The city is hard you don’t look like yourself but my heart is so soft I see glimmers of you count my bruises in the mirror there you are, there you are crying in shaky breaths once you’ve gone your laughter is home feel my tears freeze en route to the bar
If I had tasted even a glimpse of the sting how can a man hold all the stars in the sky would I have made a home in these pages and crumple inward like this packed up a life, determined and ready, I curse the concrete for scraping so coldly and, fuck, the rush of vibrant everything wish for everyone I’ve loved to be sheltered even the deepest of cuts feel, somehow, novel
We story the setting, rather than vice versa, for a few hours, you and I press pause where else could anyone want trading stories and pop-tab cans this life is a wild ride, we shriek and we thrill tuck you in beneath the violet galaxy and, if we’re crying, nobody gives much notice you whisper, aw, look at the stars, arms and legs akimbo as we sweep through the sky.
My resting heart rate is 51, which means my heart moves slower than the second hand ticking against a concrete wall, and maybe this is why time seems to heal me slower, always catching my breath as I catch up to the page
Those sunflowers die in a vase on the counter, yellow petals cast as yesterday’s hopes, because giving flowers is an act of surrender – to the idea that nothing lasts, to the choice to be right here now
I pride myself on how smoothly I can pack up a life, T-shirts rolled in suitcases, the hotel room already forgetting my warmth, and I do get tired of going, I do yearn to find home outside the confines of my body, but I am, in fact, home here, and wherever I wander, home.
How’ve you been, someone asks, how do I talk about healing, want to say it’s been Hell, how I’ve had to learn to house fury and cradle bruises, all the hundred conscious steps back to a self, stringing up lights and hoping the glow warms me down to the bone, but I opt for can’t complain and a sip of my beer.
Back then, the world stopped and we shattered, empty apartments, promised never to take a thing for granted, and oh, the honeymoon year, the wild blur of color, saying yes and figuring the rest out later, reckless abandon and endless nights, no wonder even the cruelties felt like love.
You were the drugs in your pocket, a few nights of wonder in exchange for so many bruising tomorrows, the loneliest boy who taught me some company is lonelier than being alone.
What came next was a rerun, Sophomore slump, boring story, stupid prizes, nothing better to say, except I found myself in the fallout, the surprise gift of disaster – you take the shit that matters and you run.
Can’t complain, but some wounds always will, joints that swell in the face of changing weather, whiplash October, and I’m more or less the same as always, tender and wanting, defiant and gentle, breaking into a run and holding onto blue yesterdays.
Summer was something to survive this year, autumn a rusting finish line, I revel in October because it reminds me of letting you go, the way I breathe more freely the second I stop reaching for you.
I’ve sworn all my life I’d rather be taken advantage of for my gentleness than remain cold and unbruised, and you very nearly changed my mind, took a sweet boy and made him afraid to want, but gentleness returns like autumn air, all at once, just one morning arrived.
To leave a lover, it’s quite conscious, first hell and then habit, soon stranger than a stranger, a song you once knew, a joint aching only in warning of wild weather.
I haven’t found a way to tell those stories, so bleak in the light, so I drop them as punchlines, and laughter makes the monsters shrink, watch them skitter away amidst the browning veins of what trees once clung onto.
Rain in small rivers against the living room window, greens spilling into the concrete grays, kiss my tabby cat on the crown as he watches the world, and the hours go on stacking.
Indie music reminds me of autumns in college, flannels in October, dorm room movie nights, the worst beer and the best company, a guitar strum rips me back to my mid-twenties, sharing headphones and shaking hands, and you kissed me in that hotel room, those wild first hopes of forever.
These days I say goodbye like I’m nursing an old injury, a knowing nod, it’ll sting like hell for the first few days, but I’ve known this ache before, and nostalgia is nothing but pain from an old wound.
I confess, I am something of a gardener, and it’s been a season of tilling the ground, pulling out the roots that wrapped their thorns around my gentle edges, go right on singing softly in the stubborn hope that my love knows how to bear fruit, and fledglings evergreen will become my forest, a canopy stronghold beneath the wanting sky.
Memory has become a library crowded, and nothing says vanity like a shelf of books collecting dust, so I scribble notes in front covers, dropping books on park benches, coffee shop counters, empty seats on the train, maybe this story will serve you, and depart and return to a world that still might hold surprises yet.
red and black lumberjack plaid pattern on fleece fabric
Here I am, on some midnight, feeling another summer pull itself away. Normally, I’d be drifting to sleep right now. Maybe not even ‘drifting.’ My lovers have sworn I fall asleep in a snap –– we hit the pillow and you were gone –– but not tonight. Tonight my mind is a kitchen sink overflowing, thoughts in amoeba puddles across the linoleum floor:
closure comes years after you stop wanting it. forgiveness can happen behind unforgiving boundaries. we outgrow life chapters the way teens outgrow clothes.
Get too close and they bleed together. A larger amoeba now, messier in its boundaries, murkier and deeper at once. (I don’t know shit about amoebas.)
Life’s lessons feel messier this year, harder to untangle and stretch in ribbons across the desk. A younger me would have been eager to sort it all out, find a throughline. An older me will be all knowing wisdom, with his better view.
For now, I’m content to let amoebas be amoebas. Bleeding into each other and crawling themselves through the seasons. (Still no idea.)
–
People don’t always stick around. This is hard, sometimes. Heartbreaking, often. And sometimes it’s good fucking news.
I finished the show Community this week, and I got tearful at the final scene’s notion that sometimes people leave on a boat and never come back. It’s meta, like quite a bit of the show, but it’s honest. Not everyone comes back for more episodes.
One day, they’re written off. Just last week, it seemed they’d be here forever. Now the remaining characters find storylines without them.
I think about the final scenes I’ve shared with people. Sometimes I knew this was it, and other times I held onto hope for another season. Just a bit more, to really give the characters closure.
Just recently, a cameo from somebody I thought would never find their way back into my story. Some people have an energy, a way of recoloring the world around you. We laughed over old memories (and reminded each other of younger days). But the sun rose, and the plane lifted off.
Closure, about five years after I stopped chasing it.
–
Memory can be a jagged thing. It’s like I’ve got a drawer full of glass shards, sharp-edged things I could throw away but I’ve been meaning to find a use for. I lift them out, study them under the light, and cut my fingertips bloody.
Can we ever really throw these things away?
The happier times are there in the drawer, too. Their edges are sharp because they keep company with the brutal times. For every time we lost ourselves to laughter, there’s a time you made me cry on the streets of my favorite city. The night I thought we just might have conversations forever is stacked against the night I reached for you and watched you let me drop.
I don’t want to just hold onto the good times. Without the others, without context, they become a saccharine lie. And I could toss them out, see all the ugly hardship without any of the joy, but that feels sinister and a bit lazy. How can I avoid bruising myself this way again, after all, if I don’t remember the pearls that coaxed me deeper, darker. (I’m mixing metaphors.)
So, if you’re gone, you can know there’s a drawer in some closet beneath my ribcage where I keep the shattered fragments you left behind. I remember your hair in the sun, the way you looked at me when you thought you could love me, and the chill of your goodbyes.
–
Are you okay? Yes, I’m okay. Writing a feeling down is the closest thing I know to setting it down and letting the wind carry it away. When I write about sad things, I usually feel lighter. Trust me on this.
Who’s/what’s this about? Good question. It’s about me. I had an ex once express frustration with me for writing I’d done about our time together. He said it was our story, that I shouldn’t share it. I understood, and I disagreed. Writing is my way through. I was working my way to new pages. Same here.
I don’t think that’s how amoebas work. You’re probably right. Wikipedia is right there, and yet I persisted.
Dinner gets cold, right there between us, the sight of it turning my stomach, and I spend weeks trying to settle the tab, sharp edges to everything we owed, until deciding, like the food, some things are better thrown away.
It’s funny (no, it isn’t) the way some reckless boy wanders in and all the colors change, and when he goes, they stay, stubborn hues, bruises in blues, grays, indigoes, and there I go, trying again to paint sunshine onto my wanting skin.
The warm returns slowly, golds, oranges, roses, and I forget you in sunflowers, but memory lives on in the corners within us, the axe forgets, the tree remembers, and you return in sharp edges, shards of glass in the carpet, and I remember everything.
Dinner’s on me, I decide, because to settle our scores means to stay in proximity, and trying to weather your rain to prove I had faith in your sun only ever choked me, pruned fingertips and graying eyes, that’s on me, on me, on me.
I hate a sunny day when my heart is broken. It reminds me the cataclysm is contained, an apartment fire limited to the confines of my hollowed out chest. The smoke is choking only me, the world draining of color for no one else. A sparrow lifts a twig from the ground, lifts by instinct to some waiting branch. I try to collect my courage for a walk to the car.
Heartbreak reaches every corner of my being. Is it like this for everyone? Each time it’s happened, I wrestle with my inner optimist, eager to hurry the grief along, put on a good show, return to the bigger story. Then heartbreak stains everything he touches, bleeds out in every poem.
The best chapters of my life have always followed some startling spill to the pavement. In 2016, roaring in grief in my empty bedroom, hands in cups overflowing against my shaking head. In 2020, shaking shoulders as I called my sister, stammering to tell her I’d just lost my job over a Zoom call. In 2022, waking up to a broken promise, punching my chest in the mirror, whispering stupid fucking boy.
In one such moment of grief, a friend told me I’d soon be showing everyone what it was to bloom through pain.
And so it is – I know how to cut away the dead, till the soil beneath me, find new sun. But I am tired of blooming through the wounds in my story. I am ready for something sturdy, something steady. I am eager to flourish in a chapter that holds no desire to break me.
–
Time is a ribbon. It’s an idea I believe to be borrowed from A Wrinkle in Time. Stretched out, it looks like a line, but some events are like fingertips pinching two ends together. You grab coffee with somebody you knew years ago, and suddenly you exist in both timelines at once. Old rhythms, shaking dust off memories, feelings a song you’d forgotten but not washing over you. Before long, the ribbon stretches itself back out, and there you are, both abruptly remembering the distance, a gut-punch as time’s tension resumes. You are not those people anymore.
Our stories are, perhaps, a circle, and we travel them with the idea we can stop the repetitions. But, try as we may, we can’t help but repeat a few patterns, stubborn in our learning and flimsy in our unlearning. The third time, the fifth time we hit the same brick wall, we lament that perhaps we haven’t grown the way we’d imagined. Then we find a new way through, a more clever way across, and we discover there is richness in revisiting.
In 2023, I can reach back to the person navigating a shattered world in 2016, and I can whisper to him, You were right about who you are. He won’t hear it, but perhaps I’m not whispering it on his behalf. Perhaps I’m more sure than ever of the only company I’ll ever be guaranteed – my own.
–
There is no loneliness greater than betraying yourself to maintain the company of somebody else. This I know from experience.
I’ve spent the better part of the past year in a kind of relationship therapy with myself. Why am I so willing to make concessions for what I need so I can provide what someone else wants? In July, my therapist told me she believed we’d reached the end of our sessions together. “I’m really proud of how far you’ve come,” she told me, “and I’m just not sure there’s anything I’m helping you through anymore.”
Boundaries. Gentleness for myself, first and foremost. “What would happen if you stopped trying to show boys how great they could be? What would happen if you wait for a boy who showed you how great he could be?” Questions that rocked my world. Firm reminders away from putting my story in the same circles. “Try a new way. Choose again.”
It’s a Friday evening, and the sun just poked through the clouds. It feels good to savor it, to feel like a member of the world around me, alongside the sparrow, the crowd of people and their complexities, the car rolling by playing Amor Prohibido at full volume.
When we were kids we made a game of holding our breath, fingertips clamped on sun-soaked concrete as we plunged underneath, counting seconds in the silence, jitters rising, hold our panic, hold our panic, until we broke the surface and gasped for air, screaming ‘thirty-seven seconds!’ and panting as we readied to try it again.
And so it was that I’d survive your love, games of endurance and conscious starvation, I can subsist on so little, held my panic, felt the thrill and the stillness, balled up fingertips, counting seconds, until that surface shattered, too.
And there was air, and I drank it, etched lines in the concrete around what’s love and what isn’t, lost track of time in the fullness, in the wide-open air, under sun, to be alive not the same as surviving.
I want you to know that Sundays will be ours, to rest, to revel, to rumple blankets on couches, sun rays spilling through the glass and bathing us in gold, and I will whistle something bright at the grocery store, thinking of you as I tuck two grapefruits into green bags, and I will kiss your crown as you cut, as you sugar them, and as you take the first bite, I will sneak a glimpse of you, the small smile that breaks through when something thrills you, and I’ll smile right alongside.
Mondays will coax us back into busy rhythms, and Fridays will beckon us to recapture the moments we felt young and invincible, but Sundays are an empty page, space and time up for grabs, and we will fill them with movies and music on vinyl, telling each other the same stories, and when we are old we will remember the Sundays most, a gift from a God who saw that we were good, and we will join him in building worlds and naming flowers.
And, outside our window, sirens may wail and flyers for can’t-miss events will ripple in the wind, but we will not hear it over the chorus of good company, exclusive party, the wild joy of missing out, choosing this and each other, reminiscing over the days when we wondered whether we wanted too much, and we will know we have enough, grapefruit smiles and feet intertwined on the well-worn rug.
michael king 