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.

Inhale. Exhale. Big drinks of breath. Here I am.

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.

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?

I moved to New York for the stories.

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.

To you, my sweet, cacophonous friend.

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.

I’m betting on myself.