The beautiful savage drifting in the back of my mind is nearly forgotten beneath ginger dreams and transgender crushes.
“Everybody knows the boat is sinking” but if I’m not there to witness it… does it capsize and submerge or does it merely fade away?
Kate Bush struggles to reel me back in, but seductive as she is I have far too much to do and explore to immediately surrender to her siren sway.
And yet I want to return and travel through those fictional waters, which slowly swallowed me whole a mere decade before.
Ten years ago and so much has happened but an unexpected blessing of chance has allowed my survival that I may reencounter that phantom vessel; to finish the cycle which began before my awareness & to finally bring my drowning to completion.
Patrick shakes his head; dancing in place as they come for him once again in figment and thought, in memory & dream.
He clacks away at obsidian keys as he struggles to spin pain into art, flesh into word, bravery into poems pressed together in collective battle scars; assorted victories and losses on his way to documented catharsis.
A cascade failure of memories wiped away by drugs struggles toward a surface stain of calculated depth.
Flickering images like tongues of flame shimmer through a train car of strangers… ignited and extinguished in the same breath… I feel their warm glow long after they are nothing but smoke and ash.
Cold rain sparkle pricks me awake as I stumble through the mist into another dreaming space of bright chill and a remembering of self.
Memories are dreams of a time that no longer exists.
We were all dead years ago and my struggling ghost is nothing so rare or sacred as that fumbling child faggot who plateaued in the momentary recognition of shared desire.
In July he’s beautiful… beyond what I’d known, beckoning behind me, breathlessly below me, and he’s blatantly blessed my insides; benevolently and becomingly.
Less than 2 weeks ago and he was harrowing… having hazed our harmonation when he hollered he’d rather have HIV than herpes simplex.
The lilting listing of letters STOPS as I’m overwhelmed to trembling at hearing the sentence uttered within my lifetime, let alone with such a haunting sense of longing.
Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
I want to scream. Want to shake him. Want to slap him for such a blasphemous confession.
But I hold him close as I shiver and he whispers about pills and stigma, outbreaks and misconceptions, the men (plural) who’ve rejected him, and the men (plural) who’ve accepted him since his November 2017 infection.
His illness merely scares me but his promiscuity terrifies me; I am nothing if not a child of the AIDS pandemic.
He was amazing when he was inside of me back in July. I even dreamed of a life spent together. The three of us, I mean.
But he wanted someone all his own and so he never stopped looking: in Seattle, Canada, Hawaii or New York City.
He tells me that he was in my place years before and our symmetry stuns me all the more.
I pull him on top of me, my legs wrapped around him, as I whisper in his ear about our blissful summer night and how I thought I’d scared him away with my longing for a life together.
He silences my tears with his own silent weeping; his voice shattering into a broken child’s quivering as he tells me that I’m not to blame; that it was he who frightened himself away.
Fear defines his every action; tinges the edges of every decision… I hear it in his voice and I know that he speaks the truth.
There is no pre-exposure prophylaxis to be taken for this unease.
He leaves us, naming us blameless and yet there is blood on my hands…
For although we remain in the land of the uninfected, none of us could ever be classified as clean.
Waking up without Aaron, empty bedroom with flashbacks of desperately frenzied fucking just hours before… I’m always reminded of my single sexual experience with Jeff in his Grandfather’s basement.
Waking alone then… I had been devastated.
What did he think and feel as he disentangled himself from my sleeping naked freshly fucked form?
Did he smile? Did he regret? Was he afraid of my morning after reaction?
I’ve never asked these questions before.
Did he snuggle against me as his cum simmered inside me?
Did he kiss me goodbye?
These questions have never haunted me as they do today.
“mad men who remember” are lonely.
Did he dress in the basement? Did he shower? How many other men had he left in this manner? Who were they? Did they hear about me? If so, were they jealous? Or maybe excited? How many others were there after me?
I have no way of knowing.
My only bridge to that knowledge is tenuous at best.
“Don’t fall in the river!”
At least my mad man remembers something.
I doubt he could answer my questions…
Perhaps we share that bed in dream fragments that he’s unable to decipher?
Or maybe he remembers everything and keeps it to himself; thinking it a dream and terrified that I won’t remember?
He loved me. I know that much.
He was beautiful and he wanted me.
That sort of makes it bearable, doesn’t it?
Those unendurable unanswered questions are made beautiful by what we were together and what we chose to do with the time that we had.
This theory is the only answer that I have.
Written by Jason Wright January 10, 2018
Much of this was scribbled in a notebook on a train, on April 27, 2017. I always meant to return to this notebook and complete what I’d haphazardly written there. I didn’t expect it would take nearly a year to do so, but here we are.
For Jeff, who casted a long shadow, and for Aaron – my partner in all things.
He whimpers and I wonder if I ever dreaded such desire so much or so unconvincingly, but then as waves of shimmering memory crash down upon us I know that I was once as fearful and thirsty as this unsteady stripling cursed by his impetuous prick.
The tremble in his voice tells me everything.
How many times have I heard that quivering?
Enough to know what will happen next.
Enough to know that he’ll kiss me for the first time before we leave this place and that his world will never be the same, although others may never know.
I wonder if he’ll be clumsy, fearfully failing and requiring my lessons?
I’ve never been a very good teacher.
But I needn’t have worried. His inaugural kiss is all skillful struggle & instinct; like he’s remembering a previously forgotten lyric which he sings into me, the movement resonating with my own dimly recalled early fumblings – old ghosts coming to light and making experienced virgins of us both.
Part II:
Years unfurl before us and we continue to cross paths, if not swords… never quite friends, but never enemies either.
We are could-have-been-lovers who never really liked one another… or maybe I want him desperately but have never admitted it to him, never admitted it to myself, and I protect this secret with a feigned indifference.
Perhaps he wanted me too once, but the injurious nature of his initiation was too overwhelming; too persistently all knowing, causing him to deny any self identified failing as commonplace as an honest, inexhaustible, uncontrollable lust.
The night I find him in the cemetery with a new student he actually drags the boy over to me to tell me that Ian is dead.
He kisses the boy goodbye, all casual and masterful now before he tags along with tears captured in his long black lashes.
When he reaches for my hand, I allow this silent sign language apology… as we stumble through a midnight city that once witnessed our virginal beginnings.
And as the sun threatens to wake us from our surreal remembering, he pulls me to him with eyes closed… desperate to feel the familiar, if shockingly innocent touch of my skin on his, rather than the aching emptiness our former brother once inhabited.
I don’t want this, I think, this isn’t how I’ve wanted him at all… yet I surrender to him like the tide pulled unfailingly by the moon and his sway.
A killing kindness that murders us both.
Part III:
16 years and he doesn’t recognize me on the underground.
I can’t blame him; I actually don’t recognize myself and I lack the reflection of his distant, unchanging gaze.
I watch him watching others but feel no need to illuminate him as I flow out and beyond him… Like I’m someone who never drowned in those icy depths.
I pretend and become a formerly drunken sailor, now sober, awake, and ignorant of all that took place that long night before, save a few vague images and the phantom bruising smudge of a lingering question, raised by the harshest of realities.
We once lost and found ourselves within each other… within the loss of innocence and the commingling of grief, but now, here in this place beneath a sea of inspiring destruction, what we discovered in that stilted, tilted, ordinary wonderland has been forgotten.
We drowned in the flood of all that came after, and though we may find ourselves again (and again) in the eyes of flaming strangers, the fire which burned within us has been lost forever, save in dreams which melt away every day as we wake.
