who became pregnant within about a month of our living there but even when the baby was born, they were so quiet, which as everyone with any sort of neighbor knows, is a kind of crazy miracle. On the very top floor, in the studio attic apartment lived a single guy who worked in finance and traveled a lot. When he was home though, we’d find cigarette butts stained with varying shades of lipstick ground out on the landing. One late-night, early-morning, the guy figured out why: Sitting at the front window, he saw a towncar pull up, a lady get out and come into the building while the car double-parked, then about an hour later, the lady came back out and drove off. So the guy upstairs enjoyed nocturnal visitations. This in no way affected us, although our stand-in landlord in the garden apartment did get approval for us to have locked mailboxes installed rather than what had been a mail system of leave-it-all-on-the-entry-table method we’d been working with. The other byproduct of learning about our neighbor’s late-night visitations was that I came to fully understand how the guy I’d moved in with was a nightbird and how I had happily eased into not being one anymore.

This wasn’t an issue I immediately recognized as impacting our intimacy too fully because, honestly, there wasn’t that much intimacy to begin with. As mentioned in last week’s writing, if I’d recognized my motivation around using this relationship as a foxhole to hide from the world in, it was buried so deeply in my subconscious that I swam by it constantly and paid it no mind. There was something that began to happen, though, that I couldn’t ignore. Namely, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to find the guy wasn’t there. Incredibly, this was before the thing we now call cellphones so I had no way to reach him to see what was going on. I would get up, wander around, look for some sign of where he’d gone, not find one, go back to bed while talking myself out of a freak-out, succeeding in doing that never. When he’d come back, he’d tell me that he was just taking a walk, clearing his head, thinking about a story he wanted to write or he’d taken the train (or ridden his motorcycle) into the city and had been sitting at a cafe writing. He’d explain that this was his creative time, just like I enjoyed the mornings, he thrived in the nighttime. OK, my brain would try and process that as a valid thing, and I didn’t want to be the one to crimp his creativity. Noooo, I wanted to support that, yet this nighttime disappearance affected me more deeply than just a writing retreat. I explained to him that when I was young, right after my parents divorced, my mom would go on dates and when I’d wake up in the middle of the night and not find her there, I’d be convinced she’d been murdered and I’d never see her again so I’d stay awake until I heard her come through the door. Whether this happened once or a thousand times didn’t matter, the terror I’d feel would appear instantly. And this same sensation came over me when I’d wake up to find him gone. He’d listen and nod, then pose a series of solutions, none of which included stopping the midnight ramblings. “I’ll leave a note,” “Let’s pick three nights a week for me to do this, then you’ll know what’s happening.” Sure, I’d reply, again thinking I had no right to curtail his creative muscle. Also, I never actually talked about any of this with the therapist I was seeing again occasionally. I actually have no clue what we did talk about, but regardless, the guy’s night journeys continued, and even with all the notes and calendar-inscribed dates, I still envisioned catastrophic endings. Perhaps these were premonitions, as we’ll see when I get to that part of the story.

So on we sailed in Park Slope, me displacing many feelings, him displacing many feelings, even as we sat down for dinner every night as if our deep feelings were pesky little side dishes. Then, in September 1999, we decided to get married, because, of course. Though the reasoning was not at all romantic and altogether practical: health insurance, which was something I didn’t have. That summer I’d had an unfortunate run-in with the hospital system when I’d had an asthma attack, which I’d ignored for a couple of weeks trying everything from acupuncture to steam to other home remedies, none of which worked. One day, as I watched a woman walking her dog across the street, I thought Breathing is not negotiable, then I walked very slowly to a doctor two blocks away. As soon as I stepped through the door, the receptionist looked at my blue-tinged face, called the doctor out, who called a car to take me to the emergency room, where I stayed for many days until enough prednisone and oxygen helped my lungs to function correctly. I was housed in a room with other patients who appeared uninsured, just like me. It was wild and scary, a chilling view into what it means to be in the American health care system without a safety net.

So naturally, when the guy said, “hey, I have good health insurance, you have none. We should tie the knot,” I agreed. Even though I’d never been a girl who thought marriage was necessary to have a relationship, I did feel the practicality of insurance in the way a medieval couple might have seen land or goods or alliances as a good reason to commit to each other legally. So we gathered up some friends and family, and stepped out onto the Brooklyn Bridge to make it official. There’d been a wicked hurricane, Floyd, some days before. We didn’t have any backup plan whatsoever in case it rained, but the day hatched with blue skies and we did the deed, then had a party and got busy with that insurance, which in May of 2000 would come in handier than I’d have liked it to.

Next week: adventures in insurance and other eye-opening activities in and around Brooklyn.