A wounded heart needs a place to repair, and since this wounded heart had a week of vacation time to take before the year was out, I decided that a week in New York City would be just the recuperative break I needed.

I arrived in new York last Sunday and met up with my friend David, a fellow blogger in the gay blogosphere who’d very generously agreed to let me stay with him for the week. Dinner was on the agenda, but there was time to kill, so David steered us toward Central Park.

I had one request for our park visit: the Bethesda Fountain. (I’m not much of an uber-fan of anything, but I am obsessive about Tony Kushner, and Angels in America was the play that made me want to be a playwright, so there’s a theatre geek gravity that pulls me toward the fountain every time I visit the city.)

We stood in front of the fountain for a few minutes, watching countless people rush up to the fountain, turn towards someone with a camera, pose, smile, then jet away.

“It’s so weird the way people take pictures here,” I said. “Huge smiles on their faces, then when they’re done, nothing.”

I’d been watching this one girl, early twenties at best, shoot this beaming, ebullient smile at the camera, then as soon as the flash hit her face, her shoulders sank, her face dropped, and she looked as if her cat had died. Tragically.

Then, serendipity. A wedding. Handsome guy in a tux, thin beautiful woman in a crisp white gown, hand in hand, laughing, being photographed by a very serious looking photographer ahead of them. They made a round of the fountain, being photographed, joyful, and I wanted so much to see the pictures that were being taken of them, to see that joy filtered through an artist’s eye, to see what that kind of happiness looks like frozen in a frame.

I don’t know what it all means, how it all comes together, but I know it’s important to mark, to write down.

I love the idea of marriage coming upon us suddenly, wandering through the park, this shock of a white dress cutting across the greys and blacks and browns of a hundred coats and jeans and t-shirts. And I think sometimes I am that twentysomething girl taking her picture, flash of a smile then dropped shoulders and miserable, and I don’t want to be. I want to be that laughing couple. And I’m standing at this fountain, a fountain that represents a healing fountain sprung from the touch of angel’s foot on the Earth, and there’s a connection, I know there is, but at the moment it’s a little too tricky to make.

Later that evening, David and I were talking about marriage (not to each other, in general, for the larger community, I don’t want my mom to read this and think I’ve been holding out on her), and we talked about commitment and promiscuity and history and do we really all want marriage? and should that even be what we’re fighting for? We talked about ourselves, our community, what we want for it, what we want for ourselves, what we dream we can become.

And that same sneaking uncertainty crept over me, the same that hovered over the fountain and the picture girl and the married couple. I know it was all important, but I just don’t know how to put it all together.

We fight our fight with a great deal of certainty. Certainty that we’re right. Certainty that we’re going to win. Certainty that we are fighting on the side of what’s just. And we are all those things.

But it is also good, I think, to embrace the idea that we don’t know how it all comes together, that the struggle we’re in is sometimes larger than we can wrap our mind around, that all we can do is sometimes grapple publicly with things we don’t completely understand, things the grappling helps make clearer, things we might find down the road we were completely wrong about. Or not.

Before we left, I made a promise to myself to come back to the fountain. Take a picture of myself, smiling broadly in front of it. Maybe it would all come to me then.

Hope never hurts, does it?