ephemeral beauty and longing to keep it

on infinite feelings that exists in a finite frame

Georges Seurat, La Promenade

It is said Lord Byron, while on his death bed, turned to a friend and confessed he had known but three happy hours during his entire existence. How was it that the man who wrote “She Walks in Beauty” could only recall but three hours of happiness?

Sitting in the corner of an upper east side restaurant (Botte, if you’re ever in town), I shed a tear over Lord Byron and the hours of happiness he could count in one hand and wondered (hoped) if the woman who inspired that poem had at least been the reason for one of them. I shed another tear for the best meal of my life I was told I could never have again.

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Up until the main course came, I’d been having a proper New York City day. The kind of day that makes your rent and the goddamn noise and your broke-down central nervous system all worth it. The kind of day they sell the rest of you in the movies just to boost our tourism.

I had my cup of coffee at a café on Madison and 81st, the cozy one with the black and white tiled floors. Window shopped townhouses only the cast of Gossip Girl could afford. Wandered around the Guggenheim like I was cool enough to admire pieces from artists I didn’t understand. (Except for the few Rothko’s on display. I think I understand him.) Curated the perfect end to the perfect day with a glass of wine and the spirit of Frank Sinatra alive and well both in me and the speakers. Frank and I, we had come to reclaim Rome for our people.

And then I fucked it all up.

My mistake was ordering from the evenings specials. An ambrosian pasta that must have been gifted to me from the burrata gods themselves. Two bites in and I knew this was it. I was in what my Greek ancestors called eu-topos, the good place. Served on a plate by a Sicilian chef and a waiter, Enzo, who came from a town where it wasn’t gabagool, it was capicola.

When I foolishly asked Enzo how often this dish would be featured on the menu, what I needed was for him to look me in my slightly intoxicated eyes and lie. Give me one animated “Every weekend Su!” goddamnit. Of course he didn’t. I’d probably have to tip 30% for that.

“Just for the weekend, miss. Chef enjoys the challenge of creating a new special weekly. He rarely reuses a dish.”

“Just for the weekend, miss” sounded a lot like “go fuck yourself” to me. But it should have been enough. I should have come to terms with the universal truth that yes Enzo, some things are just for the weekend. Savored the rest of my meal like a well-adjusted adult who once hired a life coach out of boredom does. Showed a morsel of gratitude to the chef who gifted me a once in a lifetime kind of meal. That’s always lesson one. Gratitude. The mother of all virtues and I had none of it.

Instead, I cried.

I collapsed under the ephemeral nature of the meal. I could wrap it up and take it home, shout “to-go Enzo!” Put it in a box or glass jar. I mean I could’ve, but it’d never be the same. Like the transitory images in the Seurat drawings I’d admired hours ago, everyone was destined to dissolve into the background of my life. And my perfect meal reduced to nothing but leftover molecules.

“Why is it that I find it so difficult to accept the present moment, whole as an apple, without cutting and hacking at it to find a purpose, or setting it up on a shelf with other apples to measure its worth or trying to pickle it in brine to preserve it, and crying to find it turns all brown and is no longer simply the lovely apple I was given in the morning?”

-Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Instead of choosing to stay in the good place, I was now in ou-topos, the place that cannot be. To the Greeks, it was utopia all the same.

I asked for the check. Left Enzo his well earned 30%.

This could have been one of my three hours.