rain sounds
Vienna, Austria // June 26, 2024
Hey everyone. I hope you are doing well.
On a flight to Vienna from Barcelona, a baby cries for two hours. I imagine what it’s like to have so many thoughts and no way to communicate them. Constant input without output. Everything hurts, everyone is always yelling, and no one understands that you don’t understand anything. We’re moments from landing, the pilot jerks the plane back up into the sky, he accelerates. People are worried in German and the baby is screaming because its tiny ears must have collapsed. A few minutes go by and the pilot apologizes quickly and quietly. The man next to me laughs. Something something in German. Smile. He texts his girlfriend.
I’m in a hostel on the fifth floor of an Ikea. The place is filled with rainbow decorations and disco balls. There’s a man in front of me coding and eating a loaf of bread. I met a guy last night and figured we could get some drinks. A bottle of wine later, I made my way to the bathroom, my hand subtly wrapping around his shoulder like a kind of scarf or how prep school kids wear their sweaters. He, Paul, told me I walked slowly. I said I like to enjoy the views of the city and the people I’m with. I was, in a roundabout way, telling him I wanted him to take me home. The hostel was nearby, but incredibly unappealing. The room smells like molded wood and there are no windows. Vienna, yesterday, was Georgia hot. Almost 100 degrees. (Thirty something for the rest of the world.) My legs stuck to my jeans and I wondered if they smelled bad. I haven’t washed them in weeks, to be honest. Not since the skinny dipping, making out on the doc. I never heard from the Swedish girl again, but she read my message. Do you remember the green light from Gatsby? It’s nothing like that. It’s like an LED. The one in your hotel room that blinks maybe every five minutes, but you can never sync up with it quite right.
Paul and I walked at an oscillating pace to the metro station by my hostel. I was hoping he’d say something about his apartment or the train ride or something to indicate he would hold me, we’d have sex, share some breakfast and never see each other again but instead he stared off in the opposite direction. I took the opportunity to examine his jaw. It was German in its structure, no arch, all contour, obtuse angles, all the things I love about Austrian slash German men. He had this curly hair, kind of wispy and golden like coffee with some milk and he was wearing Nikes and shorts which looked a bit silly overall. His almost purple Polo shirt gave him the look of a young boy who’d been dressed by his mother. I held out my hand, waiting for him to look back in my direction. When he turned around, he looked confused by my open palm. His finger prodded mine like a surgeon puts on gloves.
It’s been thirty minutes. I’m still watching this man on his computer in the hostel. He’s looking at homes for sale now. We share that interest, I see, but he has a spreadsheet, an indicator of a kind of seriousness I don’t think I will ever be able to appreciate. He’s rich, I assume, because the houses are huge. I wonder what it is he is coding. Maybe a house.
Paul grabs my hand and I pull him towards me. We kiss once, twice and my hands are on his shoulders. He laughs, but he can’t look me in the eyes. We kiss three times, four, and I feel a force, like a moving car, shoving me hard down the stairs, on my ass, on my back, back on my feet, yelling, “I’ll fuck you up!” or some shit like that and Paul has shrunken away, some man is filming and another is calling us faggots. “You gay. I fuck you,” he says and I laugh kind of but I’m pretty drunk so I think about killing him when these ladies show up and say things in German. Paul looks like a scared child and I worry that I scared him more than these strangers ever could have. Before I know it, Paul’s on the train and I’m walking back to my Ikea hostel just up the road and the guys, the cameraman and the shover, are still talking with those ladies who I think wanted to save my life.
I don’t recall the rest of the night. Maybe I made my way into the shared shower and cried. Maybe I fell asleep watching YouTube. Maybe I texted a friend. The point is, somewhere out in the Cloud there’s a video of me making out with this handsome guy Paul and then being shoved down the stairs and called a faggot and really I’ve just got to see this video. I think the guy, the faggot one, asked me for a cigarette after the fight broke up and I think I gave him one because I thought it would be funny. Now I just want my cigarette back and I’m not laughing at all – it’s not funny.
Apparently pigs can’t look up to see the stars. I wonder if it’s the same for two headed calves. Someone’s gotta ask them.
So, yes, I’m naked on the floor of the bathroom and yes I’m shaking and yes I’m throwing up and no I don’t need to call an ambulance and no I don’t need to drink some water. I’m living out my twenties, baby, it’s time for me to make life shorter. The men here, the Viennese, have this Schiele skin, kind of warped with time. One man sends me a photo of his remarkably large dick on Grindr and tells me he wants to fuck me bare. I tell him I don’t do that because I hate being sick, but he says he owns a communications agency, which means nothing to me but that he lives alone, he has nice suits, and maybe I’ll let him fuck me. But I don’t. He blocks me when I tell him he should respect my preferences or whatever and I realize if I’m ever going to marry rich, it’ll have to be someone evil.
There’s this massive advertisement for someone or something on this construction site near my hostel. I can’t tell if it’s Audrey Hepburn or Leila Muraud. Either way, when I’m fucked up drunk on really gross Viennese wine, her eyes make me think of the orange lights in the highway tunnels going north on I-85 probably to go hangout with my friends back in Atlanta who are making lives for themselves, becoming doctors and lawyers and shit and I’m wondering if they make special drugs for boys like me. My sister’s getting married. We’ve talked about this, but I can’t help but size my life up against hers. She’ll buy a house soon. I think I own only a few things I’ve paid for on my own: some furniture, a few articles of clothing, and lots of books and art. If you put it all together, light it on fire, and donate all of my organs to a dying child, something good will surely come of it and I know that to be true. The old man with the big dick, he had Schiele skin. It was loose in some places and tight in others, kind of worn out by the sun (probably lots of nude suntanning or something gay like that), but overall handsome and rough in a very masculine way. So I’m thinking now, what if I look up all the communications agencies in the whole world and find the CEO with the biggest, fattest dick and just let him fuck me until I’m crying?
I jerked off in the hostel bathroom listening to this Dutch guy snore. He’s the guy who I saw coding earlier. He’s been sleeping in the bunk on top of me. He has these large, tanned feet and narrow legs that make my entire body feel like I need him to be pushed deep down inside of me and yes I’ll cry and yes I’ll likely bleed a bit but that’s alright, that’s okay, I think I probably have it coming anyways. He runs a startup helping people get refunds for delayed trains which makes me think right away about when I used to sell booze and vapes and cigarettes to fourteen year olds when I was teenager because I had a fake ID and I looked super beat up and old and shit. It was bad, I know, but I just wanted to meet new people.
I met an actress named Lena. She spoke only a little English and her eyes were absolutely massive. She told me she ruptured her eardrum a few years ago and now she hardly goes to concerts, movies, festivals, anything that could be too loud. She showed me these huge headphones she brings around everywhere and she kept wrapping her denim jacket around her body like it’ll keep her warmer the harder she pulls at it. She said she has auditions coming up, so she can’t eat too much or drink too much or do too much of anything because she has to get into acting school or she won’t have anything going for her. I drank one beer over three hours and we came to the conclusion that philosophy of religion is important, theater is nice, I don’t speak like an American, and that I am really bad at French. And, I met a diplomat too. He told me I should become a businessman and I said I love spending money. He paid for my breakfast slash lunch and when I asked him what a diplomat does he said, “we lie.”
I’ve been listening to rain sounds and staring at trains. They don’t have horns anymore. They just keep moving no matter what. I saw a guy turn into red mist once. Before the train hit him, no one even knew he was there. Now he’s everywhere. I wonder if that counts as a baptism. The priest should hold the babies under just a little bit longer. Scare the audience, give them some idea of the danger of it all. The rain sounds, they go really loud. Sometimes there’s thunder cracks and I feel no fear. I stood outside in the rain the other day until I was shaking from the cold and I cried at the mist and I cried at the train and I cried at the mere thought of taking one step in any direction.