Letting go in watercolor, my god, the lovely stains, indigo where the skin broke, cranberry dropped and bled in the sparkling bath, this was our song and we shouted it ’til our throats burned, burgundy, shut your eyes and you’ll swear you still hear it.
What if I plant marigolds, tuck them between blankets of soil to witness the miracle of green, what if I rearrange the living room without a television, wrestle the couches and chairs against the wood grain until everything is a circle again, what if I embraced starting over like I know it will be the one thing old people wish for, ancient sighs, reminiscing for the eggshell sheen of a blank page?
Here, now, petals pressed into all those yesterdays, we are lovely, spectacular things, reveling in everything and everywhere, play it again, my voice cannot break to this chorus.
The move to Pittsburgh loomed large. For weeks, I chewed my thumbnail and surveyed my apartment, wondering when I’d gotten so much stuff. I stepped out the front door and studied the line of cars, bumper to bumper, at the curb, wondering how I’d ever manage to park a U-Haul. What to do with my couch? How to guarantee the return of my deposit? My orange tabby cat stretched himself asleep across my chest, and I frenzied over whether he’d handle the transition all right. I woke up to my lover and wondered how I’d stomach mornings without him, without New York, without the pigeons dutifully surveilling the sidewalk below.
The day arrived, and step by step, we delivered the baby. We unlocked a U-Haul in Jamaica, Queens, found a spot for it right outside, and the great shifting of items began. August meowed with increasing concern as his world disappeared from the apartment. On the last trip, we left our keys on the sill and took him out the door with us. Gradually, the scenery shifted from urban sprawl to the sun-soaked greenery. We arrived to Pittsburgh, parking on a slope, and moved everything to the sidewalk. Then, somehow, we took it all upstairs.
The first morning, I woke Josh so he could bear witness to my crying. I would miss New York, would miss him and our life; the absence of logistics, its problems to untangle and solve, finally permitted all the leaving to take the stage. For a moment, my world spun, but his hand steadied mine. I surrendered to some well-earned sleep.
The next morning, we grabbed coffee at the neighborhood YINZ and then set about returning the U-Haul. We piloted the loud and unwieldy thing through Pittsburgh, its infinite slopes and swerves. We dropped it at the North Shore and began the long walk back, spotting a German neighborhood and a park, quaint and rolling and green. We crossed a yellow bridge into the Strip District, grabbed a bite, and walked on home.
The sun abided, golden. You have made a home before. You will make a home again.
–
So, how’s Pittsburgh?
The question has been a bit of a constant. For months, I’ve been figuring out how to ‘story’ this place for folks who haven’t experienced it firsthand. For New Yorkers, I came to describe it as ‘a lovely exhale,’ a place where starting the night at midnight is a rarity and a single meal rarely costs $60. For folks back in Indiana, I highlighted its Midwestern sensibilities, its stunning topography, and the striking sincerity of its people.
With a year in Pittsburgh under my belt, I’ve come to understand it through a series of images: Yellow bridges, sidewalks crowded for Pride, for a Pirates game, for Fourth of July fireworks; a tunnel through a mountain that delivers you into the heart of downtown; black-and-yellow sports memorabilia along the Strip, where lines form to get La Prima coffee and the best cannolis I’ve ever had; the gobblerito, a Thanksgiving-themed burrito (and true semi-annual event) at local chain Mad Mex; the dancefloor at Lucky’s, a gay bar that must be experienced to be understood; the passing of a Thanksgiving turkey onto the fire escape, where my roommate delivers it to our neighbors for sharing; an abundance of rivers and mountains and the joy of using these as a setting for community on a Saturday.
I love the feeling of being on a plane landing in a place I’ve come to know as home. Pittsburgh has, to its credit, always met my return with gentle weather and pristine skies. The airport is comically far from the city, but my intuition has come to estimate well how many pages I can read on the PRT bus, immersed in another world as it carves its way through neighborhoods and shopping malls.
Of course, what I will remember most about the Pittsburgh year are the people. I will remember the friends who welcomed me in, wide eyes and open hearts, who belted with me on the dance floor in West Virginia and run with me through the moon-kissed sidewalks of a Pittsburgh Saturday. I could populate a paragraph with only first names and, Yinzers, I promise you would find yours. Nobody here has been too busy to know me or care.
I will miss everyone.
–
Almost a year, to the day, I will be leaving Pittsburgh. Josh and I found an apartment in Astoria, a move that makes sense for us, for him, for me. It dawned on me, this week, that my cat hasn’t been outside of this apartment building since the day we brought him into it. Soon, there will be another U-Haul, another strenuous thousand trips up and down, boxes arranged and stacked. Together, we return to make a life in a neighborhood we already love, and I know much of it will feel like an exhale, an inspiration, a light turned on.
But there is so much I will miss about the Pittsburgh year. To know a place as home is to miss it when you’re gone, and Pittsburgh has become a home. Already, I am braced for nostalgia for my neighborhood baristas and their banter, for the Saturday Farmer’s Market and its gyro stand, for the breweries I have come to love best.
Before this year, I had only either lived on my own or with a lover. I wondered, at times, if I’d missed the opportunity to live with a best friend, the Joey to my Chandler. Over the past year, I’ve had the honor of making home with one of my best friends, a thunderclap of a man who keeps a rusty tambourine in the back of his shower. Over twelve months, I’ve basked in the unmistakable ambiance of his joie de vivre, playing nodding sidekick to his afternoon making his mom’s sauce and meatballs in a sundress and Lucille Ball wig. His cigarette smoke lingers on the towel hanging from my bedroom door, and my cat has learned to adore the crunch of his uncooked spaghetti. Of course, Ross and I will continue the love affair that is our friendship, a connection we’ve nurtured since before COVID-19 rocked our worlds apart, but I will treasure these pages. To know him is a gift, and to love him is an honor.
Time, as always, ushers the turn of the page, but – for now – my thumb halts it in place. I will spend the next few days, the final remnants of the Pittsburgh Year, reading over golden beer and climbing (always climbing) the sprawling, infinite hills.
There is a rhythm to the killing of lantern flies, let me teach you: simply shift your step so the winged thing rests along your concrete path, and listen not for its tiny breaths as your shadow bathes it, when it flees, marvel not at the lustrous red of its futile, final flight, hesitate not to step where it lands, too tired to run without resting, ponder not whether time or God or the universe will witness your own crushing this way.
Eternity is a pretty notion, a promise sung, in a round, over the weeping of orphans, and oh, I yearn to believe it, I long for the cinema of abundant reunion, love as the circle to conquer time’s lines, but lovely ideas are flower petals pressed into the open wound, I crack the texts, practice the forbidden magic of bringing back mothers, and my mouth chokes on carnations, roses, baby’s breath.
Every mother is a sunflower, stretching her face to the sky in the unkept edge of an abandoned lot, lovely, she, and remarkable, her reach, the way everyone will insist they see her silhouette in the sunsets after, and through the indigo night, she becomes another chorus sung, a promise, among the huddled remainder.
On the street, in a crowd, I carve on through like a surgeon, my hand behind me, open in the knowing wait, we make our way, make our day, some stretch of green, some small shared delight, our secret, kiss you in blue raspberries, you had to be there, someone says, the way eyes roll in the unfettered sincerity of cinema, and I shrug, we were.
All my love stories turned out to be war stories, let the boys graffiti their names in bruises across my collarbone, love so visceral in its violences, planted my feet in the hurricanes and fought like Hell to bloom, sang of some world without turbulence, of the grisly majesty of trying to build alongside knuckles raised to smash and run free, indigo sonnet to the man they left, breathless in the crushed-violet after.
But you, my enthusiast, my stretch of meadow in some bustling cityscape, flowers on the table, for a Sunday, for the sake of magenta, you steady my steps, whisper amidst the whip of winds, offer shelter in lieu of some test, oh, I exhale, without thinking, each time you enter the frame, love you, uncomplicated, sturdy, the way I love the sun as it kisses my face just another good morning.
Here and now we are children, of mice and monorails, eyes wide at the castle gates, first sighting this street from my father’s shoulders, I walk you to Tomorrowland to so many stories of Yesterday, and hurt is a wave rinsing over, consider the way Grandma loved It’s a Small World, study all the drowned pennies and pretend one was ours, time nothing but a skein of silk billowing on, and here lands the overlap, I am a boy chaperoned by a man learned in the dual carrying of griefs and hopes, and salt carves rivers down my jaw.
We press our palms into place and imbue it with magic, the scrape of a city in the dusk of my twenties, the moonlit beach where a porn star confessed to me he feels his grandfather standing naked amongst the waves, the park of artifice, the orange-countered diner with the remarkable eggs, this is our place, we insist, stamp our names in ink we were promised is permanent, but, hush, we know better, say nothing.
In the winter, my bitter search for words to give my father at the golden retriever who time crumpled in his hands, only to tell him I know dogs don’t live forever, but I hoped he would, and the record scratched, looping back for mothers and summers and every other remarkable, impermanent magic.
Life’s half the battle, a whisper from the walls, I bask alongside time and all its many iterations, reassuring, isn’t it, the way the truth will always echo, squeeze my eyes shut and there I am at all the endings –
I am the heaving chest on a yoga mat, roaring weakly into the empty apartment, fresh believer that my world is flat, I claw at the darkness and wail for help, pity like a blueberry pressed into eggshell linen for the man I hear yelling his name, and
I am a beer, sun-drenched on a patio among the red bricks of a city we share in name only, reading the news, from my Dad, swallowing tears and losing the arm-wrestle to disbelief, every mom should live forever, I yearn to thrash and break, tear the sky like an old towel, demand better, demand more.
My sister rolls her eyes, but I insist that she promise – if we ever fight, leave wounds unanswered, and I am crushed by the piano, dangling ever overhead – she will remember, with more pages, we’d have closed the braid, finished the melody, brought those chords right on home, there’s always more, always.
A lover leaves bruises and eleven years later calls to ask what it all meant, the turntable continues, needle waiting, but we remember the way it goes, there’s more story, always, more to be said, yelled, whispered, and – sometimes – sifted from the stillness of the echoes.
Well, me oh my, I borrow my days like some well-loved guitar, the acoustic strum and how it rescues the room, tie a new string for every year, all its glories and scars, close my eyes and hum, lips pressed in a smile, or a secret, every chorus brings me closer to myself –
I line up my polaroids, try to trace the threads of time, pause to listen, does melancholy sing somewhere in the eaves of my being? But, ah, I shrug and grin, musing at the idea of all these selves sharing a room, how glad they’d all be to hold, in their palms, the promise of so much becoming, a one-man relay, I am a thousand poems in a constant color, golden orange and spilling warmly into the room.
Nostalgia is a papercut until we learn to visit those pages without trying to stay, I love those yesterdays, but, my God, the sun just broke through before the rain even knew to stop, and my fingertips will devote hours trying to write this moment into some slapdash permanence, already gone and giving way, flight and the lovely return.
Strange, the way memory rakes across my sands, a moon has its mysticisms, rolls right in then slips away, and there you are on my shore, visceral, vivid, I –
Can’t quite explain my nostalgia for those days, your prep cook chapter in Chinatown, guess I remembered to forget it ’til now, shelling clams, shoestring wrapped around the cover of your knife in your bag, on some train, the sweat on your brow, and TV on my couch, the scratching of legs, make a joke and then turn to find you sleeping.
Tell you the truth, I have kept my mind on a short leash, never to dwell among rose petals, gentle mornings, the very moments, tender, hopeful, that kept me treading water in your orbit, easier to document the lessons spelled in scar tissue, but time is saltwater, eroding the sharp edges and, by benefit of the blur, I weigh in my hands the hope you take pride in those days, the spark of magic, your hands to the plate.
When a wave departs, the shells lay bare, jagged mosaic; among them, the living rise to tunnel from view, safe from the seagulls and the hands of children, reckless and wild, ’til the hour grows late or game goes idle, our nod to carry our things on home.
Gay boy, you are beautiful, right here in the gold-sheen wash, this very moment, you break into laughter and what an honor, seeing you, here, all those years you lived like a ship in a bottle, held your breath then squeezed your way through that narrow neck, heartbeat in your throat as you stammered the truth, just to feel what it is to breathe the honest air, and what a gift, what a love letter –
By the pool, your fingertips fidget at your shirtline, eyes scan the scene for smoke to signal danger, just another place you don’t belong, but, in silence, you breathe like a chorus rehearsed, and then you pull free, only this way can your shoulders know sun, let freedom rinse, we are here and in our palms we carry beauty we won’t quite see until time slows our bodies, right this minute, prescient, urgent, lovely, ours, you are beautiful, gay boy, you.
Please don’t forget to be a little in love with everything surrounding you this evening, here for now and only that, weep for the orange tabby who nests and revels toward your heartbeat, ribcaged, but never reveals the secrets of its singing, paws pressed, tender, into flesh, sheathing the sharp, instinctual wild for this lamplight nap.
You are thirty-six, cradling three dozen reasons not to trust the luster of just any literary notion, but go on, make poetry of the mundane miracle of life and all its unlikelihoods, can you believe we get to existtogether, you lift your glass at an Applebee’s, laughter as everybody’s chaser.
One day, unknowing, you will go on your final run, that familiar rise and rhythm and thunderous bloodstream, so loop, twist those shoestrings like a ritual, a prayer, a dance – the Earth steadily spun ‘neath the needle of your devoted watch, let the infatuation hold you, sold, quiet embarrassment of riches, everywhere, the cinema pales in its desperation to capture, run your hands over everything, everything right this second.
michael king 