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.
Playful, warm, understanding, rambling, adventurous, romantic. Explorer of emotions, excavator of deeper meaning. Early morning run, trip to get coffee, a poem I wrote on a fingerprint laptop screen. Yesterday’s T-shirt draped over a chair. Look past the mess and there’s my magic. (I’ll return the favor.) Easy laughter, ready invention. We are all on the same team. There’s room for us. I have your back.
This is who I am at rest, at ease, guards down.
I reread old pages and bear witness to a man in survival mode: Tense, detached, on defense. A lion too prideful to admit he is suffering. Rush from room to room, tip back a drink to try and find joy. This is love, I lie, this is love, this is love, this is love. My patience is short, my jokes have sharp edges. I weep around strangers on a walk to the gym; I swallow my pain in neon rooms. I raise my voice, a mammal backed into a corner and kicked in the ribs. You’ll teach me not to raise my voice. Cruel summer, false lovers. I smile and dance, never lonelier than in these crowded rooms. I lie to my friends about what it’s like to be alone with you. I lie to myself about what it’s like to be alone with you. I never feel rested. I have been hustling and out of breath, in some ways, since the moment you walked through my apartment door.
It’s been months, months, and just now I recognize myself again in the mirror. Those were week and weeks of deliberateness. Deliberate healing, deliberate letting go, deliberate pressing on. My Taurus moon erected cliffside boundaries, shrouded me in blankets, put a vinyl under needle scratch, boxed up an old life and found another.
My plants, whose vines were crisping brown in that old room, now prosper on my windowsill. I study them, and I understand. What a thing to be seen, again, in a new light.
–
I wake up to the sound of airplane wheels meeting concrete, and soon I am hugging my friends hello at an airport. We explore red rocks, glide the oars of kayaks through dammed waters, whisk our bikes through mountains. We yell like children, laugh, and pause to drink water. We are young. When we get home, we say nothing, just fall onto couches and floors with blankets and pillows. Bob’s Burgers and no agenda.
Oh. I remember. This is who we are.
I’m too learned in the ways of the world to wish this moment would last forever, so instead I revel in it. As the sun sets on another story, I tuck the lesson into my pocket: Make room for rest, slow things down, find time with your friends that includes no agenda.
–
If I had one wish, it would be that all of us could live without having to survive. We are so beautiful when we are at rest, curious and warm, free to create and invent. We are so easy to love.
A friend’s throat catches as he explains there are going to be cuts at his job. He doesn’t know what he’ll do, if the money stops flowing in. His survival, the survival of people he holds close, depends on it. I recognize when his heart is heavy, when his patience grows short, when his gentle hands are quick to become fists. He is surviving so much.
I yearn to control the wheels spinning in his life, to write the story on his behalf, to grant him peace and ease and gentleness. Of course, I can’t do this. I can only offer respite, a moment’s rest. I can only love him, even now, even angry, even afraid.
This is what he, and the other great loves of my life, have done for me. On the mornings I didn’t know how to show up for myself, they showed up anyway. They listened as I lied about the story I was living, waiting patiently for me to find my way back.
We find our way back. Maybe that’s the more realistic wish – that we always find our way back. I will be waiting.
Therapy in the breaking down of cardboard boxes, the breeze whisking through a street I will never invite you, pull this panel and what seemed sturdy falls free, stacked cleanly for pickup as I turn to head home, make home.
My friend asks whether I believe there is a difference between happiness and joy, and I decide yes, happiness more of a beautiful happenstance, joy a practice quietly nurtured, tidying up the rooms within us to make room for our souls to sway in peace.
This will be a story of joy, so I keep no clutter in the cabinets and drawers, sharp-cornered memories thudding dully into the mouths of trashbags, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, and the learning against to trust bare feet on the tile, closed eyes, dancing softly, paying no mind to all the glass shards pulled out in those yesterdays.
There are books in the windowsill, a hundred stories exhaling in the sigh of a sun-soaked May, and mine is a life in boxes, and the curtains you insisted kiss the floor of my place still do, but the rest of us is gone, even the ashes scattered, and still I find aches in the spaces you touched.
I remember the prayer and my sternum catches, halts my run, eyes wet, I felt you bruising my arms and wrapped them around you in prayer, my first in a long while, and a week later, you broke me, a man, amen.
Manicured nails, shimmering blue, the morning we stifled laughter over your ticklish feet, how I picked that polish off, green and pink flakes on the boardwalk, just fighting to survive the way your love starves and squeezes.
We get it wrong, the sun washes deeper than the rain, every step further is an exhale, relief, and to love you was an interruption and to love myself is a return, so when the train rolls by my window, I think of how you’d hate it, and peace blossoms in our shallow grave.
The truth is I will answer how are you with good even when I can’t see the world in color, when I’m figuring out how to breathe through a new knot in my chest, and sometimes good is less of a truth and more of a promise to myself, we will get there, we will feel good, and
Truth is, I was only beautiful to them as long as I fit into the picture they’d already painted, and realizing it was an ugly scrape, and never again, never a-fucking-gain, and the
Truth is rarely an easy story to say out loud, I’m a character lost and wandering the unspelled page, hoping for happier pages, trying to speed through the gray, re-read, re-read, until the words finally mean something,
And the truth is I hope you will love me on the day I am hardest to see, when I am lost and stubborn and fighting my way to the next page, I hope you will go with me, hope you won’t go.
Philadelphia, five years ago –– wrote a poem in that coffeeshop about wanting to study my arms and find them free of scars, and nothing is the same, so is everything.
They say we cannot simply sleep, can only create the conditions for sleep, dark room, white noise, blanket, oscillating whirr, and hope sleep will find us, and isn’t that also true of love, just setting up the room and hoping for the best?
So I run beneath the sun like a man who is in love with his life and I remember to tell the stories that make me laugh, till my soil and plant seeds for tomorrow’s flourishing, sand those hard edges down, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
To let go is to make room, no more bruises in my stanzas, nothing sharp nor sweet to say about yesterday’s characters, just the exhale of look where we are and the wonder of where might this go?
As I packed my life into boxes, emptied my Indiana apartment, I explained it to my friends and family. Every time I’ve gone there, it’s been the same. You walk outside, follow your intuition, and a story sort of unravels at your feet.
It’s a decidedly bright-eyed sentiment, the kind of line sure to elicit a groan from a seasoned New Yorker, but it holds true. It keeps me here when things are hard. I get to call home a city that brims with possibility, meaning, unexplored corners.
Before I met Ross Morgan, I’d never encountered the same quality in a person.
We met through a gay kickball league. At a pre-game brunch on the East side, he shared a story from his college years I could not believe was true. Charmed, I stuck by his side as we walked toward the tram, and our conversation blossomed. “Don’t fall in love with me,” he shrugged a warning, “I’m probably not in the city for much longer.”
He wandered into my life and stories shimmied in right alongside him: The Halloween he tripped and fell in the street as Freddie Mercury in drag. The night we paused a horror film to discuss his snack of choice –– uncooked pasta. The COVID-19 pandemic, when he disguised me in medical scrubs so we could watch a show together in his hotel. The night we smoked weed on his fire escape because I’d lost my job. Get out of my face. Or that’s not the way people feel about me. Adventures in Pittsburgh and Miami and Muncie and Jax Beach. A drunken synopsis of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
The stories proliferate; I have loved every page.
Ross departs New York City today, his apartment emptied into a moving van and his eyes fixed on a new horizon. HI and a hundred other people will miss him here, often, and we’re excited for him all the same.
There’s the funny thing about stories: We gather enough of them, and suddenly our lives become home. Move to a new town, start a new job, begin a new hobby, and there’s not much story to tell. Eventually, though, the pages stack up into chapters, and you’re at home among them.
Ross, I know you will be home wherever you go, because you have the magic of making them flourish around you. New York will always be home to you, because there are hundred Ross stories in every corner. It’s why so many people call you friend; they’ve found a home in you.
And I know I will always have a home in you, because I have loved you, we have loved each other, and there’s a stack of stories to prove it.
You are the shot of tequila and the cup of coffee the morning after.
You’re something I’ve had to learn how to talk about, a story whose sharp edges I’ve sanded down with each retelling. The fury finally passed, fire giving way to ashes.
Where do I scatter this?
I run the city like I’ve been in a coma. To reacquaint with the world is to admit to myself that I’ve been away. Sun spills between sky-high buildings as I hustle up the street, a love song ringing in my ears. For now, the love letters are between me and myself: forgiveness, gentleness, admiration. You were brave, you know?
I arrive back home, pull off sweaty clothes and stand beneath a shower of warm water, and my palms run over my body with loving detail.
The hardest part of looking back on you is acknowledging what a traitor I became to myself. That August morning, waking up in a panic, walking into the bathroom and facing myself in the mirror. You stupid fucking idiot, I remember thinking. You deserve every fucking scar this leaves behind.
Scars give way to stories and someone else will kiss the skin you bruised. The world we built and broke will become a picture tucked in some drawer. Small though the aches have become, your memory still echoes into my awareness. One day, I will go to write and you won’t spill out of my fingertips. Til then, I’ll run and rinse and release.
–
I am standing in a year of purposeful transition. These are not the most exciting pages of anybody’s story. These are the days of taking inventory, of changing up our yeses and nos, of packaging things into cardboard boxes and preparing to step into new beginnings.
Every aspect of my world feels a little adolescent, not in its youth nor ready to be released, and I search for beauty in the becoming. We are always in some sort of flux. Movies present our lives in clear arcs – setup, conflict, moment of great peril, and triumph – but most of our days are a muddy blend of these.
Planting seeds for tomorrow’s flourishing takes faith, stubborn conviction. I think you should bet on yourself. A friend said this to me in a moment of peril, and I have since taken it to heart.
I have not even come close to my most honest flourishing. If you thought life seemed vibrant before, wait til you see where I take it next. I scatter seeds, laugh with friends, learn to exist again in raw skin.
–
Hurdles and hopes. My friends and I meet weekly, and we report a hurdle and hope each time. I love the way it plants us in one another’s stories. Oh, I discover, he has been learning how to peel the thorny vines of anxiety from his skin. Then I grin as I learn he is finding hope in the later sunset or the chance to revisit a coffeeshop he once made a second home.
I love, also, the opportunity it grants me to story myself, right where I am. I am anguishing over goodbyes I will soon have to say, untangling my friendships, inventorying my time and energy. I am getting excited over connections and learning to let them crumble when they do.
Some weeks, I struggle to come up with a hurdle, and what a relief that can be. I’m all hope. When I think on it, I feel incredible gratitude that I’ve never had a bit of trouble conjuring hope. My eyes are fixed ahead, on some horizon, imagining sun even when there are thick sheets of rainfall overhead.
In it, a wild beast begins attacking a crowd of people around me. Instead of running, I toss myself into its path, stretching out a trembling hand and saying softly, calmly, ‘it’s okay.’ The beast, usually a tiger or lion, paces and pauses, its eyes locked with mine, breathing short and unsettled. ‘It’s okay.’
Sometimes, I wake up here. When I do, I find my body is tense, as though physically matching my mental effort to calm the beast. I drink in a deep breath and exhale.
Other times, in the midst of my gentle chiding, the beast lunges at me, fangs bared, bringing my body to the ground instantly. This waking is more startled, more afraid.
Some elements of the dream change every time: the setting, the ‘storyline’ leading me to this moment, the company I keep, the clarity of the ending. But each iteration, when it comes, has its constants: a wild and furious animal, a gut feeling that I can bring it to calm, and the terrible, eternal silence of waiting to see what happens.
–
Sometimes, I am mesmerized by the fact that we dream. In the dark, we surrender ourselves to rest, and our brains start carving out storylines on autopilot.
As a child, I was told we dream about the last thing we think about, and so I would try to drift off thinking about something specific. The Power Rangers, or The Fox and the Hound. I remember waking up at, six or seven, in the middle of a good dream, and trying desperately to resume. (It never worked.)
Then, at 25, I experienced my first true heartbreak. For months, my first boyfriend worked his way into my dreams, showing up and making me sad all over again. On those mornings, I stood in the shower longer, hoping the warm water might rinse the grief off of my limbs.
Once, I dreamed about getting together with an ex-boyfriend again. In the dream, I was so happy, but I felt a pang of sadness, too: When are you going to leave again? I tried to press on, happy, but my dream ex-boyfriend eventually changed temperatures. He yelled at me, ‘See, this is why I left, why are you like this?’ I woke up, startled and sad, and then picked up my phone, breaking a long silence:
Hey, I had a dream about you. I know you weren’t there, but it told me a lot about how I think of you. Can I call you to tell you about it?
He said yes, and so I called. I told him about the dream, and he told me he didn’t feel that way, that he didn’t want me to think of him that way. The conversation we shared was bare, kind, and healing. The kind of conversation I wasn’t sure we’d ever have.
This is, of course, a rarity. Most of my dreams aren’t so meaningful, and many I do not remember at all. But often I am curious what they might reveal about me. What am I carrying, in my day-to-day wanderings, that manifests in this nighttime storyline?
From what emotional soil, tended by me in my waking hours, does a wild and furious beast grow?
–
At a young age, my grandmother told me I was a ‘peacemaker.’ I’d never thought of myself this way, and so I reacted with surprise, but she went on to explain she had observed it many times: When we, as kids, broke into an argument or a fight, I often stepped up to resolve it. I wanted to be friends.
Sometimes, I think I find myself trusting inherently in this quality. If I were to find someone standing on a ledge, for example, I would immediately begin trying to build a bridge to them. When I am at odds with someone, when emotions are high and communication is off the rails, I can feel myself click into a mode: ‘Hey.’
This doesn’t always work out, though. I can’t sustain a bridge between two people, and I can’t always be the one building bridges. A relationship cannot be sustained on this alone.
Is this the tiger tearing through my dreams? Am I at odds with my own peace-bringing, and should I learn to let go of this? I don’t have a clear answer, just an idea of a quality that has brought my life more flowers than scars.
I think of my friends, the people I’ve chosen to keep in my life, and realize there’s a quality they all share: When I am furious, when I am lost and bewildered, they are there standing, arm outstretched, ‘it’s okay.’
and, some years, the rain fell freely into the open mouths of flowers, love in abundance, possibility rinsing over the scene in watercolors, and every deep breath felt like it was making room for something more, and everywhere we reached there were petals, our wild eyes dilated, oh, this, we knew, love
still there were years on the concrete, empty slab, save for the stains of memories wrapped in thorns, which taught us the soft incantation, I have enough, and our friends grinned, old souls seeing magic firsthand, I have enough, and the sting of old scars, gone, I have enough, and then came the rinse, exhaling color over all the everything, gratitude drowning out the deficits, love letter to those years, too
michael king 