Hello. I hope you are all doing well. I cannot believe it is already the middle of December. It feels like February, 2021.
I have been in New York visiting my brother. He lives with a roommate in Bushwick who I am not allowed to talk to, so I spend the mornings here dodging this stranger’s gaze, timing my trips to the bathroom to counter those of his roommate.
I have been writing papers. It is final exams season. That means I spend six to eight hours a day typing nonsense into my laptop, hoping my professors can find something of substance within the run on sentences. I have been writing about the Apostle Paul and this one transgender Jewish noise musician. I am looking for some cohesion in all of this, some thread to pull me all together. Right now, it feels like the thread is pulling me apart, like the undone thread of that one sweater you love.
My heart is still broken. It is strange, being heartbroken in digital. You would think by now I would be used to it. These same patterns of excitement, connection, disconnection, and heartbreak, you would think I would grow calluses. For a week I felt numb and for a week I felt anger and for a week I felt loss. My friends say I am mourning the loss of the person I had created in my head. I tell them that I am just upset he never read my last message.
He told me “wish you happiness but goodbye.” He didn’t give me the privilege of a pronoun, just “wish you happiness but goodbye.” Fair enough. This is what happens when I allow myself to fantasize, my mind collects these images, these little fake memories, and builds a whole tower, an edifice of trust in someone or something that doesn’t exist. This is how I know I have surely lost my mind. It is somewhere floating down a river in North Carolina, the seventh most polluted river in the world. Maybe it has washed up at one of those cattle farms or military bases which dominate the coast of that river. Maybe it’s at my old summer camp. The one with the sailboats, dozens of them, all lined up on the riverbed. The dock jutting out one hundred feet into the water, orange buoys bobbing in arrays of five or six in a half mile radius surrounding the dock. Maybe it is there.
I used to fall in love with my camp counselors. Dad sent me to a sailing camp for the first time when I was eleven. It was the same camp he attended every summer as a child. I had just hit puberty, translucent hairs sprouting out of my underarms, crotch, and stomach. I was a freak. The other boys only had hair on their heads. They never sweat like I sweat. Their clothes fit loose around their arms, no definition to be found in their biceps, no ripples of premature muscle in their abdomens. My torso was large, my shoulders wide, and my hair a mess. I always had curly hair, but I didn’t know it until high school. Before then, I would try everything to make my hair straight, normal. I wanted it to fall on my forehead how the other boys’ hair fell. I wanted it to cover my hairline which sloped backwards toward my crown on the sides like the letter “m”. I wanted my underarm hair to disappear. At least for a few more years. I wanted my penis to be large, but hairless. I wanted my stomach to disappear, to see straight down to my crotch without the interruption of my baby fat. I was somewhere between child and teenager, embodying all of the worst elements of both states of being.
It seemed to me my camp counselors were men. Real men. In reality, these boys were only about sixteen. But to my eleven year old self, these boys were men and I wanted to be just like them. At night, after “Taps” had played on the loudspeaker and all of the lights had been shut off, I would hear these “men” chatting outside of the cabin. They would sit on wooden rocking chairs, swat mosquitoes, and talk for hours and hours about counselors from the girls camp down the river. They described their bodies in such vivid detail. They would start with the hair, luscious, billowing, springy curls, tucked behind her ears, and gradually move to her figure, curvy, skinny, boobs so big you just want to grab them, plump lips, thick thighs, thin waists for grabbing. Eventually they would speak poems, anatomical lyrics that would structure the way my eleven year old brain understood the female form.
It was so warm down there. She was already wet by the time my hand was in her pants. It was just so warm, it was crazy. There was hardly any hair at all, just like this weird, wet warm thing. She guided my hand into her like whatever. It was crazy, like some kind of movie I swear. She kissed my neck and she was breathing so heavy. I was pressed up against her like a surfboard, you know? I was rock hard, I mean really. My dick was like freaking out. I was just trying not to cum. That was the hardest part. Before I knew it she was kissing my chest and then my stomach and then my crotch, right above my dick. She pulled at my shorts and I was freaking out like in a good way though. My shorts were off and all I could think about was how I didn’t want to cum right away. Girls don’t like that, you know. Her tongue was doing crazy things on my dick. The feeling was unreal. Her mouth around me like that. It was so warm. She sucked the whole thing. I came in like ten seconds and she swallowed it all. I don’t even remember her name.
The boys would pass these accounts back and forth like a cigarette. Each story would increase in detail, in eroticism, and in vulgarity as the night went on. One time, one of the boys went to the bathroom to go jerk off because the story had him turned on so much. I sat by the window in the darkness taking mental notes, recording details of these fantasies, trying to figure out what it meant to be a boy who likes girls.
Some nights I would close my eyes and try to imagine the scenarios they depicted in such poetic detail. My hand would make its way to my own penis and before I knew it I had ruined my sheets and I was crying. There was another gay boy in my cabin the second year. His name was Mark. He was from Maryland or New York, Jewish, and from money. He sat with his legs crossed when the other boys leaned back on their arms with their feet shot out. He read books about pretty English women and French boarding schools while the other boys stole glances at vulgar comics in Mad Magazine and read books about spies and soldiers. I was somewhere between the two, reading the editions of Archie comics my mom would ship to me in “care packages”. Every day after lunch we had a rest period when us campers were expected to read or perform some other silent activity as the counselors rested or did some kind of work outside, fixing boats or cleaning jammed guns. I remember during one of those rest periods, Mark had finished his book about an English woman who cheated on her husband or something like that and he asked if I had anything for him to read. His bed was above mine. I leaned down, my back sloping over the side of my bed, and looked under the bunk to see if I could find one of the Archie comics my mom had sent. I pulled one out and right before I handed it to Mark I noticed the cover page had been yellowed with my semen. At this point in adolescence I was ejaculating several times a day without any regard for time or place. It hadn’t been an issue up to this point as I had always done it in the dead of night, the sounds of my efforts masked by the crickets, breeze, snores, and the constant hum of campers’ electric fans. Mark had grabbed the comic book before I could pull it away and with a brisk “thanks”, the comic was his.
We never kissed. We never really even talked after that. He kept the comic book and we both kept our secret. I came home a month later tanned by the sun and confused by the world I was awkwardly growing into. It was that summer when I started to look everyone in the eyes. It was that summer when I started to look for something in everyone. That longing, it never went away.
I remember when we kissed outside. It was raining and we were drunk. We were always drunk and it was always raining. I loved you that way. We made out and I could taste blood. Your chapped lips were breaking, but I didn’t mind. I would take whatever I could get. I invited you over to my apartment. You said you had a class the next day. I asked what time and you said ten in the morning. I should have known then that it was over. I made my way home, alone, but lost in fantasies. I sat in bed, squinting at my phone screen, reading and re-reading messages I had sent you that night.
It was the night of my show. A few friends and I had performed some rock songs to an audience of at least one hundred drunk college students. The crowd was electric and the music was so loud and my voice quivered when I saw you. You were beaming at me, your eyes shining in the pink and blue bar lights. My friends commented that you were looking at me with pride and love and wonder. I could see it too. I remember shouting your name into the microphone, thanking you and only you for being there. We danced that night. Some girl stole my beer and tried to steal yours too. You laughed and danced how an old man dances, your long limbs shooting off into various directions with seemingly no respect for the beat. We fought to pay for the beers. I think you won. We spent an hour dancing to whatever music was played. The bar was almost empty by the time we agreed to leave. We walked a few blocks and sat in fluorescence. Of course it was raining. We were drunk and your eyes were so bright and so tired. I put my hand on your knee and you laughed. You ate your food in record time like it was going to disappear at any moment. I studied your eyes, your lips, your nose, your hair, your ears, your legs, your arms, your hands, trying to find some pattern to memorize to keep you forever. If I could just reduce you to something I could understand, some string of numbers, some palette of colors, some collection of images, of names, body parts, moments, words.
I knew you would leave. That was always part of the deal. I just didn’t expect it to be in digital.
The other night I ran on the treadmill at the gym in my high rise. Seventeen stories up, I could see straight across into an array of windows, strangers’ bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, and bathrooms. Even with my poor vision, my one eye, I was able to make out some movement in one of the windows on the left side of the building. I saw two people moving, first only subtly. Their motions became more dramatic, their silhouettes disrupting their LED lights with increasing velocity, flashes of light, pink, purple, blue, surrounding their flailing bodies. From afar, all sex looks like violence.
Have you ever seen someone perform CPR? Mouth to mouth? That there is love. When do smoke signals become the clouds in the sky? When do sparks become the stars? Recently, I heard a story about a man who had nothing wrong with him. He was working in a forest reducing trees to lumber. The day was normal, cold, and after hours of cutting down trees, his coworkers took a break for lunch. As soon as they turned their backs to him, this man sprinted as fast as he could into the woods. A few of his coworkers ran after him, but he had a sizable head start. They said they saw him fall off a small cliff, land on his feet, and keep running. They said he never looked back. No one ever saw the man again. His wife, his kids, his parents, his coworkers all swore he had never expressed any discomfort, any depression, any fear.
It will be Christmas soon. It’s already winter.