pray in mono

Montréal // February 16, 2025

I’ve got my radio playing whatever’s on in mono. When I turn the knob, it bleats and blares something awful. Like dial up or an MRI machine. I moved across town because I couldn’t sleep. The sound of my neighbors and the parties next door got to be too much. I’m listening to a dead Egyptian woman singing scales over incomprehensible stringed instruments. Mono. Radio makes everything sound the same. Thank God, it sounds good. “God is good” is what I texted my Muslim friend and he asked me if I’ll “reconsider my sexuality”. No. I can’t do that. Obviously I can’t do that. But I can do what philosophers do and reorient it. I can define it as whatever it’s not. Like a theologian. My roommates are watching hockey and shouting. It makes me feel loved, how they want me to watch with them.

I’m happening again. I’m being all over. All over the city and all over the streets, the piles of snow, cars covered in blue antifreeze. I joined a Zoom meeting the other day to watch the rabbi unveil my grandpa’s tombstone. There’s an American flag on it. Someone in the chat sent a sad react. Crying emoji. “RIP Poppy”. “He was the best.” One year yahrzeit.

My sister wants a new passport. Somewhere foreign. Somewhere nothing like the USA. Personally, I miss America. I miss how much it feels like home. Like everything I love, I, of course, fear America. I’m afraid of how easily it collapses in on itself. I’m afraid of how difficult it can be to live your life how you want to, despite it being the land of the free. I’m afraid of the freedom, too. I’m keeping a safe distance for now. I like Montréal because people don’t ask so many questions.

I spent all of late January lying in the empty bathtub in my old apartment. I’d fill it with hot water, lower myself real slowly into the tub, and lie there until the water ran dry. And my body too. My back would stick to the plastic and I’d watch a candle burn down to the base. Sirens through the fogged up window. Let my phone die. Just me and my body.

A cute guy just walked into the cafe. Sat right next to me. Close enough to smell his deodorant. Close enough for him to see me writing this. I wonder what he read. And what he thought about it. He looked like this one guy I went out with four years ago and this other guy I went out with three years ago and this other guy from two years ago and from last year too. He looked like my Montréal, like splitting the bill, like showers together, like him bathing me, like me bathing him, like waking up alone, like never seeing him again. And that’s ok. That’s just fine. That’s the rhythm of this place.

Wondering if there’s a place where I should be. Wondering if there’s a place I can call mine. But there’s not. I’m not diasporic, I’m destroyed. And my friends all know it. Valentine's Day came and went and my mom called. “Happy Valentine’s Day sweetheart.” I’m her Valentine. I’ve been her Valentine my entire adult life. I couldn’t ask for more and I shouldn’t, but I do. I form God in my head and ask Him for more than this. What is it about this life that makes me feel so unfulfilled? Maybe I should be in war or something. My eyes are too fucked up, though. I’d die within minutes. Maybe that’s the point.

I think I’ll age quickly and violently. Like how a leaf burns. Up in smoke in a moment.

Someone asked me where I’ve been. She said I’d been distant. I’m not convinced I was ever proximate enough to call this distance. To measure the distance or to give it a name.

Every day my stomach aches. Constant pain. I don’t talk about it much because there’s nothing really to say. I’m always in pain. No doctor can help. They just say it's stress. No matter what I eat, what I do with my body, I feel constant, unrelenting pain. Like my stomach is digesting itself. This is the underpinning of my life. Everything happens on top of that pain. Like a bed of sick soil. Like piles of jagged rocks. These strangers are staring at me now. Right into my eyes. I wonder if they can feel my pain. Trying to build a life on unstable grounds. One day they will ache how I ache. They will look in the mirror and see my baggy eyes staring back. They’ll remember how I squirmed in my chair, how I embodied discomfort. They’ll think of morphine and wake up at noon. They’ll apologize in their sleep. They’ll think of me when they dance, this beautiful couple. I’ll put one thousand locks on my bedroom door.

I reflect on men, wonder almost aloud why all my favorite books are about pain. All my best memories are about pain. I’ve always been addicted to pain. All the various ways of receiving it. All different kinds of pain. My favorite was sharp pain. The kind of pain that comes from a knife or a really sore muscle. My body telling me to stop. My mind telling my body to keep going. I used to do everything until failure. Like a bodybuilder without a body to build.

I slept with a couple older men when I was younger. I’d close my eyes and let them do whatever. My half grown body shaking with nerves. “Here, take a sip.” I’d sip. Something sweet. Whiskey and Coke maybe. Wake up the next day with pain in my neck from the bald guy grabbing it. Wake up the next day, my ass sore from whatever. I don’t know. I’d go to school and wear headphones all day. Growing up gay in a place like Georgia makes you look for pain like that. It makes a gay boy act how he thinks a man is supposed to. Before he’s old enough to say no. I don’t want sympathy at all. That shit makes me sick. But you need to understand where all this pain is located and how it came to be.

Screaming on the mic with the old band until my throat’s red and I’m spitting blood. Riding in the backseat of my friend’s car. Windows down. I’m lying across the whole back row playing with a lighter. Running my finger over the flame. Feeling a little pain. Smoking a cigarette on the hood of the car in some abandoned lot. Watching trees move with the wind. They’re taller than I’ll ever be. They’re tall enough to touch the sky. To make their own kind of sky. Older than this city. Definitely older than I am. My friend’s talking about killing himself. It’s quiet enough to hear him breathe between sentences. I won’t sleep tonight.

My grandma told me when she was a young girl, someone from her town threw her in the well behind her house. I asked her what it’s like at the bottom of a well. She said, “wet”. I imagine the light at the top like a tunnel. Like going to heaven. I imagine myself there, in the well. She said her mom let down some rope and she climbed back up. It was night by then. She lived in a small town in upstate New York. The stars must’ve shined like nothing. The moon.

There have been times in my life I’ve loved someone so much I’d thought about killing them and eating their body just to be close enough to feel them. I’m not like that anymore. I rarely meet eyes and I’m mostly reading and listening to music on the weekends. Playing guitar for a few minutes and then putting it down. Playing the same few songs on the piano. Hasn’t been tuned in a decade. Sounds fine to me. Life like that. I see videos of bombs exploding on the news. Pretty much constant blizzard outside. A drink or two when the sun’s down. Life like that.

I feel like grabbing a power line. Throwing myself down a flight of stairs. Record high snow these days. Enough to drown in.

My sister’s skull got infected when I was in high school. An ear infection spread. She spent the week in the hospital. My brother and I ate Thanksgiving dinner together at the McDonalds down the road. Back in the hospital, I overheard the doctor saying something about the infection possibly spreading to her brain. All the color in the world, suddenly grey. My feet moved before I knew where I was headed. Looking for some quiet, I guess. Or a noise loud enough to do what quiet does. I found my way into the empty hospital chapel. Stained glass gave the white room some color. My knees hit the floor before I could find a pew. I don’t know to who or what I prayed. I could hear my sister’s screams. My heartbeat in mono.

Picture the roof blowing off our house. The one we built together. Picture the sky flooding our bedroom. The one where we used to sleep. Listen to black metal and hear the screams three doors down. Map your emotions onto the strata of your life.

Someone I loved. She said my fingers were like piano keys, that sometimes, after we’d have sex, my body was like a dead body. Perfect is the body. Her hips. Her breasts and my face between them. Brushing our teeth together. Sharing a towel. My memory makes things. Her voice in my ear. Everything quiet like the snow. Everything in this world is made for me, she says. Looking into her eyes and closing mine. Staring at the corner. Remembering my high school crush. Remembering his late night texts. Never enough, what I’d tell myself when I’d cry to sleep. When I’d empty out the day in tears on my pillowcase. When I’d lie on the shower floor until the water ran cold. Praying in the chapel of my bedroom for second hand romance. Love when his girlfriend’s asleep. Love when she wasn’t texting back. Praying in the chapel of my bedroom for one night of sleep. Praying for a new city, away from comfort and all the things that make life easy. No words. Man of God. Come kiss me.