here we are, another makeshift night, another haphazard occasion, drinking something, watching something, talking over everything, and you tell me there is something
and, as a boy, i never quite grasped it, the power to soak up all a day’s fun without losing myself to grief that another sun set after all, sobbing in my grandma’s arms over no more bread for the ducks, and she whispered, oh honey, i know it
in that first year of college, i felt time passing beneath my feet, looked at the world around me and felt it shifting, told my roommate how fast it would all go, the people we loved wouldn’t always be here, and we went to sleep to the sound of one another crying from across the room
thirty-three, and my heart still shatters at the end of every good thing, hug you goodbye and sob on the couch, and grief, to know it’s a shadow left behind by yesterday’s wild joy does not make it easy to hold, but still my palms clasp onto it tightly, grateful for the indigo ache,
promise i am pretty in the right light, just tilt your head westward and squint, do you see it, do you, will you keep your eyes on me another ten seconds
if i’m honest, you’re a promise i broke to myself, and something new entirely, fresh vines stretching over the aching bones of yesterday, blossoming in spite of everything, everything we lost in those rainless days
all the times i got it wrong born from the fear i would get it wrong, frozen in the hopes the sharks would get bored and go, razor cuts against the walls of somebody else’s world, and i promise i’ll get things wrong and i’ll do it by trying
set the heavy down, let the sadness breathe for a weekend, we don’t need to be on those streets, i’d rather wander ’round for the moment
leave it for a monday, watch it sit and wait, ever present, just tip the glass back, go on, shake your ass fast, happy you won’t shatter ’til you’re pausing
promises in pencil, crumpled paper balls for the hallway, tear ’em to confetti, no one sees you ache when you’re laughing louder than the karaoke replay
another shard of glass, swept ’em but you know you missed one somehow, and you know now, deep down, you never need to say you were right, when you’ve already whispered it in your mind
just drink a breath down, let the silence ground you in quiet, some feelings come and go, and the real ones know to stay in their waiting
My phone’s always pulling me back to pictures of my yesterdays. Two years ago, it reminds me, I was a lion-maned man watching the world from his windowsill. Four, much younger-looking and anxiously anticipating a move to the city. Six, madly in love with a man I didn’t yet know was packing his things. It’s a joy, the nostalgia, and it isn’t. Every old grief has kept its sharper edges somehow.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it, keeping all these stories in this knapsack. I am, in some senses, a carrier of all my fallen selves. A keeper of all my failed romances, my broken pathways, my swollen wanting bruises. There are the happy memories, too, but I’ve long since learned that heartbreak and triumph usually inhabit the same room.
When I talk about the times my world has crumbled, my voice verges on breaking. I am fine, I know it, but the hurt still rises up, a tide in waiting. My eyes are saltwater, my hands oars shaking on the rippling surface.
Is this what it costs, I wonder, to be a storyteller? My arms and shoulders ache from the weight of all the tomes I’ve stowed along with me. But, oh, the spectrum of color I feel when I feel someone take a story of mine in their palms and hold it close.
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Walk with me through the city and you’ll discover I’ve got a story on every street corner. I can’t help myself sometimes; I need you to know all the pages I’m carrying around with me. It’s an invitation, on my end, a welcome into a richly curated interior world.
I’m showing you the photos I’ve hung that make this life feel like home.
There’s the bar where my best friend lost his wallet, and the coffeeshop where I had the most ill-advised date. I used to go to this gym, and then to this bodega that used to serve smoothies. I used to run here in the mornings, I tell you, and I hope you realize it means my spirit was stitched back together along these pathways.
I’ll tell you some of them more than once, and some more yet. I’m sharing some meaning, some glimpse, and I’m aching for you to see it alongside me.
\../_
In a few ways, I am still the child that won’t hear ‘no’ without an explanation. I am the boy who hates when it’s time to head home from the park, heartbroken at the blistering grief that all good things end. I am the son who ignores his parents’ counsel that a Band-Aid won’t cure an earache, stretching the sticky edges across the borders of his ear.
And I am the thirteen-year-old who doesn’t know why his heart is picking up from the boy who just passed him in the hallway. An anxious early teen wearing the same three shirts in rotation because his body is comfortable in them. A high school Freshman finding no tears at the loss of his grandfather, until nights later, when everyone else is finally asleep.
I am the twenty-two year old falling in love with his best friend. I am the twenty-five year old shattering his own life and stubbornly finding his feet again. The man at twenty-seven, getting the word ‘BRAVE’ etched across his arm, reminding him to always try and do the brave thing.
All these selves are lost to time, perhaps, or maybe the people we become are cumulative. Maybe I am a walking, breathing village of younger selves. Maybe they coexist, in some way, in a stack or a circle, finding communion with one another and granting each other grace.
here i am, dad, it’s another morning after, i’m here in some world without you in it, the stories scattered in a mess of polaroids across the sun-worn rug
here i am, five or six, my best tee-ball swing, can hear your voice cheering when i look this one over, and there you are with the lobster ice cream, eyes bulging wide, a story you kept right on telling and telling
so many of these are flowers, dad, and the sun through tree branches, and they might not seem like stories, but we both know that they are, the quiet hum of good things, i can just hear you singing
the sun carves a line across the hardwood as it drops, and i miss it, the warmth of knowing you’d never miss anything, and i know you’re not here, and every story we wrote is its own eternity i will carry around with me, and here i am, and here we are.
in case you were wondering, the night i saw you i rode the train home with my shirt on inside-out and the rest of me was inside-out too
if i loved you, i’ll love you forever, which is heavy and happy in the same slap, and i was drunk and sorrowful slumped in an aged orange chair wondered where we put all the love when somebody moves without leaving a forwarding address
a woman beside me wrote a note in her cellphone: i’m not lisa, the importance of being myself, and i thought there are stories everywhere, and sometimes it’s so much to carry, and she looks a bit like a lisa, and
i considered the woman at the coffeeshop, scraping a scratch-off lottery ticket with the child she is paid to take care of, and does she know she is teaching him something about luck, and why does it all make me ache and exhale?
i broke a six-year silence the night i told you i loved you, watched you dance in the rippling glow, felt you like a memory returning, oh, i thought, this, and ‘i love you’ scattered loose from the shelf, the spines of all the other books tingling, knowing
that a story is merely a series of truths from the shadow, couldn’t unlearn you after the second I knew
told you softly and clearly, arm around you in the groggy aftermath, and startled at the sound of your breaking voice
and there we were straddling the before and the after another page gives way and away and away
a child will be born on the day the world ends, and you and i won’t have the wherewithal to cry
so much is cut short, and things go right on beginning, hope an obstinate usher, wishing down to the bone
geraniums in november, anger is sincerity in a funhouse mirror, i am treading the fury, smiling at strangers while i wait for an iced coffee, wounds open to wind, planting flowers, right now?
go right on living, get your kicks, break my ribs and keep building, i’m just angry at the bruises ruining my instagram afternoon, clipped stems in tap water, petals too fucking stupid not to crane toward the light.
watch the news and what’s new, can’t seem to catch my breath before another blow, does a lung have muscle memory? and do mine have any recollection of what it is to feel full? make a note in the margins, future reference, every lifetime carries a final full breath, and i will almost certainly take mine for granted
if you scan these stanzas searching for your face, i have to warn you, i wrote them in search of myself, a map etched in a maze’s murkiest corner, night glow hopes of where i am and where the story might just go
fresh out of blank pages, scribble meaning into old newspaper, fingertips bruised, wanting beyond want to believe i can say something you will carry within you long after i’ve said it, pull back and squint at the letters looped over letters, the blur, wondering what, if anything, stays
sad songs in the lonely glow of a hotel room in some unnamed city, writing in some anonymous voice, aching for meaning, aching for everything, and this heart is a hoarder, filled to the brim with every old, yellowed story
this is my body, break it for you, break it for both of us, til our cups runneth over, we drink from it and know it is good, thou shalt break it again
we were boys in pulpits, once, words of condemnation placed in our hands, scrap of bread soaked in blood, you are broken and will be broken again, run away from your wanting heart
and, o, were we to wander again through ornate wooden doors, shards of stained glass bound together, and tell them what we know, would they hear us, let our people go, breaking voices, thou shalt let our people go
michael king 