michael king

The downside to being an optimist is that I generally have to step outside to discover it’s raining, and, this morning, I’m fresh out of seconds. Grimacing, I survey the scene and press on. Getting all pissed off won’t make the sun come out, I coax myself, and I’m right: I get pissed, and the rain presides.

New York rain is misty and eternal, falling gently enough that I always believe I might make it a few blocks without getting too wet. By Sixth Avenue, my hair has surrendered, streams of water dancing their way down my forehead. I walk faster, dodge umbrellas and judgmental glances, turn my music up.

I catch my reflection and realize I make the exact same rain face as my mom. I think of home and feel every inch of the eight hundred miles between us.

Finally, I arrive. My jacket is soaked through, my hands are frozen, and the receptionist looks up. “Oh my God,” she says, eyes wide.

“Yeah,” I shrug, “I think it’s about to start raining.”

–

By the time I make it back home, my clothes are soaked through a second time, and I am decidedly done with the day. I peel off my jacket, hanging it on a hook, toss my damp socks into the hamper, pull on a hoodie and shorts, and frown at my apartment.

I am one man, living on his own, but I will dirty every single dish in my home before I decide to do the dishes. As of now, they all gape at me from the living room, tucked beside the couch, clustered near the TV, a tiny obstacle course of glasses and forks and bowls. With a dramatic sigh, I start taking laps between the living room and kitchen sink.

Warm water and suds have the opposite effect of the rain on my skin, and soon I am energized. I dry the dishes and put them back in the cabinets, wander back in the living room and gather up a week’s worth of discarded socks, belts, T-shirts. I wipe out the bathroom sink, take the trash, sweep the floor, fold up my blankets.

I finish, my world rearranged in a matter of an hour or so, and take it all in for a moment: Why is it I ever let myself believe the mess is too sprawling to be unmade?

–

I’m on my own, but I’m feeling social, and my phone is the evidence. On Twitter, I’ve made a friend in D.C. who says he’ll show me around when I visit. I’m joking with my sister on Snapchat about my lunch (PB&J and broccoli, she says, is a gross meal.)

I’m playing a video game, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and I’m strategizing my way through this story’s final battle. “Good job, Caspar,” I say out loud to a character who managed to dodge a lethal hit. He does it again fifteen seconds later and punches the attacker right off her pegasus. “Coming through like a boss!”

I finish, watch with wide eyes a cutscene of Edelgard and Byleth delivering a final blow to the dragon, and put the Switch to sleep. I stand up, glance back, and discover it’s stopped raining after all.

Embarking outside, gym bag slung over my shoulder, my mind is busy with news headlines: liars aren’t being held accountable, courts are gathered to decide whether queer people are actually people. I open my phone, post to Facebook, post to Twitter. The rain might have subsided, but I’m still trying to push some light back into the world.

Death by a Thousand Cuts plays through my headphones, and I’m convinced Taylor Swift has the blueprint to my heart. Hopefulness, sorrow stretching deep down to the bone, sadness lingering long after the mind has deemed it time to move on.

It plays through one and a half times by the time I arrive.

–

I get home, grab my coffee cup and computer, and make my way back to the Starbucks across the street. The barista recognizes me, takes my cup and shakes off my payment, and I smile. This big, bad city isn’t so cold after all.

For months, I haven’t been sure what to write. I’ve got twenty-five drafts, beginnings of things I’m trying to say, but something has blocked the pipes. What is it, I wonder, I’m trying to say? I type and type and type, and I’m not sure I’ve got a clue what I mean.

But I’m living it, this story, and I need to stay practiced in telling it truthfully. These are days of wild hope, indeed, but also of despair and rainfall and stubborn steps ahead. Lately, I’m at a loss for exactly what mountain it is I’m hoping to climb.

I don’t know, but I know one day I’ll want to remember the way the world looked here, now, amidst the mundane miracle.

In no particular order, an incomplete list of the bad habits I’ve discovered:

• lugging warm laundry back to my apartment, setting the hamper to the floor boards, and never quite getting around to putting the clothes away
• during temporary stays, identifying a ‘space’ for my things, usually in the living room, and casually expanding it throughout my stay
• buying produce –– peppers, strawberries, potatoes –– and failing to eat it before it withers
• balking at the idea of spending thirty dollars on something useful while casually dropping thirty-five on dinner and drinks
• telling every story that pops into my mind, neurons firing as I’m listening, and feeling certain, each time, it’s right to do
• granting myself permission to disappear on rainy days
• revisiting the scars in my story, wresting that tissue apart, mining old wounds for meaning
• remembering the people who left, in vibrant detail
• bargaining with my body through healing processes –– dancing on sore ankles, running with a scratchy throat and feverish forehead
• practicing the same impatience when it’s my spirit that needs healing
• getting so swept up in passion for my perspective that I forget to listen
• building a case against the people who’ve hurt me, evidence with razor-sharp edges
• building a case for myself, keeping tally sheets of the times my love has borne fruit, as though this will undo the other tally sheet I can’t stop keeping, the scars I’ve inflicted in my recklessness
• believing I will keep myself safe from pain by negotiating myself down from the things I really want
• putting the dishes off until the sink is full and daunting
• insisting on pushing the conversation into territory that interests me –– what’s heavy, what’s hurting, burning hope, hollow grief, searing pain
• falling in love with the idea of somebody and pitting their reality against their potential
• deciding almost any setback is cause to order Chinese food, wrap up in blankets, and watch a movie
• convincing myself I am impossible to know
• running my hardest for people who demand the chase
• leaving cabinets and closet doors wide open, their contents peering out blankly
• watering plants only once they’ve begun to droop
• tabling hard decisions until the last possible moment
• spending the first thirty minutes of my day in bed, scrolling through my phone, watching minutes dissolve

Before I begin, I want to share a few notes on ghosts. I’ve written them, each of them, down on scrap pieces of paper, stray blank pages in cluttered notebooks, penmanship a messy sprawl. Rarely does inspiration come in the moments I’m searching for it, and lessons have never arrived in the packaging I asked for.

Ghosts are, first and foremost, indifferent to your thoughts on their existence. They interact with us all, the open radicals and stalwart rationalists alike, haunt our hallways, watch us study our faces in the mirror.

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if you were going to leave,
you could have had the decency
not to wear that cologne, concentrated
there where your neck meets
your shoulder, where i’d bury
my face and rest

so that today, all these
hundred miles away and
thousand days later, i
wouldn’t brush by a stranger
wearing it too, and
remember it, you, the way
you arrived like a hurricane
and disappeared just as
loudly

lately, i’ve been
hovering my palms
over an open flame,
how familiar a feeling,
i’d forgotten, in the
binding and tearing of
stitches,
what a thrill it
is to burn.

a man was mauled
by the lion he’d been
keeping as a pet
in his backyard, my
mother said, sighing at
the headline he
might have seen coming

and i was wordless, tangled
again in my yesterdays, nothing
more human, after all, than
searching for love by
ushering in the reckless wild

A letter to me at twenty years old. Before I tell you anything, let me tell you what I remember: It’s the summer of 2009, and you’re a few weeks away from moving back to Ball State for Sophomore year. Your first year there brought you its fair share of breakthroughs –– a runner was born, shedding weight and few old notions about being stuck, and you’ve only just begun etching a story that feels like your own. You savor these days, home in Brazil, Indiana. Running childhood roads, laughing with family, jumping into Grandma’s swimming pool.

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