seeing your window

Dear Eddie, 

I thought about you a few nights ago, while walking back home, really drunk, from the Wallflower Bar on 12th Street. I had had 4 glasses of wine by then without even realizing it because I was so into the conversation with Peter Sanger, my old classmate from Harvard. We didn't talk about anything you and I used to talk about. Instead, we talked about business -numbers, figures, data and social rhetoric. It was good in a way, liberating even, to touch his skin -even if it was brief and sincere and self-admittedly professional. We laughed a lot, made noise to a point a waiter had to come and ask us to "keep it down a little bit", embraced each other like a father and daughter, firmly and rigorously and intentionally full-bodied, and joked around about Chris Wilkins fucking the tutor on Sunday nights by Wigglesworth. He's come a long way with his insecurities about height, bought a studio apartment on the 11th floor of Jane Cottage, working out of Berkeley now, in data mining and population design and plays dodgeball in a gay league every weekend since February. A full life, he calls it. Plays golf with his father at a country club in Long Island, fasts on Yom Kippur, and spends seventy five dollars on liquor by the end of every week. He's charming, and amiable and piercingly smart, but I sense loneliness in his smile. I can tell that he wants to be touched more, held more, and loved, more, by people. We get so caught up with New York sometimes, that we forget people. We forget what personhood means when all we do is increase our tallies of people as objects, of men as objects and women as toys. Everyone deserves love in a way, you know. Everyone does. Peter and I spoke about this for a very long time, for the last hour at least, and about effortless dates, about wanting to settle down and about finding boyfriends, about adversity and disappointment and about sustainable friendships. One of the biggest problems with New York is that we can't form a sustainable network of friends or lovers or fuck buddies because man-the-object is treated as something disposable, easily sacrificial and conveniently replaceable. To invest in a friendship, to drill into an ultimatum -oh why should you ever want to do that? Perchance the swinger on Christopher Street or the drag queen on Waverly can be your liaison to someone hotter, better and sexier. You are uprooted in your position of even friends because you're not the face of glamor anymore, because you cannot provide the wow-making, you cannot be suitable for continuous camaraderie. Why? Because you're knocked down, like a chess piece, plucked aside in a wooden box, and stowed away till a new player starts the game.

We got Japanese food later. A sizzler of fried, curried octopus limbs, some sauteed sea urchin called Uni, two bottles of Orion lager and a braised duck hot pot. I managed to wink at the bartender twice. Woof! He was hot as hell, with nice fleshy arms, ocean blue eyes, and a bright silver hairline. He seemed really really nice and even gave us a lot of really tempting offers about the evening's dining specialties, cocktails and desserts. But, they are all really nice aren't they? Is it genuine? or just part of their job? To attract, to allure, to draw you in so much that you feel heard, paid attention to and temporarily cared about? We, in America, demand "being nice" a little too much of customer service, I think -it feels unreal to think about. But such is our culture of service with a smile. You've got your problems, deal with your problems, I don't need to know. Or want to know. Or care to know about what's going on in that brain of yours. Don't burden me with your issues, whether you have a dead pet or a heroin addiction, because all I care about is me. Me. Me. Me. And only Me. And, the way you're serving me -because I'm paying you. I'm buying the way you're going to behave with me. And if you don't, I will not tip you. I will complain to your manager and give you a terrible review on Yelp so that you are fired from your current enterprise. For every customer, you will remold, you will play the game again, and change the way you do business to cater to them, and please them just the way they want. You, Mr Bartender, will be my puppet, and your heart will be a bismuth spade, that will freeze to cement when you are on the stage, working with a smile, serving with a smile and providing to a crowd an agency of pleasure. You shall be flawless, you shall be ideal, you shall abide by my rule book or else -leave. You will be sent away, and replaced, again, with a perfect host. With a straw doll of glamor in Oxfords and plaid, in heels and shoeshine, and lipstick and rouge who will smile at me, pretend to care and refill my water just as I please.

We stuck around at the Fish Camp for about an hour or so and then started walking towards his place. He wanted to show me the roof deck of his building. But while walking back on 4th Street, I glanced at your building and noticed your window. The light was on, and looked like shy against the width of your frosted glass. I tried not to look, but I couldn't help it. I loved you once, and the curiosity never went away. I tried again not to look up, but I kept doing it anyway; smiling at Peter all this while. Don't Look Up, I kept telling myself. Don't Look Up. But I kept looking up, and finally just stared at your window for a few moments. And I saw what you didn't want me to see. Shadows. I wished it was a shadow of you. Just you. But you've taken to the plural again. It was you and someone else, holding each other. Kissing each other. Your tongues folding in on each other. Your fingers tracing up and down against the sigmoid of his back. You held his head, you brushed his hair, and you stood up straight and bent again. I wanted to disbelieve. I wanted to stab my eyes and blind myself -blow away my power fuse like a switch, like pressing hard on the nipples of aging candle wicks. I wanted to tell myself, that it was only a figment of my imagination, it was only a quadrant of my insecurity, but Eddie, silhouettes don't lie. Silhouettes cannot lie. They are the leeches of physics, the followers of actions, never a traitor, never a betrayer -only magnified sometimes and diminished during others. And at that very moment, my blood shot up. My heart started spinning like a bicycle wheel, and I couldn't breathe anymore. My legs started shaking, my brain started screaming, and I became epileptic with spasms. So dangerously severe, I turned blue in the middle of the street. And I convulsed, and buckled and bent like a snake, and slithered by the lamp post like an ovulating worm, and felt the binding materials of my skin shedding away, like an avalanche on Everest. My glands were burning, my ribs were ringing, and my bones were left to rattle on their own. My face swelled up, like an inflated grape, and my shoulders cramped. My nostrils flared, like hot air balloons, and my chest collapsed into a hollow bowl. And second by second, I felt increasingly choked. Like there was poison in my veins propelled by valves whipping up blood in delirious tango. I could feel your lips Eddie. I could feel your touch. I could feel your squeeze around the circumference of my neck. I could feel your erection against the fabric of my pants and I felt jealous, so miserably jealous, that I wanted to tear all my hair out, and just scream for twenty minutes. 

But Peter noticed my sweat, and heard my cry. And picked me by my arms and dragged me to his home, and seated me in his roof deck, where I fell in love with my city all over again. The lights twinkled like gems on a crown in the distance nearby. It was magical, and surreal, and made me miss you terribly. 

I have moved on from you, a long time ago. Or tried to at least. But I will never forget you, and even if it's a sliver of my age, I will remember you with fondness. Forever.

I hope you read this someday in your life.

Best,

T.