The sun spills its oranges into the avenues, rum and honey gathering at our feet, and we are drunk of it, this young wanting, wild, our mouths flowers spreading open to join in another chorus.
When is it time to leave the party, my lips go to ask but my throat catches, pocketknife in the palms of a curious child, I am too old to pretend I don’t know how balloons eventually sag toward the floor, too young not to want my forevers.
Thai iced tea on our breath as you kiss me, we cut class and pose on concrete blocks, romance is rest and revelry, and I stop in the street, struck by the sun’s reach across all this city, take my hand and whisper, wet eyes, let’s go home.
Lights up on an apartment half-emptied, cardboard boxes littering the space in uneven clusters, strips of packing tape and the urgent squeak of a permanent marker, trying desperately to control the chaos– that is, packing up a life.
Center stage, a light bulb dangles just out reach, pours golden light over a slapdash stack of whatever was left to be taken away.
You enter the picture, step with rehearsed precision, crane your arm to unscrew the light, and I approach, hands tentative, then firm, I grasp your abdomen, watch you methodically twist, twist, twist, and I say – and the audience hears it, but you don’t hear it – I’d sooner die than let you fall from here.
Skip ahead a few scenes, and I watch with wide eyes as your words paint the darkness of rooms you’ve known, and I ask – this time, you hear it – can I join you there?
And I do, again and again – volunteer to install an A/C unit so you don’t do it alone, take a train on your birthday, dinners and darkrooms, shouting matches, blurry walks on boardwalk beaches, the rum punch blur of a frenzied love.
Cut ahead to a scene, two men on a trapeze, your movements sure and mine flailing, and I release, and I reach, and you pull your arms up, watch me fall without blinking, all the bones crack bleakly, a single overhead light fades into black.
And I shout, stamp my feet, sob, press my palms to my eyes until my wrists are saltwater rivers – only silence – so I sit there, shaky breaths, my final scene, here in the dark room I asked for, until I rise to exit, and
Hey, mister, you say – I hear it – and I take the stage door, the steel latch echoing briefly into both our worlds.
I hope the thought of me still draws blood. // What does that say about me?
They are twin thoughts, arriving at my doorstep in quick succession. The first twin, mischievous, revels a bit in the ruin. How funny, it marvels, Taylor Swift suddenly finding a way to be absolutely everywhere. My eyes scan the bar when we wander in and, for a second, twist in disappointment not to find you on some barstool. In the months immediately after our unraveling, what-if conversations played through my mind in a panic. I spent all that time getting ready, only to discover you’d stood me up.
The second twin sours the air and softens the heart. The truth is, I know my joy would buckle the moment I saw your sadness. It’s the very reason I had to claw free, start over, and let you fade into some old story. Heartbreak leaves behind war wounds, and we become like old people, swearing a snow is coming because our ankle acts up. I look in the mirror and confess I’m not cruel enough to win that kind of war, and then I wonder why I want to.
Does it make me a monster that I hope you’ve realized you lost something precious? When I think back to those days, I remember weathering your bruises for the small sake of keeping you company. I know that you know I saw you under the light, trembling. I made you safe in a way no one else ever has, and I hope it haunts you.
It’s a grotesque admission, perhaps, a monster wading out of the shadows. But what is more human, really? What feels more honest to this experience than wishing we could find a way to stay behind when we go?
Ours is a story collecting dust on some sun-soaked windowsill. Cracking its pages is an eerie reminder of the passage of days and the pileup of debris. To draw blood now would be to strike a person far removed from the man who left these marks. We are strangers whose past selves are trapped in amber in one another’s junk drawer.
When we broke, water flooded the room, and our lungs burned for air. The rooms have dried, those rotting floorboards ripped up and replaced, and that faucet goes untouched. Still, in the silence of a stray moment every thirtieth day, there falls a solitary drip. Funny the way the sound echoes throughout the house.
The older I get, the deeper I fall in awe of memory. Why, as I walk to grab oranges at the market, do I think of my grandma singing ‘Knock Three Times’? On a run, I remember a boy who did coke and then kissed me, remarking with delighted eyes that my lips tasted like coke. I chuckle, and I marvel at having met him only once, years ago. Is it strange to remember this silly intimacy? What, if anything, does he remember of me?
I hoard stories. I relive them with every re-telling, examining the edges and finding new meaning. I play the same video games over and over, immersing in those worlds. Songs attach themselves to chapters of my life. I healed from my first breakup listening to Blank Space on YouTube over and over, running circles around Worthen Arena in Muncie, Indiana, the parking lot stale with snow.
An old lover told me I was the biggest devotee to lore he’d ever met. I remember feeling suddenly naked. He was right. I delight in the lore of everything. I am, in ways, always crafting my own.
What will I think of these days, once they’re gone? Who will I ache to see again? What stories will I tell, over and over, and who will populate them?
Valentino arrives at the apartment and the inspection begins. It’s December 30, the night before New Year’s Eve, and we’ve agreed to dog-watch. Fluffy and remarkably nimble, Tino might seem young at first glance. A closer look, however, reveals that time has poured milk across his eyes. As he sniffs out the boundaries of his newfound quarters, he makes a series of gentle collisions:
Bump. Terse exhale. Continue.
We go about clearing obstacles and setting up comforts. Tino’s bed and feeding bowls are nestled together in the bedroom, and Josh brings him here repeatedly for orientation. He is determined, however, to explore.
When I go to pet him, brushing a gentle palm across his forehead, he catches a whiff of a stranger and barks a scrappy defense. I concede.
My cat, however, is far less willing to capitulate to Tino’s demands. As Tino explores the apartment, he is unwittingly stalked by a fascinated tabby, pupils wide and unblinking in the watching. Occasionally, the blind dog changes course unexpectedly, and August acrobatically escapes to some higher ground. We watch this, laughter rolling into the apartment.
Before Josh goes to work, he takes Tino for a walk and then shuts him in the bedroom. He asks me to ensure the cat and dog are kept separate for the time being, and I agree. Later, I decide to head to the gym, and I step gingerly into the bedroom. Valentino hears me, barreling immediately into motion, and, in a panic, I roll onto the bed and freeze. The next three minutes are quiet, the dog curiously sniffing the air and the grown man watching with a mischievous grin.
Valentino doesn’t have much time left. Dogs are a strange and miraculous gift, so very alive and attuned to the worlds of humans, but also markedly finite. We cannot make him young again, but we can build these days around ensuring he is cozy and cared for.
And his is not a life without stories, even now. In the course of a few days, he has infuriated the cat by finding and finishing his food, he has held me hostage in my own bedroom, and he has made us cackle in laughter.
Time is relentless in its turning of pages, no matter how much we ache to slow it, but it also permits us the chance to scribble down what we might one day hope to remember.
–
I adore New Year’s Day.
By this, I don’t really mean to say I adore New Year’s Eve. In my experience, the last night of the calendar year usually amounts to a messy blend of social pressure, the ticking of the clock, and communal celebration. I’ve shouted ‘Happy New Year’ alongside best friends and lovers, but strange characters always somehow factor into the experience. On the lucky years, the blur is more joyful than rushed.
New Year’s Day, however, always strikes me with the blinking softness of a blank page. Walking on the sidewalk, riding the train, I can feel it from everyone. It’s written, plain as day, on their faces. Everyone is lost in thought: reflecting on the past year, wondering about the future, and thinking about how to start writing.
I love the clumsiness of first sentences. A blank page means anything is possible, but the first sentence sets a story in motion. New Year’s Day feels fresh, feels possible, feels tender, feels hopeful, feels imaginative. Perhaps this will be the year we break better. Perhaps these will be the days our hands figure out how to strum that melody we’ve been humming.
–
2024 was the year I learned to exhale and let go.
I began the year with a scrappy sense of resolve: I would hit 2024 with a sprinting start, hitting the gym each day and chasing my wildest joy. In the first week of the year, however, I watched someone I adore crumble into crisis. Days later, I took a nasty spill on an evening run, cracking my phone screen and rolling my ankle.
When I noticed my lower back tightening up, I tried to push it through exercise. I spent the rest of the week lying on my living room floor, passing the hours watching sitcoms and calling whoever had time to listen. I came into 2024 with ferocious intentions, but, in these hours, I reached a new resolution: This would be the year of gentleness.
I started a morning yoga practice and worked to commune with my body as it healed. When I recovered enough to run, to lift weights at the gym, I did these things with gratitude and without brutality. Perhaps a more honest strength lies in gentleness.
For 2025, I resolve only to go gentler. I will wander where my soul can find rest, and I will commune with people around whom my guard unravels. I will write – poetry, stories, love letters, eulogies, forewords – and I will scribble my initials on every draft.
Today, I only want the world from the window, the indifference of sunlight, I am a bundle of raw nerves, a shaking breath, weighed down not by my griefs, but my hope, a fresh-cut flower of stubborn root, wincing and reeling deep beneath my sternum.
Already, I can feel it trying to flower, my weary frame twisted in blankets on the couch, writing love letters to people who won’t leave me to tend my own wounds, my hands reach to make a soft landing, sowing hope, forming chosen family through broken heart.
There is God in the brown-bag bagels we split for lunch, God in the soothing familiarity of favorite stories, God in an orange tabby dropping a rose at my side, purring, and the False God, held before me, shudders at hopes like these, quakes in the face of real power.
Grief pulls us to the ground, and hope’s frayed edges know these to be the seasons to burrow, to strengthen, to build, to nurture, shedding counterfeit community for something sturdier, to fight, to resist, to keep going.
Yellow bleeds into the leaves outside my window, I wonder do they feel themselves die, try to spot the green giving way, ponder the consciousness of trees, imagine the branches staring back in, whispering, he’s looking so much stronger these days, down to the roots.
You never touched my November, let’s give thanks to that, nothing to rinse loose amidst these new early nights, playlists shift from electropop wanting to the soft acoustic strumming, rest and romance and reveling, poetry in everything, pressing meaning into every minute of the dissipating daylight.
Imagining the future is a love language, as is making a meal and presenting it on the couch, watch with wide eyes at the first bite, we should catch a show or bike to the brewery before it gets too cold, we should go, but let’s stay, is a language, planting roses on the eve of some November.
Night is falling sooner, I just can’t catch my breath, hold a friend close and promise each other it’ll be all right, these weary hearts, these traveled feet, my wristwatch counts the steps, and I am always on some long walk somewhere, finding beauty in all the great unknowns.
Money is a magic rope, pulling tighter around the ribcage the more you move, but maybe it’ll be okay, split a homemade meal and escape into a story, try and remember when the breathing came easy.
MAGA hat, proud display, I don’t care that you’re scared but don’t let it divide us, red-faced rhetoric, poisoned softness, don’t meet your heroes, kid.
I bump into an old boyfriend’s dick on the Internet, and, I break into laughter, surprising myself and alarming my cat, time melting a wound down to a punchline, after all.
Late night poetry club, grief and gratitude right in the midst of a hundred unknowns, nurturing hope, scavenging hope, purchasing hope on layaway, in the stanzas, pleasant wanderings home, lamplight verses.
In a dream, under violet light, you appear and, for once, we know each other, you ask will you stay with me this time, and
Waking is akin to a dredging, my lungs are fire, ravenous air, wet palms against the spinning earth, why does my mind still invent you, does my subconscious heart still ache, awake, at the thought of your ghostly loneliness?
My limbs hang heavy through morning routines, hot water to the bone, but some indigoes won’t rinse loose, your memory a bright pink sore in the gums, and my mind a tongue runneth over: where are you today, and do I haunt you this way, and was any of it real, and is it better if it was?
I lug my cat’s tower toward the window, bedroom and living room, back and forth, because he revels in this kind of change, the same world through new eyes, and I revel in his reveling, motor engine purrs and paw swipes against my passing arm.
Outside, the world changes once more, right on schedule, and I marvel at the passage of time, bike across the Pulaski to clink beers with my friend, talking boys and botox, and the sun sets too soon on our afternoon, telltale sign of a chapter well lived, always too few pages for the stories we love.
Fruity Pebbles after sex, this is luxury, spoon clink smiles and stealing just a few more minutes from the indigo blanket of sleep to show each other something stupid on our phones, the days piling up into storied stacks on the shelves.
michael king 