Gymnopedie

A girl is standing in the corner of the playground on 67th Street and First Avenue; an old institution, concrete and gray and checkered with hives. She is gazing at her nails; her ocean blue eyes angulated around them as her ginger colored skirt pleats around her pale, bony thighs. She looks morose, ostensibly frightened, and unwelcome. To her left, peers engage in an assortment of games. Basketballs and tennis balls dribble and flounce, lurk up to the musk of a summer afternoon, while hula hoops, like wax bangles, pivot around waists. The children wear fabric from a panoply of textures. Patterns of chrysanthemums and blood-orange marigolds are dyed on to their wisp-cotton shirts. Beads of sunlight spill down the ribbings of beige corduroys. It is lunch time at Middle School 64. The children are at play within their nests of familiar faces. But she is not welcome.

The expression on her face, her low hanging brows, the weight of a grimace bearing down on her lips, brings back memories of my own experience in middle school. Memories that had turned to vapor, precipitate back into my mind. Accusations and expletives pour into my arteries, the way water dribbles out from wringing washcloths and slithers into a funnel. Images of violence canoe into my eyes, accents of bullies lean against my ears. The bruises feel alive again, twitching under my dark mustard skin. And I flinch in fear, in broad daylight, mulling over days that Time had licked away.

Do you remember that August of 2003? Mrs. Jackson's English class had just ended and the lunch bell was ringing in the hallway. I had walked up to Simon Pashua and asked, Can I play ball with you'll today? He scanned my body, his triangular chin following his eyes, and said, No. No fags or fatties allowed, get it? His eyes dilated in disbelief, in a sense of ridicule that I, of all people, could have had the audacity to ask him, a local hero, for a spot in his team of gold medalists. Just one time, please, Pashua? I pleaded, by the statuette of Mary, freshly painted red and green. He never replied, and walked away, the melody of his footsteps fading amidst the shuffle of stationery.

I walked back to 7B, the classroom by the east stairwell, where you were reading a story from Reader's Digest, and sat on the bench closest to the window. I could see the field, its patchy green grass and pollarded trees, and scores of classmates playing in teams of their own. The rejection had hit me hard, and my eyes were heavy. But my gaze was still on the boys below, light brown like Band-Aids and nimble like stars, as sunlight, the color of butter, washed over their skin. You doing okay? You asked me carefully, closing the magazine and putting it back in your backpack. I'm fine, I said, unflinchingly. You sure? You don't look okay. Tears had dripped out of my eyes, without my knowledge, making webs across my cheeks. I cleaned them hurriedly, with medals of saliva, and shouted, I'm fine. Get it? I'm fine. I felt a flush sprint through my face, and arterioles, pregnant with blood, erupt on my forehead. Pashua rejected me, I finally relented. To which you walked over to my bench, hugged me, and said, I'm sorry mate. That sucks. You know he can be a dick sometimes. I maintained silence. And then you asked, Want to go to the Green Room instead?

I said yes. Immediately. And we walked over.

There were drapes along its perimeters with splashes of dandelions, and the seat covers by the podium had hyacinth and lily prints. Aromas of acrylic were curling across the room, bunching along the frame of an upright piano, chocolate brown and polished, along the south end of the wall. Chandeliers, shaped like lotus buds, hung from the ceiling. It was a miniature auditorium, barely used, nestled by the stairwell leading to the Chapel. I walked toward the piano, sat on the stool, opened the lid, and struck a chord. The sounds of A minor ribboned towards the ceiling, and my fingers felt alive; liquid like mercury. I looked over at you while examining the sounds, and you nodded at me, and smiled in reassurance. 

I played for an hour that Tuesday afternoon. My fingers sang and my veins trembled at Satie's composition of Gymnopedie. The trills were crisp, and the scales flowed like water. The arpeggios galloped, like Derby gems, through pillows of air along the bricks. Beethoven swung along the ladders of notes, shimmering and swaying in thunderous harmonies. And the voices of melodies, duplicating, triplicating, in doles of three, and choruses of six, grew louder and louder, shriller and shriller, maniacal and frenzied, as my fingers thumped and leaped and roared and rumbled over ivory keys and ebony sharps, before finally collapsing to a pause. Bubbles of sweat had sprouted through my shirt, but I felt calm and relieved. Music does to me what Spring does to the cherry trees, I said to you, with a smile on my face. Like Neruda, my friend, you whispered.

Euripides and Coffee

You introduced yourself to me at Daniel's photo shop, standing by a long, rectangular bookshelf, facing the south corner of Bleecker Street. There were dandelions everywhere, yellow and pulpy, like vinegar bees, and silk curtains of a light blue, curving in the breeze. You were reading Milton, and me Anton Chekhov, quite possibly The Cherry Orchard, and I, by mistake, dropped the book mark Leonard brought back home from Prague. You picked it up, and walked toward me, and smiled a deep, impressionable smile before handing it over. Peter Morrison from Hicksville, pleasure meeting you. Nice meeting you too. Trevor. I said, staring at your eyes; ocean green and bulbous, round like plums. Welcome to the neighborhood, you said politely, your bushy blonde brows twitching periodically. Meet me at the pier on Saturday. Christopher Street. 4 pm. And we left the shop, with unfinished words and a flurry of emotions. Confused, surprised, and oddly satisfied.

When Saturday came, I walked over to the pier in a white poplin shirt, dozens of quarters jangling in the seams of my corduroy pant pockets. It was 4 pm, and you were sitting by the stauette at the Western end of the park, reading Euripides and drinking coffee from a Burmese urn. The air was wet, and dark gray clouds, the color of ash, were squeezing along the diameter of the sky. The warm smell of dewberries was all around, and the chattering of ferry sounds and mewling of a mild drizzle replaced the silence of the afternoon.

I walked up to you, shook your hands, and sat on your left side on the damp, wooden park bench, which had the words 'In Memory of Roslyn, Love, Mom and Dad' embossed on a tin plaque. Your eyes looked narrow, and swollen; the color of beets. And an expression of concern shadowed your face --a certain nervousness, I couldn't quite figure out. Is everything okay, Peter? I asked. No. You said. What's wrong? I paused for a moment, rationalizing possibilities of events, like flipping through pages of an encyclopedia. You heaved a deep, full-bodied sigh. Your finger-tips, once slender and pink, were now dry and purple. And you said to me, in a whisper, The test results came back yesterday. HIV positive.

As you uttered the letters, H, I and V, you collapsed into hysteria. Traces of shame, embarrassment, and fatalism, splotched against the perimeter of your face. Disbelief and fear made your bones hollow. Your tongue became pale, and dry, and formed white hexagons of parched cells, like drought had hit your country. You cleared your throat, twice, peered into my eyes, and said, I don't know how to tell him, Trevor. I'm sure he'll understand, I said. No, he won't. You screamed, three times, your voice getting louder with each successive mention. And then your pitch dropped, and you surrendered to silence, the kind of silence that puts pressure on the ear drums and creates illusions of sounds. And a minute later, you said, We promised to be exclusive.

We chatted some more, and at the end of the hour, as the rain came to the city in roars and rumbles, we kissed in front of bundles of tourists, scrambling for a roof to keep themselves dry. It wasn't love. It wasn't infatuation. But a symbol of consolation, at a time when your world was spinning faster than you could handle. We left, shortly after, bidding goodbye, giving hugs, and retreating with the words, See you around, soon.

But years went by. And I never saw you around. And I imagined you were seeking treatment somewhere, and were doing alright. Until I opened the newspaper today, and saw a picture of you on the last page of the City section. 

Peter Morrison. May 1982 - April 2015. 

Died of AIDS in Greenwich Village.

You will be loved and missed, always. 

Love, Mom and Dad.

Dear Home

The Admissions envelope came in the mail towards the later half of February, informing me that I had received a full-tuition scholarship to attend college in Indiana. I had wanted to move to America ever since freshman year of high school, for many personal reasons, and now the opportunity was right in front of me. I was thrilled. I was overjoyed, and completely overwhelmed. Once I made up my mind that I was going to accept the offer, the countdown began. John Denver's Leaving On A Jet Plane played on Repeat-mode in my mind, and I, for one, was beyond excited.

My mother, on the other hand, had an initial bout of happiness that hastily transitioned into bitterness and anger. She was convinced that the reason I wanted to leave her and move away from home, was that I disliked her. She also took it upon herself to believe that my decision to move was an outcome of a faulty upbringing, for which she was apparently responsible. And if I loved her, and cared about her, then I would choose to stay at home and tread the path she had cut out for me. We went back and forth many times, playing tug-of-war with words and emotions. But my mind was made and so was hers. On the night before I left, she said to me, “From now on, please consider your mother dead.”

Rural Indiana was nothing like the sets on Hollywood, but I managed to make it through four years of college. I learned about Euchre and 4-H fairs and juggled with racial tensions that exist in predominantly white rural towns; my light brown skin noticeable in community gatherings, inviting stares, murmurs and endless gossip. A man in a pick-up truck, wearing a red bandana and metal bracelets, threw a water balloon at me once and yelled across Seminary Street, "Go back to your third world country, you son-of-a-bitch. You're polluting my town." He drove away shortly after, down Locust Street onto Sycamore Street, and disappeared into the shadows of nightfall on orchids. My eyes welled up with tears, and my body shook in spasms. I wanted to call my mother, and tell her that she was perhaps right that I didn't belong here, but I hadn't heard from her in over two years, and the awkwardness of rupturing a constructed silence prevented me from doing so. I even dialed the number on my broken keypad, hoping to let go of the past and explain the situation at hand, but I disconnected before the first ring. I couldn't make myself do it. And because of my hesitations and unfounded stubbornness, two more years of silence went by.

Moving to New York, the summer after graduation, brought with it a sense of freedom and perspective. I finally came to terms with myself, piecing together parts of an identity which often confused me, disappointed me, and made me angry. The constant self-denial of an immutable truth was a vector critically underlying my move to America; a truth that required nurturing, experimenting, and eventually consolidating. And the consolidation finally happened after moving to the city; a liberating milieu that unhinged my hesitations, my inhibitions, and my homosexual desires.

As the self-acceptance phase came and settled, I coveted communication with my mother. I wanted to hear her voice and see her face; the face that grew old over photographs from visitors. But memories of the boundaries we drew and the subsequent years of painful silence stirred within me a sense of mind-numbing awkwardness. If I called, and if she answered, would I start with an apology? Or would I pretend that everything was fine, and pick up the threads from where we had left? Unsure about what to do, I avoided the call, and instead, wrote her a letter.

"I am supposed to consider you dead, but I know that you are alive. And I am at a point in my life where my thoughts are maturing, and my identity is taking shape. My leaving home had nothing to do with you. Rather, I seized the opportunity to move to a place where I could be myself, where I could think independently, where I could nurse my questions about race and sexuality. I am gay, and that is a big part of my identity; something I have come to terms with after many years of playing hide-and-seek. And this is the identity I built walls around when I was home, to save myself from handcuffs and you from embarrassment. None of this is your fault, and I hope you understand. I was stubborn, and inconsiderate, and vehemently impulsive, for which I sincerely apologize. If you have anything to say, or want to talk about it, please call me whenever you want to. I would love to hear from you. I miss you very much."

Days went by. Weeks, even months. Finally, almost six months later, I received an envelope with my name and address written in my mother's unique cursive. "Got your letter. Things are mostly the same here. I've learned to adapt to the emptiness at home, and am trying to be stronger and more independent. I don't have much to say to you other than you should do whatever makes you happy."

We move away from home seeking asylum from threats, or chasing dreams, seizing opportunities, and hoping to craft better lives. But transitions come with trade-offs, and migration is no exception. There are emotional tolls that we pay, hefty and unprecedented, at the intersection of new beginnings and shared histories. We lose friends, make new ones, and bear the stamps of time and struggle on every inch of our bodies. There are little things about social mores that no one ever tells you, and you learn from a fair share of mistakes and retrials. You hear pulses of home whooshing through your neck, clogging your mind from time to time, and you fixate yourself on the edge of a pivot, juggling the weights of your private past. You are shackled to nostalgia, and the unease of radical change; yet, you seek comfort in the decision that you made, in the path that you chose, in the rudimentary steps you set out to follow.

I left home at a pretty young age, against the wishes of my mother, and an avenue of neighbors, who said I was selfish, cold-hearted, and incapable of respect. What could America give me that India could not? How could I be so motivated by money, that I did not think twice before forsaking poor people from home? And most importantly, how heartless could I be to abandon my parents, not take care of them in their own home, after all the sacrifices they made for me? I maintained my calm in the last few months. Silence was the best reply. As a result, the locus of blame then shifted to the parenting pattern of my mother. The neighbors warned her to set an ultimatum against my departure, or else she would lose her child. America will change him, the phone calls would clamor, you'll never get him back. It'll be too late. But my mother never set an ultimatum, and I followed the trajectory I had selected for myself.

With the loss of proximity, both emotional and geographical, there are rifts that form, tensions that arise, and misunderstandings that erupt. These are outcomes of migration, anticipated by some and unexpected by others, but something we immigrants accept and weave our lives around. My mother and I exchange letters now, sometimes emails, sometimes texts; but it still feels strange --like something strained, like something we undertake only as mutual responsibilities. My partner remains unacknowledged, pointedly ignored, and tactically avoided in any situation I mention. I am implicitly communicated a certain discomfort. And I try my best to understand difference, to understand the stance of a traditionalist parent, but not being a traditionalist myself makes it hard to see things from that point of view, to maintain neutrality, and to remain calm.

Many bridges have broken over the span of years, because of secrets and lies and matters of the mind. It is now my time to rebuild the bonds that I wish will last forever.

My Imagination at Night

Sometimes when we lay in bed, listening to the darkness and the murmurs of candles, watching the moon chuckling like a hyena behind my gray, rusty window grilles, holding hands, kissing, or even twining legs before sex, I think about poetry. I think about words and a bucket of sounds where consonants and rhythms splash around; like naked boys with green eyes in a pond by the cabin. I imagine words raining on your face, washing away worries that have come with your profession. Creating trees, and sprigs, and little sprouts of rosemary smells dancing mazurka through the cones of your ears. And yellow leaves, like oreoles, growing from your tongue. Forming shapes and leaving roots, burrowing stalks of secrets through the trails of your veins. You remind me of olive. Or Neptune or a panther. You remind me of ribbons. And ruby stones at the palm readers. You remind me of the barber shop on the Latin edge of Mulberry Street, where dandelions on the window ledges mate with the bees. You are Neruda and Plath. Saenz and Woolf. Morphed into a yarn of my covetous imagination. And the only time I am back to reality, at 1 am on Second Avenue, is when you whisper and say, baby it's time to sleep.

Toy Fairies

My letter to you today about Nolan's cross-dressing grandfather reminded me of a time about myself that I have never shared with anyone. Not mother. Not father. Not sister nor the maid; who made money selling bangles under the coconut tree by Russell Avenue, when she was not in our house. But being twenty five and open about literacy and sexuality, empowers me to write to you about my life as Lola. 

Imagine me, thirteen, in an orange frill dress, swirling and twirling to songs of the land, with palm leaves swaying, power lines spinning, and the sun and moon violently rioting against a blue, cloudless sky. I am smiling at myself, and clinking scores and scores of bangles buttoning my hands, in a secluded corner of our gray, cemented roof. And I feel like Lola. A strong, powerful, independent girl, in the shape of a man. The frills give me power. The bangles make me stern. The powder on my cheeks makes me stiff, and upper-lipped like the Victorian girl from television. My hands are in a V sprouting from my chest, and I am spinning like a top. My feet are buried in sandals, and the frills form cones from my waist to my legs, churning air, fanning bees, and giving out an aroma of mandarin sugar. I am lip sticked in pink, caked in foundation, and pieces of handkerchief are pinned to my hair. And I am giggling at myself; my smiles vanishing in the tips of my fingers. The heaviness of the evening air feels like clusters of cherries slipping down the plateau of my light brown cheeks. And in a shrill resonant screech, I yelp out loud Lola, it's time. 

My neighbor from West Street sees me like that. And freezes. And tip toes away to her ground floor bed. Through her windows I see thongs and rosaries splayed across a tray of tiles. 

For five years after, the Rosenthals and Silvermans, know me as Lola. Little brown Lola, in orange frills and make up. In cloth hair and rhinestones. In white nails and necklace. In pearls and turquoise and violent diamonds. Spinning on a roof. Gaping at the sky. Twirling and spinning and whirling and coiling. Wriggling and swooshing and purling and roiling. Flapping my soul till I fall to the ground. 

This is me, Lola. Welcome to the other side of me. 

In the snow

It is snowing in the quad today. And at least a dozen high schoolers are here on tours talking about scholarships, PhDs, and raising families. I was in a hurry, earlier, to get coffee and caramel; it has been a long day already, and the sky is gray. 

A girl on the stairwell, with a neat braid and lipstick, reminded me of you. Reminded me of the April you came to New York, with your luxury bags and sunken eyes. We chatted on Facebook for three days, reliving a past we didn't remember, and decided to meet up at the patio by Butler Library. And when we did meet, it felt like nothing had changed. We picked up the threads, where we had left, and laughed and hallucinated and drank Vermouth till wee hours of daybreak. 

We would walk to Alma's statue, sticking out like a toe nail at the steps of Low. And you would look at her crown and giggle and shout out loud 'She's worn it for ninety fucking years. She's possibly even seen Eisenhower. What a champ!'. And then we would walk to the statue of the Thinker and sit on the grass by Philosophy. You would laugh, suddenly. Saying that the blades tickled your thighs, and you could feel mist on your underwear. And we would chat about life, and catch up on stories, of careers, communions, and the blue-green of the Pacific. You would talk about Connecticut, being a city girl, and the heinous politics behind the Pulitzer. We would strap our arms around each other's and listen to the wind percussing on our ears. We knew we were gay. You with a lady, me with a man. Yet, enwrapped, we found solace and happiness --the way two strangers become friends. 

People say that there is no undoing when you become friends. But life is more complicated than that. There are entanglements. There are boundaries that you maintain, because friendships are fragile and have sensitive ends. You and I have toured together every corner of our home, with the glitter and aromas of New York City sprinkled along our eyes. We hesitated at parties, smirked at children, talked about literature by fireplaces in Brooklyn, where creativity and the cool are known to erupt. We talked about marriage, and raising kids, the looks of your sperm donor and his wardrobe. We went to the piers along the colors of the Hudson, and stared at athletes oiling there abs, wrapping bandanas around their dark blond hair, and playing with the tips of their light brown nipples. There were moments of solitary understanding. Even if we didn't say anything, we understood each other and what they call body's hidden languages. Finally, the time came, and we moved on with our lives, as you entered into your Chelsea home with the dying landlady, bubbling to her death with systemic metastasis. 

What I would think about, while laying on my bed, is our parents. You told them of a boy. Mine didn't talk. We lived in a shroud of lies. And no one barring you and me knew about her, the one you married after Amelia died on Passover. We talked about secrecy a long time back, by the Thinker, on a muggy September evening, and you said you were tired of lying to them about being with a Wall Street shmuck. But courage takes time. And there is no undoing. And when the time is ready, you will set yourself free. 

I go back to thinking about the girl on the stairwell. And why she reminds me so much of you. Maybe it is the eyes --dark, sunken, tired. Or maybe it is Alma. Who knows? The curiosity will slide, and I will be back to my business. But know that you are thought of. And loved. 

so gray

I felt a thunderous jolt of displeasure after I asked you to figure out your plan today. It felt like a shell was lifted. That a point was reinforced. But I know you. And I know it must have pricked. And it must have felt like my words pierced through every opening of your skin. It may be a reminder of an impossibility over which I have little to no control. And I sympathize with you. Sincerely.

It is January 7th. Early for a year that ended in mistletoes crystallizing over doorsteps in the Upper West Side. And homeless people shattering in shards as they freeze in the extreme of a cold millenial winter. And the sky looked like a canopy of bleached pigeon feathers. Gray. Lonely. And desolate.

I thought of you.  

December 20

I saw you fidget at the northern tip of the sidewalk, as we waited patiently, after the show, for the traffic lights to turn red from green. You took out your cellular phone from the side of your coat pocket, punched in a few numbers, and slid it back in, several times, over the course of four minutes. This was 66th Street and Broadway; about 7pm on a cold December night when Christmas lights were sparkling on the facade of the Lincoln Center plaza. 

You had Tracy tattooed across your pale left palm, and 2006 across your right. And you fanned yourself vigorously with the Playbill brochure, till the bus came and stopped in front of you. You looked at me and smiled, alerted by the inexplicable sensitivity that comes with being observed. You walked up the steps, scanned your bus ticket, and instead of walking to a seat you gave the bus driver a large bag filled with cake you recently bought from Cafe Boulud. And then stepped down from the bus, with water in your eyes, tears that you could no longer hide, and walked away.

I followed you for almost three and a half blocks, and yelled Hey there! Are you okay? You stopped immediately. And folded your knees, and contorted your elbows, and sat on the sidewalk. I walked up to you and asked, Is everything okay, Sir? You paused for a while and then said, It's just the memories, you know? They're rough tonight. What about them? I asked. To which you pulled out a picture from your wallet and gave it to me. She died, eight years ago, when a bus hit her in that exact spot on this very day. I let you talk, as tears rolled down your eyes, and your fingers quivered in paternal angst. 

After a minute of silence, you said to me, And so I buy cake from her favorite shop and give it to the bus driver who comes at the exact same time every year, in memory of my girl, the person who always made me smile. And then you looked at the sky, cleared your throat and whispered softly, Sweetie, do you hear me? Daddy loves you very much.  

 

chocolate bar

A little chocolate wrapper, fluttering around the corner edge of 85th Street and Lexington, speckled with mud and fractured snowflakes, reminded me of our encounter with Harold in the summer of 2004. Remember him from your old neighborhood? He used to live with his mother and a widowed aunt who made tulip bracelets for supplementary income down the alleyway from the train tracks. When he came up to you and said, can you give me food? I haven't eaten in two days, you grabbed my hand, and let go of the lilac vase you were carrying to give to Rita before the circus. The hand-grabbing didn't mean anything. It was friendly, impulsive, and reactionary. A lot of things we did as kids didn't have double meanings or distorted motives. They were simple; heartfelt, sincere, and playfully innocent. Adulthood, on the other hand, brought in layers and layers of unnecessary complexity; things that didn't have to have meaning, things that didn't have to offend, or make anyone uncomfortable about anything. 

But you grabbed my hand, as a reflux, perhaps, and while the vase shattered into pieces, you took out a chocolate bar and gave it to him. He cried, took the chocolate bar and ran away --dropping the wrapper by a driveway. Three days later, he died in a car accident. I lay a tube rose at our meeting spot. It made the news.

observations in November

I find it particularly hilarious that they call you Lucifer, because you apparently glow in the dark. Like a transfer protein. Because you are stowed away, along the folds of a pocket notebook. And forgotten. And re-invented. And re-discovered in your glory 47 years later. You came from a damp rural town in eastern Norway. And sank into Brooklyn till they took you out from the corridor. Lifeless and pale. Your hands folded in the shape of your flag. And your frozen lips in a perpetual smile. Blue gray and particularly cracked. I stared into your open eye -you forgot to shut the lids before you died - and there was hollowness and history. That was my first encounter with lifelessness. 

The Rabbi that day tormented me for my garment. And my lack of prayer. He compared me to a water lily and stroked his beard fourteen times before reading a poem in Hebrew. I sneezed at the congregation, and shut myself into a box of gelatin, with the kippah falling off my head, and my skin becoming brittle. 

Today, I walked into a lake by the scientists' cafeteria, and sat in the middle of it, counting the number of honeybees buzzing around the library. There were five. And one on the ground. There was a couple holding hands, wrestling like maniacs. Her name was Athena and his was Elijah. They were married when they were 10 in a refugee camp in the far East. She left a trail of tears as she walked back to her motor car. I ran over and traced the water trail to a bathroom, where I found a smear of blood. On the wall, it said, Unborn Child #9.

 

the eye problem

When you wear an incorrectly powered contact lens on your left eye, inadvertently or purposefully in my case, your eye forms red tangles. It is blood. Oxygen-filled. A hundred days old. Circulating within erupted venules, and chirping away songs of the spring of 1989. There are polished edges near the lens, that have voices. Record-keeping, and narrating; there are memories in your eyes, like in the twang of your vernacular. It is the time for harvest -when you sit in silence, balm on your head, drinking coffee, and think about making mistakes.

abrupt

When we sat down to eat at the burger joint on Lexington Avenue, little did I know you had a history of divorce, crystal meth, HIV, and a son who has turned his face against you. My situation is the contrary -adrift, and afloat on an ocean of memories. It has been four years since I have seen them face to face. We try in different ways to reconfigure relationships; you crochet, and I weave, and yet the fabric is never seamless.

I walked into a closet of light bulbs at the end of yesterday. They were smooth cheeked, hallucinogenic, and timid in a way dimples burst across their foreheads. For seventeen minutes and nine seconds, I whistled bluegrass tunes, and scrunched fourteen bulbs using my right fingers, till I smelled mica in my blood trails. The day ended with the sun squirming into a horizon cushioned with dust pillows from the chimneys.

Abrupt.

Life has been whirling in a polychromatic spiral of possibilities and impossibilities, and the cataracts of unions closing in chasms of institutionalism. We see babies, and dead bodies swinging in the same air under the veil of ritual. And I feel the contortion of your cravings crackling and bursting across electronic paragraphs, where I imagine you, behind an illuminated blanket of pixels, reddening with lust, pulling your clitoris, shaking your head in semi-circles, the primal aroma of manhood pirouetting in your kitchen. I imagine the air suckling perfume from your apron, in front of a radio, playing Elvis Costello. And then you are laying on a rug, holding a book, your bright white legs splayed apart perpendicularly, reading about enema as you prepare for the night. I imagine a name for you. Eugenia Wallace. Or Hilda Koch. You in a corset. Your breasts squeezed into the shape of seedless raspberries, popping over the curvature of lace and leather. Standing beside your loveseat, you sing songs of fire birds and thunder. And when the clouds melt into balls of rain, you walk to the forest and meditate on where you were left behind. On who held your hand, who stole your shoes, and who measured your shadows. And rumination bubbles in your blood orifices a magnetic covetousness. A craving to be attended to, to be loved, and held beside. 

Shadows, from the outside, are short-lived. But the path you have tread, the gravel you have stamped, the air you have exhaled, have left elements of presence in the midst of particulars. This is an urge to refold yourself into happiness. To smile like a canary dancing in the sunshine. To buy yourself a compliment of strength and fidelity, and to tell yourself -this is a life worth living.

around the house

The way our arteries pulse at night -I could substitute our market of clocks with the microphonic bang of contractile body bells to resonate in the corners of my ocean-colored study. I feel the rise and fall of fluid permeating under your skin, and fleeting to your fingers. It has the permanent sound of a flea market on a Saturday morning.

The candle on my nightstand is muted by remote controllers that burned the wick; to a point I hear requiems at sunrise, when the clouds, blueish-white, are waiting in line to shower.

The curtain on the North window is squeezed around its navel to fit an eye lash of the wrought iron grille that was put up in 1942 to prevent burglary in my tenement. It looks like the cut-out of a corset, pleated like a skirt. Mary Wessler said, it's so vanilla, i could lick it. So I took pictures this morning and sent them to Cherry magazine, because they sell posters of lonely curtains. 

There are four glasses on the floor, sweating from the cold water that I poured into them 3 minutes ago. There were fruit flies in them this afternoon that I chased around the house, and blew air behind their wing pockets till they flew away into the air outside the confines of 319 east and circled back to the neighbors faucet. I broke their fly families, and felt a little sad. How long do fly families survive? I wonder. 

And I flipped through four or five books since I got back from the sauna; my skin reddish-violet from the 184 degrees inside. I love the feeling of sweat trickling down my shoulder and chest hair, and the strength of the heat clearing my mind of unnecessary worries. The books were tragedies. Personal tragedies. One, a bronchitis story. And others about autistic kids or disabled infants. I started thinking about Grandma, and missed her terribly. Her lungs wrestling -this mental image of her skinny, bony body tiring away to remnants of soot from charcoal stoves. Ones on which she cooked, post-Independence when my father was ten, and flying kites against clear blue skies in the July of 1963.

Letter to Mother II

Dear Mother,

I got a message from Gary last evening on Facebook saying "Tom, I need to talk to you." Do you remember Gary from Mount Eden Center? We used to hang out a lot in elementary school and then he and his family moved away to New Hampshire and we sort of lost contact. I messaged him back, asked how he and the Doll's were doing and if everything was okay. "Not really," he responded, "I came out to them a few days ago and they were so angry that they don't want me to meet with any of my friends. Needless to say, they took away my cell phone and won't let me do anything before I talk to a therapist. They're like...this is just a phase Gary. Don't be silly. Talk to the therapist and things will be fine. But I know myself, and this is not a phase, Tom. I just wanted to reach out to you because I learned from Facebook that you have a boy friend and was wondering if you have any words of advice." I told him what I had to say, and he said it comforted him. It made me happy.

The conversation got me thinking about sixth grade when you came up to me one day and said, "I learned from Mrs Ringer today that Johnny is a fairy. Fairies can sometimes do bad things. You shouldn't mix with him too much from now on, okay?" "Okay," I said, not knowing what I was agreeing to or what bad things fairies can do. A year later, on a Tuesday evening, while you were drinking cognac with Aunt Marla, I overheard her say, "You've got to be careful about him, dear. I saw him on the roof from my window the other day. And he was wearing his sister's velvet frock and clapping. You don't want him to be one of those now, do you?" I ran away from home that night, and cried under the stars, and stayed at A. Weissman's place till sunrise. And when I turned 16, you asked me that afternoon, "Any good girls in school, baby? I told Marla yesterday that you're all ready to date the prettiest of them all."

That remark set off some kind of a compressed spring in my system. Even though I had never dated women in the past, I thought that I could ease into it. I imagined every other man doing it, so why couldn't I? Perhaps, if I truly loved and valued someone, I could just as easily be in a happy, committed relationship with that person, irrespective of gender. And if I got more emotionally invested, and the relationship became more serious, one day I would realize that loving boys was, perhaps, a short-lived whim, a tiny speckle of my imagination and more like a go-to cushion of satisfaction because I didn't know any better or otherwise.

And then I met someone unexpectedly on a Saturday evening at a diner in the suburbs of New Haven. She was with a boy, I remember; perhaps a cousin or a negligent lover, with dark drooping eyes and pompadour haircut. And I was with you and Irene Goodman, cater-cornered from her, drinking lemon tea and eating raspberry scones. While waiting in line to use the restroom, she and I randomly started chatting about fiction books. It was Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge for me and Claude Simon's The Acacia for her. The conversation lasted about a minute and a half before we heard someone flush the toilet followed by a grating whoosh of the hand dryer. As I peered into her cornflower blue eyes, moistened by periodic blinking, she said, "Wanna hang out sometime?" "That'd be cool," I said, warily. "Well, here's my number," she added, as she pulled out an olive-inked felt pen and a small piece of recycled paper from her magenta twill pant pockets and scribbled it down. "Text me whenever you want to," she said and went inside the restroom. While walking out she smiled awkwardly, lifted her right hand as if to wave at the wall and said in a hushed, muffled voice, "Have a wonderful night."

We reconnected, a few days later. I texted her saying, "Hi Liana, this is Tom. We met at Barry's in Maltby Lakes. You asked me to text you, remember? How's it going?" She replied within a few hours saying, "Hi Tom. Have been waiting for your text all this while. Things are going well. How've you been?" And that is how the slew of text communication began. The idea was simple, I told myself: Try your utmost to focus on her and don't think about boys. If your mind does, however, start to wander away, rewind your thoughts like bits of plastic tape spinning around spools of old audio cassettes and reset your focus. Tell yourself that you can do this and keep moving forward.

For the next few weeks, bleeps and buzzes and short acoustic rings from my cellular phone suctioned me up to the rim of excitement. My phone would beep in the middle of art lectures, at the end of synthetic chemistry lab courses, and infrequently, in the beginning of ballet lessons and I would reply to each text carefully within a few minutes. By the end of third week, terms of endearment sprouted up. "Good morning babe" she would say; or "Have a wonderful day, honeybear." And on our fourth week of cellular courting, she wrote, "Babe, I've been thinking about running away to Santa Monica with you. I'm miserable here without the ocean."

The novelty of the possibility of dating a girl, and the possibility of reinstating, what society calls, a normal and natural attraction adequately seasoned the enthusiasm in my responses back to her. Under the circumstances, I got the attention I needed, started to somehow feel a strong emotional connection, sensed a mutual romantic interest, and felt a genuine element of happiness while interacting with her. Text messages began to interweave emotions and expectations and myriad responsibilities shortly, leaving me suffused with boluses of endorphins. I felt like I was living in a glass cage in a mystical state of quasi-euphoria --in that same over-the-top ecstasy that consumes a runner towards the last few miles of a marathon or while slicing through layers of crisp, tangerine air on the backseat of a roller coaster. The emotions that developed were real and raw, but I didn't know what they were. Was it love? I asked myself. Was it just a playful obsession? Or perhaps, a childish crush? Whatever it was, it felt authentic and undiluted in its strength to a point where I second-guessed loving boys for the first time in my life. It felt liberating to think that I could be like the other guys in school who affectionately talked about girlfriend responsibilities, and more importantly that I could bring her home to a family event without you and Daddy feeling uncomfortable, embarrassed or being shamed by other people.

I sometimes wish that you had met her. You would've loved her like your own daughter, given how similar your tastes and interests are. At other times, however, I am glad that the meeting never happened, because when she would eventually find out about my being gay, you would, understandably, chide me for toying with her emotions, and tell me that I should've known myself better and made up my mind about identity preferences. In your world, everything is black or white, but it isn't so in mine. I still think about her, though. Her welfare, her happiness, her career goals of rural obstetrics. Her russet curls and refined smiles, as delicate and light as large soap bubbles. Her adventurous eyes, like rings of topaz, infused with gelatin and an origami of tender muscles, and the tattoo on her breast in ancient calligraphy that read Liberate The Rebel. She loved volleyball, white wine and garlands of seashells, but most of all she loved Nature as a priest and a father. Her mother, she said, was Marilyn Monroe. And the guest list on her fridge magnet read Georgia O'Keeffe, Sally Bowles, and Indira Gandhi.

The night we became a couple was a humid, September Wednesday when pellets of mist were foaming in the air. We were at the Turtle Pond in Central Park, staring at the Grunwald monument, talking intermittently about Nixon and Bill Clinton, and the injustices of racial profiling when she said, "Can I ask you a question, T?" "Sure, go ahead. What's up?" I replied, seventy eight percent certain what the question was going to be. "We've been chatting for about six weeks now, and I like you a lot, and I think you like me too. So, I was wondering...do you want to be in an exclusive relationship with me?" I said yes. Flatly --without feeling any emotion. I don't know why I didn't feel any emotion that very instant, because via text, the connection seemed strong. It came out involuntarily, like a knee jerk response at the crux of the situation, which of course made her giggle and chuckle and cry with happiness. As for me, I became breathless with apprehension, nervousness, and a battery of misgivings; it felt like I was drowning at the intersection of lies and deceit. But I folded myself back together, drew a deep breath, and engaged in a full-bodied hug, feeling her breasts squash against my chest. And then she rested her head on the bony groove of my right shoulder and caressed my neck in gentle swirls, as tips of my body hair bristled underneath the weight of her fuchsia painted nails. A minute later, as my lips lay quivering like a lightning-struck tuning fork, she kissed me --warm, and deep, and tangibly heavy as I pulled my tongue back in the shape of a c, touching the flesh of my burnt upper palate. I felt strips of her tongue push through gaps of my teeth, beads of spittle leaping onto the floor of my mouth. And we sat still for a few long seconds -transfixed with emotions and odors of nervousness, before we resumed staring at the monument, discussing politics, and the injustices of racial profiling. Her nipples were hard and visibly aroused, popping like buttons through her peach-colored blouse, but for me, there was only a feeling of fearful empty hollowness -not a single trace of an erection.

You probably wonder why, then, did I say Yes when I knew it wasn't going to work, perhaps raising your expectations of my having a normal life? Why did I say Yes when I knew I had feelings for boys and ultimately wouldn't be interested? I wish I had a simple answer to that, but I don't. Emotions are complicated, and I couldn't parse out a crush from love; an obsession from real, grounded sentimentality. More importantly, I just couldn't bring myself to say No on her face, which was so perfectly lit up with a soft romance when she asked me the question. I've always had trouble saying No to things I knew would make someone infinitely happy. And the proposition of a relationship was no exception for me. Did I do the right thing, in retrospect? Absolutely not, and there are no legitimate excuses to prove otherwise. But I tell myself, people often say "You never know unless you try." So I tried, half-expecting the outcome. But I tried nonetheless.

Few days into our relationship, the reality of a serious commitment severely jolted me into a state of fear. There were expectations, and obligations, and timetables were created. And e-cards, wake-up messages, and voicemails of missing me and loving me gripped me full-throttle. I became hesitant and second-guessed myself every minute of every day. Yet, I couldn't bring myself to say Liana, this isn't working. I couldn't bring myself to rupture her heart with splinters of my identity confusions when trust and affection were beginning to build. I couldn't look into her eyes and tell her that I had to leave; that she should find another man, that she should be freed. However, my self-loathing and bitterness never went away. I wore costumes and masks of the affable phantom; rehearsing my lines and readying my acts as reluctance gave way to miscommunications which eventually tipped the relationship along a downward spiral. Life became a gimmick --a constant game of hide-and-seek with charades, facades and situational alibis. The hardest of all was during the holidays, when we drove back to her parent's home in the belly of the woods, and sat on the patio overlooking the lake, and talked about how happy and fortunate their daughter was to have found me. "It's nothing short of a miracle!" her mother said, "I knew God would answer my prayers." Despite my refusal of sex, my discomfort with public display of affection and despite the rockiness of my emotions, she loved me  and thinking about all the sacrifices she made over the year makes me choke up. In my defense, however, I tried as hard as I could to be in love with a woman and to have a heterosexual relationship. What didn't occur naturally, I doctored it up --paying attention to Hollywood, texts from favorite novels and even conversations with chums. But there was no love in the empty vessel that was me, only friendliness and wan obsession. And on a Friday night, one year from the Turtle Pond, while going through pictures of Sister's engagement party on my phone together, a text notification popped up on top of the screen. The 917 number was saved to my address book as Jackson S. It said, "Last night was hot, man. I want you to fuck me again. As hard as you can. Free tomorrow by any chance? I'll be home by 7." She looked up, let go of my phone, and said, "I knew it, Tom. I knew it."

I tried three more times, thinking that the first relationship probably didn't work out because she wasn't the right person for me, but all of them ended badly. One found me stumbling out of a gay sex club in Fort Lauderdale at 1 am on a Tuesday, drunk out of my mind in a leather jockstrap, when I was supposed to have been sleeping at Aunt Lori's condominium after helping her move. In the morning when she said, "I love you" and I said "I love you too" she became the color of a ripe strawberry and yelled "Get the fuck out of my life, you fucking faggot liar." The second, while attempting to check her email on my computer, found innumerable bookmarked links to gay pornographic sites. She sought refuge in an asylum nearby shortly after, suffering from chronic depression from being with a fourth guy who happened to be gay. And the third one, after soulful thinking and a few weeks of mindful meditation, came out to me as a femme lesbian. In that circumstance, we were both relieved. It was a win-win situation. Love for boys is not a choice or an addiction, it is the normal for people like me. It is the instinctive natural. Boys are what raise eyebrows, make the heart flutter, and cause erections. It is not an alternative, or a cop-out mechanism that Benny and his wife drilled into your brain, to make you believe that mine was the easier way of life. Being gay is hard; exhausting, tiring and emotionally taxing. But what I want you to realize is that sexuality, for me and for many people like me, is not an open tab. It is not a flexible on-off switch as they make you believe in your neighborhood of cultists. It is not "doing whatever makes me happy"; rather, it is the platform of emerging happiness.

Many people out there continue to believe that the minority status that paints my identity can be fixed by the callings of Jesus, and the Krishna and a handful of either deities. Success stories of "gay conversions" spread like wildfire in the religious circles that lend credibility to the family spheres, providing hope that perhaps the right camp, the right proselyte can make the miracle transformation. As for me, I have tried your normal, I have tried heterosexuality, I have tried from the bottom of my soul to love women and have a wife, but the mechanics of us gay men don't necessarily work that way. And I write to you, to say, that because of the false hopefulness that organizations promise, that religious leaders vow to create, hundreds and thousands of little boys and mature adults are wriggling and squirming under the burden of handicap; with fractured identities and unhappiness.

In the past few years, several advances have been made, at least on paper, for gay men and women in my neck of the world. Social liberation, they call it. Or perhaps, emancipation of another minority class.  To truly liberate a class, there needs to be an attitudinal shift; revocation of prejudice, termination of targeted biases and re-morphing of the existing image. We are only at a point where ripples are being generated on the skin of the social curtain. It takes time, they all say. Give it a generation. But the burden of identity discrimination even through the span of a generation can take its toll on innumerable queers as we are guarded within a cage of apparent cowardice, defectives and other personality follies. Why not think of an attitudinal shift as a sort of community service? A service that can help battle scars of self-loathing, thoughts of suicide and covert misery. That can prevent closeted husbands from renting hotel rooms and fucking boys and juggling sexual diseases between the barometer of the "straight-acting life" and true identity undertakings. Coming out, as I have realized, is contagious in the sense, it provides support to people on the edge. It provides validation to countless men and women living in a nebulous cloud, not knowing what life is like when the ball is dropped.

I overheard a professor's husband say the other day, "Those queens just want too much attention. They're obnoxious in general, and now they've started completely stream-rolling over everyone's civil and religious liberties." This is what breaks humanity into little pieces -that present attitudinal stronghold of bitterness and resentment against a supposed "lifestyle choice." People often say, forget about the petty differences and look at the bigger picture and be united for more important causes. But it is hard, when you are made to feel like an outsider, pushed aside and isolated and made to live like an island beside the mainland, and asked to make the extra effort to meld into the mainstream. Acceptance, I realize, is easier said than done. In my rally to advocate for people of my kind, I sincerely wish that the lubrication of social upheaval begins at home, sooner rather than later, and eventually spreads from node to node of community and state lines to remolding of nations and continents alike. And yes, Johnny maybe a fairy, and his kids may never have anyone to call Mother, but they will be loved, in their own little ways, with their own little dolls and fairies. 

Hope you are well.

Love,
T.