Dear Book

Dear Book,

Even though you and I do not share any dregs of DNA, I often think of you as my third parent -the way you are nurturing yet strict, provocative yet calming. You speak to me inaudibly in creative metaphors, action words and clusters of compacted idioms but I hear your voice loudly and clearly ringing through the folds of my brain as it seeps into my mind, and settles into my thoughts like a sprinkling of sawdust pulled into cohesion by the brawny arms of gravity. Your voice serves a multi-dimensional purpose: instigative at times, often invocatory, while wrapping me up in threads of emotions uncoiling, as if, from a spindle. You can bring joy and sadness within matter of minutes, alternating like a pendulum bob, through a simple act of comprehension; the edges of your alphabets dripping with beads of melancholia or whiffs and rinds of celebration. Contained within you is the spectrum of emotionality that remains couched behind the darkness of India ink, behind stretches of sentences with colons and apostrophes, and the devised anatomy of paragraphs. Reading through your skin, the bouquet of sentences, reveals the contents of your guts, your past history, the traces of your genealogy, and the messages you harness. You teach without sounds, you speak without lips and stay reliable through the storms of adolescence and adulthood, that brew and strengthen and accumulate with time, experience and inconsolable tragedy. 

Holding you, or even just seeing you standing on the wood shelf, brings back memories from a long time ago. Betty D. adopted you from the local thrift store for seventy-five cents and brought you back to my parents house in a charcoal-colored plastic bag. I clothed you that afternoon in a brown paper skirt, combed around the sleeves and polished the semicircular ribbing spread across your spine, listening to the songs of rain pattering on the grass outside. For the next several days, I sat out on the patio and read your words, swelling up with emotions along the way. When Mother and Father went out for work for large stretches of time, delivering babies and suturing amputees, I would place my head on your firm paper body and tilt my ears to the side, hoping to hear sounds of vowels shuffling across your weighty stack. It would bring me joy, and comfort and solace in a way no other thing or person could. I never felt lonely with just your company, because you educated me, made me think, and challenged my beliefs. I clutched on to you the night Grandmother died, wriggling and squirming in her bed as emphysema gnawed away the bulbs of her alveoli. It brought comfort to me and a sense of closure. I took you in my book bag my first day of college, knowing I could talk to you if no one else did. And I surrounded myself with stencils of your words when people dismissed my sexuality. I have felt coupled to you all along because of your quality to fascinate me alongside your patience, your gentleness and kind demeanor. I romanticized, as a child, a future with you. And sometimes I feel that little has changed, even after seventeen long years.

A lot of people completely underestimate your personality. They look at you pityingly or objectify you completely or treat you as just a book. They ignore your body smells, your own pattern of aging and the fact that you bruise easily. They miss the the sound of flutter rushing across your leaves, fail to observe the bends and turns along the blunted rims of your abdomen, and gloss over the personal memories you evoke just by being you. They make bags out of your scales, decorative pieces for their homes, or sometimes even fashionable garments -immune to the sounds of your cries or your unconventional lisp, as they break open your rib cage or yank out your extremities. Since today is the age of convenience, portability and efficiency, a fair share of consumers have decided to digitalize you. They will preserve your words behind the rhomboid of an illuminated screen and access your outer casing through buttons and switches. All your friends and peers will be given shelter in the memory chip of the same device, categorized under file names. And you will vanish from the tangible to an abstract intangible, accessible only through puddles of liquid crystals fractionating and colliding on the interface of skin and glass. The feel of your follicles, the unevenness of your skin, the aroma of the non-multiplicative dead cells polygon-ed across each page -somehow they will not matter. The possibility of doodling and hand writing notes beside arcs of black typescript will not be relevant. Being able to flip through the sheaf of your constituents or laughing to your narratives with balls of spittle flying in heightened trajectory and landing on your laminated coverlet are deemed optional and unimportant. So, you are re-formatted by the know-it-all tycoons and publishers and book company magnates and electrocuted; militarized in a way, and made to be uniform.

I am thinking of the time you were used as a weapon, flung to my head out of a fit of rage. The time you were hidden from my mahogany shelf, serving as a repercussion for my rebellion and disobedience. But there was also that time when I leaned on your shoulder after receiving twenty rejection letters from professional school applications. I relish at your mysteries in the front car of the subway, as the rest of the commuters titter away to paradoxes of comedy clubs. You are my prized possession as I walk around the park, while the residents of the city glamorize for television, doll-up like marionettes wired to culture, and sparkle like rhinestones in cages of mirrors. Most importantly, you are like a parent -a role-model of tolerance, a constant companion and a person of reliance, as Mother and Father tend to the poor, continents and oceans away. I have not seen them in four full years, but seeing you keeps me going.

Despite what others say, you are not inanimate or lifeless. For me, you are a shelter of comfort, a trove of knowledge and an organic catalyst for lifelong learning; fertilizing ideas, aiding the sprout and blossom of innovations, and egging on minds to re-evaluate beliefs of politics and society. People in past civilizations have tried to burn your predecessor, fearing education may backfire against their personal vile. All of that because you are powerful, you are important, and you are necessary. You are the book, the beautiful soul, smiling for centuries to come.

Sincerely,
T.

question

the way, mary jane, you say you hurt, 
make me think that you have a heart made with 10 million packets 
of Domino sugar, powdered Bon Bons and yellow, Indian sand.

i want to hold the periphery of your cheek
and massage Olive oil, camphor and chocolate.
everywhere. behind your ears. nipples.
and the inner folds of your hibiscus vagina.

i want to scratch the lesions 
around your navel. lick your blood
to taste how saccharine and sugary you can be,
and stitch dandelions to your toes.

so that you may have a reason to smile.
and eat breakfast of sunshine, figs and lotus roots.
for dinner you may drink a swirlie
of tears, sweat and almonds 
encased in the confines of a narrow perimeter.
where rivers have birthed, 
leaves have crinkled,
and myna birds have fluttered across meshes of corn.

you have loved Main Street
and grown proud of reform,
telling yourself -I am purposeful in this town
I am a white woman, locally brewed,
I know this territory -it is familiar.
I fear sometimes that familiarity 
has scissored right through the stretches of your imagination
and made you fearful of being uprooted. 

i want to urge you to re-convene 
and re-aggregate pieces of yourself
sit around the flicker of a vanilla candle 
and ask -am I truly happy? 

A memory

Walking from work this afternoon in the rain reminded me of home. And the two of us, from years ago, when we were fifteen and fourteen, respectively. You, A, used to live on the fifth floor of a pink building by the toll bridge in a neighborhood called Park Circus, surrounded by prayers, conservative Muslims and the delightful aroma of chicken kabobs. Cars and buses would come and go, too ordinary to notice on their usual journeys, belching puffs of soot from old, rusted radiators. And you would sit by the balcony, holding a paint brush, and stare at the clouds walking in the sky, waving at you, calling you names, slipping away into the silence of twilight.

I lived in a house, similarly pink, in a sub-urban district by the degenerate lake, surrounded by retirees, songs of the orchards and mile-long thickets of bamboo trees. The eunuchs would come, at the crack of noon, and dance to the sounds of violent drums and hiss at strangers, standing behind black grille gates counting handfuls of coins, and erupt in peals of joyful laughter when the beats came to an end. The pharmacist next door would return to work after a satisfying lunch of rice and fish, sometimes stopping by to say Hello and inquiring about my father's whereabouts. His father was shot, ten years ago, on a Saturday night by a gang of robbers, dressed as girls, haggling over the cost of a cough syrup bottle. He bled to death in front of my eyes. The ambulance never came, the police didn't report. And that was the end of Ravi K.

When thoughts of home came swarming in, I held my breath and pressed my jaws and widened my lips in a curled semi-circle. And looked at my nails, the uneven white edges, and thought, for a second, about Mother, who I haven't seen in four full years. And then I thought about you and me, in the silent corner of a pastry shop, staring at the ceiling and the wide French windows, discussing Shakespeare, Lord of the Rings and life in America. There was a transience about the moment, like the cusp of traffic lights turning red to green, or orange to red, commanding passengers to go or to stop, and then it was gone, within the blink of an eye, back to 4:30 pm, rush hour traffic and the metallic thrumming of subway cars.

The rain poured down through overhead clouds and wet the sidewalks in a dark, earthy gray. The drops, at first, looked like miniature bubbles; like tiny beads of undissolved gas in a clear, refrigerated liquid. Soft, and bouncy and a little spongy, they rolled off the sleeves of my orange checkered shirt. But then they got larger and larger, taking the shape of transparent pellets, and diffused throughout my poplin weave. It reminded me strongly of the monsoons in the city, when you and I, in painted caravans, would sit on the broken seats towards the back and eat mangoes cut in cubes, our faces and teeth yellow with pulp, and compare who had had more leftovers stuck to the skin. We would go to the temple in the nearby village and I would pray for peace and forgiveness, till tears squeezed out of my wooden brown eyes. You waited outside by the off-white shoe racks, and counted the number of hibiscus buds, and stared at the expressions of traveling devotees who went to the temple, hoping earnestly that God would fix their lives. You and I disagreed on the nature and extent of our religious beliefs, but we were respectful of each other and avoided the topic; fearing that our disagreement would split us in half.

I remember very well, a certain day in the April of 2004, when the floods crashed into the perimeter of the city. People died mercilessly, hungry and homeless, because their mud shacks melted back to the earth. Fish bones floated on the murky waters and twirled, in dance, in the currents. We had no power for days. The buses froze. The flowers cried. Steam from China cups of nearby homes filled the neighborhood air with a dizzying aroma of Darjeeling tea. In the middle of this, you asked me softly, Do you want to go for a walk? I said yes, instantly. And so we went, without rain boots or shoes, walking on water, and stopped in a field, soft as putty in the south side of town. We walked around. The ground felt like cake with unsettled icing, brown and green, alternating with the portraits of grass, brown clay and carcasses of three dead crows. You took out a flash light and projected it upward to see how far the amber bulb would light up the air. And then you said, do you mind holding my jacket for a minute? I didn't say yes, but pushed forward my right arm, my palm facing up to the circus of clouds. You walked to the center of the rectangular field, your footsteps echoing in the silence of the evening, and stood there for a second. After that, you knelt down carefully and tilted to your side, before laying down flat on the ground, on your belly, hands stretched out in a loose empty grip and your hair jet-black, like Pashmina wool. You put your ear against the surface of the field, and said to me, I hear heartbeats of our land. What joy filled me up, I cannot even describe. I ran to the edges of the isolated field and laughed with leaves, and flapped my arms like a wandering magpie, my soul energized with the beauty of a wet, monsoon, evening. 

There is happiness, sometimes, in the tragedy of monsoons. When the dams crack open, and the water gates flood, and the sound of sizzles surround the town. It is a memory of home that I never forgot; you and me, in an empty field, gaping at the sky. 

hanging in there

Every time you say, I'm hanging in there, I have this image of you swinging from a bean stalk, elevated seventy feet above ground. Below is a wide, ocean-viewed, butterfly garden covered to the north in hyacinth clusters and to the left, along the trim diameter, is a patch of marigold. Your arms are in a loop,  like the Olympics ring, through which sunshine and insects float in streams. And the tips of your hair, brown and pointy, crackling like chestnuts or splintered pistachios in the heat of a summer swig, when buffalos and bees, caked in oil, hum in the waters of the Yangzong sea. The color of your cheeks is an embarrassed red, and you are surrounded in a scent of mulled camphor. Your words project like film onto the flat of a farm, where unpaved roads and irrigation puddles intersect in perfect geometry. It is like a reflection of your mind; a mirror held to the convexity of your pale eye ball, your cratered mahogany iris, and the hollow silence of your deaf pupils. 

You seem to be suffering a lot lately. You seem to be stalled in a transparent cabinet, frozen and blued in an umbrella of air. You try to move, to walk and smile, but your muscles lay fixed in one dimension. As if pinned along the perimeter of myofibrils, to a point where you asphyxiate with the warmth of your own body heat. Circumstance, I say, and shake my head; the mother of travelogues and plaintive progress. 

I see you from a distance, electric at best, stuck in a mountain of iodine crystals. Your head jutting out, your arms wiggling, and the cage of your upper body trapped in the slant, you speak mathematics and the couture of bubbles. And then you become a leaf, green with veins, bent along your back at thirty five degrees, plucked, forcefully, by a child of six. Placed in a vase of burnt metalloids, you have a new home. You have a new dream. You bring forth a ratio of renewed happiness. And like you said, you blush a green, as the cups of your kidneys swoosh and clutter the candy globes in your blood. You are an oriole with canary filoplumes, embracing your inner diabetic, gurgling away depression, and starting afresh, in cottons of rain, along the periphery of the monsoons. 

The waves of summer are popping in the air. Awake, awake and run to the mills, and climb the beeches on Forest Lane, and shriek out the voice simmering in you. Lola B, Lela B, it is about time, I say. 

the back of the bus

Looking at you, sitting in the back of the bus with your Mexican nanny and off-white pants, reminded me of a time of my own childhood. 

You are probably 9, with sky blue eyes and a short blond crop. You have a small triangulated nose, a chiseled cheek and a short, stubbed chin. Your face is partially square, a little rounded at the jaws and arched around the forehead. You look like a Cole, or may be a Colin -I cannot quite tell. And in the 20 minutes of our bus ride, with very different purposes and eventual destinations, you never smiled. At all. You looked out of the window, and looked at the green of Central Park giggle at the top of your curled eye lashes. You looked at the stones of the narrow passageways, hugging against moss and pearls of rain. You looked at people, and shoes and a salad of paper scraps strewn on the bus floor. But your lips didn't sink an inch. Your eyes rarely blinked. And your face looked frozen in a pocket of the hour. It was 4 pm on a Wednesday, buried in the midst of a bustling afternoon. You were going home. With a non-mother mother. Azalea print backpack. And a non-ironed tie. 

You are a beautiful child. Whoever you are. And innocent, and reminiscent of a past self that I beckon only with memories. Memories of a conundrum, memories of a hallucinogen, memories of acoustic dreams, resonating like laser beams along the edges of my body. You are lost now, in the ocean of faces, in the bowl of clouds of Manhattan boys, in the lungs and vapor balls of the Upper West Side. You are a memory, a negative on my camera film, bottled with sulfides and lathered with peels of Washington cherries -your cheeks are ablaze, your hair in a lilt, your consciousness sparked in the origami of purpose. 

I am the face of aging time. I am the clock of pencil chandeliers. I am the surface of pregnant clocks. And I think about your face with a sparrow in my heart, with a volcano of tears from calcific depression, from the yowls of anguish disguised as smiles -everyday, every night, paddling in the sea of the backwater ripples. Obsession with boys that never came, that pushed away at the gentlest touch, that kissed and drank bottles of wine, and ran away to the tip of the estuary saying call me when you reach home. And then there was silence. The disguised ignoring, the painted facade of the germinating actor, standing as if in a Venetian court and hailing at the ruins of a diseased soul. The double life, the double pronged wretchedness of your poisonous self -throw away your face of pretended truths, slice away your veins and shed your layers and layers of invisible make-up. When you walk on that ward and take care of people, of dying psychiatrics and breast-missing hoodlums, you say that you believe. What do you have, to be able to believe? What do you say, feeding them injury, that they are about to lose this life? Because, nursing was your only other option, DB. Switching from real estate, to a meaningful path, you didn't lose your decorative lies.

You beautiful child. Asleep in my mind. You reminded me of a time when all I worried about was good food, shelter and statues of Lego. And sat at the back of a bus, yellow and blue, and smiled at the stars, asleep in the sky, ringing and turning to melodies of love. Thinking to myself -I love people, they must all be good. 

investing in you

I know I tell you a lot of things now about my lover, ex-crushes, current crushes and infatuations, but I can't help but continue to have a faint sense of guilt, lingering in my mind; a feeling, wispy in a way, that I led you on. We were meant to be professional, under the aegis of circumstance, but both of us know that we became friends quickly. Like somewhere down the line, the water broke, the sac of dutiful role assignments stretched open, and we embarked on what we like to call an adventure -a journey without an ending. I wonder what it was about me that broke the shell, that sprayed your mind with a sense of awakening. That drove you to a literal frenzy where, I remember, you said that you'd be okay with quitting your job. I let all of this glide by, not commenting and choosing to avoid topics, because I developed a fear of losing you. And I didn't want to at any cost. So silence became an answer, a lot of the time. Facades became common, more often than you will ever realize, and deep within the cave of my belonging, I was rotting with a seed of hidden identity -unclear, shattered and terribly lost.

A lot of people out there chatter constantly about investment; time-stamping and cataloging every step of every move. Choose your friends carefully, is the mantra I hear everywhere all the time, or maybe it has been for a while now but surfaced to human civilization in different shapes and forms throughout the tunnels of history. So the natural outcome of living in this counter-culture results in the investment in the right set of friends, I suppose, in which we live together in a zoo -taking, only, and not giving back. The economic nature of it all makes me think that I live in somewhat of a dealership, that every hour is a transaction of a visionary enterprise and that every step I take should have some positive outcome. But it forces me to think of a question I have shied away from for a long long time. What was going on between you and me?

I keep going back to that one night at the bar, in the crummy basement with blue lights and a flashing sign of Heineken entrapped along the hallway. I was drunk, after 8 shots of liquor, and so were you. Your frames were bent along the ridge of your nose, and you were sitting at the bar, in a trim black dress, staring at the television screen, laughing with your friends and looking at me from time to time. I saw you giggle through the corner of my eye, and a misty mold of your body hunched around the outer edge of my strained peripheral vision. My friends were around, dancing to the music. Swaying their hips, snapping their fingers and shouting in song when the choruses came along. People chugged their beers like buckets of rainwater, and flirted with strangers in the bisected corners. Some held hands, or sucked on nipples while others tiptoed to the backyard to bellow out smoke. I knew it was you, but I didn't care to talk or even go up and say Hello. Why? Because it may have made both parties uncomfortable and in a small town like ours, ignite a spark littered with rumors. What also crossed my mind was the fact that if I had said hello, it may have demonstrated a personal interest. What if you thought, let's take it to the next step? What if you thought, oh may be this is going somewhere? And in all my cold nonchalance, and box of untruths, what good would it do to egg you on?

And so began the skirting around. Touching topics, leaving questions unanswered, and addressing issues selectively. I believe yours was an escalation of emotions, on the swing of a sharp, angular spiral with shaky balusters and lubricated hand rails. You climbed up in your petticoat-ed whims, not lying, not in a pretense, but in unsubtle innuendos. I wasn't sure at first what was going on; what a sudden influx of pleasure puffs, food, wine, books and smiles! You took to discussing the sex couture of your thongs and the lace curlicues of your bras. You took to an explosion of divulging your desires, your convolutions, the softness of your breasts. You opened your arms, and the partition of your lips, and the curtain across your trimmed vagina. And broiled within me a patchwork of complexities; layers and layers of fishing across, detached and unhooked and eventually recoiled. Extended to me a tongue dripping with beads of your secrets. And pulled me ashore to the beach of your inner self, the human B, the desiring B, the B beyond a cage of professionalism. And I went adrift, waddling on waves, wallowing in foam and tart-colored make-up, swimming away, gulping carcasses of crabs from droplets of the sea's devastating glands. Like cancer dispersed within my capsule of reasoning. Like I glossed over reality to reflect on you a segmented, modular guide to living. Of which I have tired, over and over again. Muted by misgivings, and blinded by a thicket of prickly, devastating lies. But you have been patient. Knowingly ignorant. And a part of my fragmented family.

I have a lot to say. And will speak another day. But this is my muse for a Monday evening. When the winds outside, in turnip cloaks, play civil auctioneers of Spring.

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. 

seven minutes

The man seated across from me at the La Familia Day Care Center in Hollis Hills, Queens, is David; but he does not resemble a single David I know. When I say resemble I'm talking about facial features, expressions and ethnic backgrounds. He towers over me at six feet five inches but looks uncannily small as he hunches over the small maplewood desk and looks at me through drooping eyes like I am a piece of ginger, like I am catastrophe, like I will sentence him to isolation and squash his eyeballs; that expression of you may only touch me cautiously -that grave, defeated look.

I begin my routine.

"My name is Jonathan Wollman and I'm here from Castleton College. I'll be taking just a few drops of blood from you today for a diabetes test and a lipid profile test." 

I stare into his eyes. The white part looks a little yellow, and a few ruptured capillaries are netting around the edges. I am scared that there is some sort of a pressure build-up within his eye chambers, puffing it up, that may eventually make it explode. That will end up pretty badly; probably in a runnel of blood gushing out of his pink carunculae, leaving him blind, desperate and suicidal. What is left of a homeless man without the gift of vision? I ponder. 

He nods, loosely, and smiles a few times. Something must be really funny that I don't quite get or am completely oblivious to. I repeat my introduction. There is no agreement, disagreement or acknowledgement; just a calm indifference possibly common among the poor, homeless and decaying.

"Do you have a preference for which hand I should use?" I ask.

He shakes his head, gently at first then violently, for a few seconds. He pauses for a moment, yawns, and resumes shaking his head. His platinum-blond hair clomps against the arch of his forehead and thrums like a boat engine brrr-ing through the ocean. 

"Alright. I'll use your left hand, then. Do you have a finger preference?" No answer. I carefully reach for his ring finger. It is cold and crinkled and frighteningly white. 

"Do you mind rubbing your hands for me, please? This'll help with your blood flow." I tell him, while rubbing my own to show how it needs to be done. "If we get your hands nicely warmed up then we don't have to prick you multiple times," I say. 

Suddenly, he makes a low-pitched, mechanical gurgling sound. Perhaps he wants to say something?

"I don't have blood," he says, finally. The voice is gruff, a little raspy, a little smokey but not extremely deep. It sounds like a packet of audio waves leaking through a plug of mucus, covering, intermittently, a nozzle looping into his vocal tubes. 

I laugh spontaneously. "You're funny," I say, but he's not amused. "It'd be hard that way. But here...can you please rub your hands while I get my kit ready?"

He rubs his palms in smooth continuous circles, but so gently that I doubt it will do any good. The motion seems mechanical, artificial and ticklish; as if his fingers have ears and wake on command. There is no mind involved, just simple steps and two bare hands rubbing away in sporadic rotations, familiar to one another like coeval half-sisters or neighborhood cousins skipping rope, rowing or lobbing pebbles in a lake. 

From the blood kit in my delegated station 6 I take out a piece of white netted gauze, a Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid, a green plastic-encased lancet, a lipid profile cassette and a capillary tube. I arrange them all on a piece of paper towel, in an anti-clockwise fashion, and go through my checklist to make sure I have everything I need.

I've missed the alcohol swab. So I turn to my left, pull one out from the kit and keep it at the end of the trail. It looks like a Japanese fan, only not as sophisticated. Then I pick it up and tear it through the center of the wrapper. One uneven piece spirals down the eight inch distance and lands on the paper towel. The other is still stuck to the swab. Next, I pull the swab out with my right thumb and index finger and throw the other piece of the wrapper into the trash can. It lands without a sound -as if, nonexistent. 

I bring the alcohol swab closer and closer to his ring finger. Eventually, it touches the pulp, I wipe it for a few seconds and fan the area to dry it off. There are little ripples on his skin, as if hit with an avalanche or corrugations made from wind, the kind of creasing that happens when you dip your fingers in hot or cold water for too long. Age and homelessness have taken its toll, forming shapes like contour maps all over the pulp. This is a sad reality and there is nothing I can really do to remedy it. 

Within a few seconds, I pick up the lancet, twist the cap off, hold it perpendicular to the finger, count in my head, one, two, three and push the plunger, deep, through the five strata of epidermis, into the inner layer of skin, till the tip of the micro-spear nicks a part of the digital artery. I remove the lancet, and notice a drop of blood peeping through the wound. 

"That felt great, Doc. Do it a few more times," he says. The lancets are not reusable and I have no reason to prick him multiple times, unnecessarily, so I take it and throw it into the red "Sharps" container. As soon as it enters the container, it is invisible because the bucket is not see-through. I hear a crrunch, and know it has landed safely. Glass upon glass, steel over steel, they can resume sharing stories of piercing, pain and viciousness, the many people that have come and gone in happiness and in despair. 

I collect the first drop of blood in the capillary tube and start the A1C test right away. Then I wipe the site of his wound with fresh gauze, and start squeezing his finger to get a few more drops. I will need it to run the lipid profile cassette. He seems restless and annoyed, all of a sudden. 

"Just one more minute, just one more minute," I say as Theresa, my assistant, and I squeeze out blood from his finger. Finally, we have the necessary amount and start the test. I give him a Band-Aid and ask him to wait. The tests take about seven minutes to run. During the remaining time, he is allowed to drink water, fill up a questionnaire or just sit there. 

After about a minute or so, he suddenly starts talking. "You can't deny that the Germans still won, aye? They revolutionized the world. They proved themselves despite having a bad reputation. They did the right thing -you know?" 

"Oh-okay. But where is this coming from all of a sudden?" I ask, casually.

"You're using a god-damn Siemens machine. You outta know this shit." I'd never given it much thought, but he was right. 

"Those Jews, I tell you...I hated them. Growing up. I knew the Germans did the right thing. But now I hate them even more."

"Why? Why do you hate them even more now?" I ask. 

"Because one of those docs, Silberman from the Bronx, killed my best friend. My best friend of 37 years. It's tough, ya know?" He says.

I expressed my deepest sympathy and then asked, "What did he do?"

"Never paid attention to my friend. At all. They say they wanna take care of the homeless, and volunteer for this and that to show that they care, but that's bull-fucking-shit! They don't give a bleep about us poor people. They lie to us, tell us, we do this, this and this, and everyone believes. When Cody was in pain, he didn't even write him a damn pain-killer because he was busy. My ass. He was probably too busy fucking his slut or mooching up to the rich ones. It'll all about the money, isn't it? You people are all about money." 

He made a gesture with his right thumb and index finger, gliding the 2 briskly, thumb over index, like flipping bills, or tossing a coin. "Because of that Jew, my friend died of an airborne infection of the Central line. What could be worse?"

There were 2 minutes left on the blood panel machines. "Keep talking," I said.

"37 years is a long time you know. When you know someone for 37 years, it takes another 37 years to forget." 

"I'm sorry for your loss, David."

"Thanks Jonny. Cody was such a simple-minded guy, you know. It's really hard to find. We lived together, found food together and hung out all the time. When I became homeless, in the September of 2006, he even left his parents' home to come with me."

"That was very sweet and considerate of him," I said. 

"Sometime around mid-summer, last year, we went to Santa Monica. Hitchhiked all the way. We did drugs, smoked pot, talked about life till the end of the night. We just always discovered new things about one another, and that brought us much closer throughout the years. Such a good guy...oh God's so vicious!" 

30 seconds left on the clock.

"A lot of you think that homeless people like us are always unhappy. But let me tell you, it's not true. Not necessarily. We are and we aren't. It's like a dynamo going back and forth. All we expect is for society to not treat us like a piece of shit. Like dirt. Many of us had homes once, had families once. But circumstances change things ya know? When you lose all of that, you start looking for new companions. People who understand your situation and not judge you for everything that happened. You look for people in the same boat as you -or even a new cruise-liner. You start bonding over it, slowly; you have things to talk about -where the free food is today, when the heater's not working in the Citigroup Atrium, when it is...stuff like that. There's competition too you know. People struggling...who gets that dang food first! But it's an adventure really. Not the typical...just a different kind of life. Some have it betters than other, just like you folks."

The green Fisher Scientific beeper goes off. I mute it and write down the numbers.

"Have you ever had a companion? Like someone who you just think about and it brings a smile on your face? Gives you energy on a bad day? Someone you know who's thinking about you constantly even if you haven't talked to them in 2 weeks? Someone you can count on no matter what -come hail come snow, even through the most bizarre family circumstances -like the death of your son? I smell him in this room, even thinking about him. I hear him talking on his cell phone with his god-damn sister in Nashville, Tennessee. Oh Cody..."

I smiled at him then waved my hand at Jemima, who was standing at the reception area, to let her know that the tests were complete and that she should send me the next patient.

But David continued. "...And you know when we were in Riverdale, earlier this year, visiting my cousin Diana Finley. One Saturday evening we sat down in the living room floor and made plaster molds of our hands. They looked great, boy, they looked grreat. You could see the outlines of the veins, hairs, everything. I took Cody's and he took mine. But that bastard broke it within a week. Haha. But I kept it carefully. And thank God I did. Now that he's gone, I hold on to it every night before I go to sleep, outside the church or on the street. It's like holding on to a little part of him, a part that doesn't slip away. A part of him that stays with me, real and alive. I bring it close to my face sometimes, to wipe my tears. Maybe he can feel it too, up there somewhere..."

"It'll get better," I say and offer him a hug. It's awkward and maybe unprofessional, but he appreciates it nonetheless.

"Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Time will tell. But I tell you boy, those Germans were right." 

I didn't want to prolong the conversation, on this topic of Nazism and anti-Semitism, any further. Finally, I said, "Your numbers are ready, David. Zenda will escort you to Dr Karen's office and she'll tell you what your numbers mean. It was nice meeting you. Hope you feel better and have a wonderful day."

He stands up while pushing his chair backward with a resounding squawk. He has advanced hydrocele, a condition where his testicles are enlarged to a point it almost touches the floor. Lymphatic drainage issues -chewing his organs away, second by second. Homeless and uninsured -why, of course, should he receive treatment? God forbid healthcare should ever be a human right -the line of thought that exasperates me beyond control. In the middle of all this, I notice his suspenders, beautifully woven, holding up his denim pants with mini-eruptions of thread. 

He shakes my hand one last time and before he leaves he leans forward and says, "Pleasure. Pleasure meeting you boy. When you grow up, just remember one thing, the helpless will always need your help. Don't fool them no more." 

for pleasure

I am surprised, a lot of the time, when I think about happiness. And what it means to be happy. I find myself thinking about what brings me happiness, the context, the circumstances, for example, under which I get to be happy; under which you get to be happy. Think about an occurrence in your life that brought you a tremendous amount of joy. And try and reminisce as much as possible about what the experience meant to you at the time. Does it mean the same to you today? Do you feel any different? Do you feel once-removed, or far-removed in any way? Perhaps your present dictates the interpretation of your past experiences; or maybe it doesn't. But what brought pleasure to me during my childhood years, my boyhood and labor-intensive teenage rarely give me pleasure anymore. It is a contradiction that really surprises me.

A lot has changed, for sure. Things that were once exciting and important seem trivial and silly today. Its immediacy removed, its urgency vacuumed away and its influence questioned. It embarrasses me, even though it shouldn't and it makes me wonder if my queerness has anything to do with it, with a concerted welding of whim and reason or an outcome of my solitude. When people live in solitude, they have the option of pleasing themselves, with the use of their hands, their tongues, their shadows, their thoughts, ideas and imaginations. Self-serving they call it; and it boggles minds. It only lasts for a period of time, though -long or short depends on the person -after which the excitement of self slips away. The body becomes a wasteland of provocation, the hull of repetition, and a metaphysical trough of mindless routine. One of the ways in which some overcome this condition of stagnancy is through the investigation of sexuality -a facet of human life, popularly filigreed with holiness. There is the aspect of primacy, the animal life, the mammalian living that they polish and present, to add gravity, meaning and culture. The transition, the body's exploratory desires, the gradualness of sexual curiosity is really quite baffling, if you put some time and think about it. From Lego-lions to jump ropes to genital play, the advent of maturity, age and body triggers is like a timely ritual, a sort of coming of age, like a ripening fruit cracking its skin. Or think about it like a Sunday circus, with its acrobats and medleys choreographed to a point of mechanical precision, and compare it to a child's timeline of development; as if readying for a circumstantial transition to which there is no undoing. Nothing left but the footsteps of time gnarling at existence.

The simplicity with which pleasure installs itself in one's day-to-day life in a gridded city of phenomenal squalor, is worth pondering. That was home, for me. A city of millions losing the battle of inequity and lawlessness. We clapped through the storm of helium balloons, in the event of a political victory, and returned to the fair grounds secure in our faith. We found joy in the squalor, even when the infrastructure of our intermittent luxuries fell apart; trampled down by capitalists and crushed to powder by the insidious government. We swam in the lakes, night and day, played carom at dusk and read to the homeless on Middleton Row. And we discussed literature and philosophy in coffee shops on Allenby and inched around the cobble stones, on alternate Tuesdays, taking photographs of the moon, jaws of clouds and the spouting cones of mustard sunshine. For years and years, we rolled in the mud, flew kites on the terrace and stole coconuts from neighbors, held hands of the homeless and rescued orphans and survivors of infanticide.

Can you believe that, desirous of boys, of heirs to estate, they would take their girls, the one-day olds, and drop them from window sills of the tenth floor bathroom? They did so, often; the ungrateful parents or sometimes the in-laws, and you could stand at a distance and see it happen. You could see a white bundled object, an epileptic spool, a miniature spindle, kicking through cloth, purring and wailing, till it came crashing down on the ground in a resounding thud. Blood would smudge the entrance to the wards, diffuse like ink through pores of terrycloth, and people would gather around, cry, be surprised and leave. That would be it. We would read about the police reports in tabloids or watch them on the news. But nothing ever happened, and no one ever got arrested because the law protectors were just the same -hungry for boys, the "cheaper of the two," the ones who would eventually "protect and take care" in old age. I would ask A sometimes, feeling exasperated and defeated, "Why do people do this? Does it give them some sort of pleasure?" And we would both sit in silence, at the south corner of a mahogany bakery, sipping coffee, positioning our frames while the voices of traffic horns bugled in the street, like an applause at a theater, raucous and boisterous, and fade away into the dizzying darkness of the evening. 

On some weekends A and I would bike to the eastern tip of the city, to the sunflower field on Pelham Way. We would park our bikes, drink some water, and lay on the grass, all afternoon, listening to songs of Leonard Cohen, humming along and gazing at the sky. The sun would shine brilliantly through a lattice of clouds, white and spongy like pillowy marshmallows, and we would trace the outlines of sunflower peduncles, while reciting Suzanne, Winter Lady and Stories of the Street. We would play with shadows, follow their trajectories with broken compasses, and whiff the limbs of wild sunflowers. And on days without breeze, we would doff our shirts, drop them on the floor and bolt into the lapel of the rolling grassland, huffing and puffing, breathing heavier and deeper, faster and faster, wheezing almost, with buckets of wind splashing against our bodies, spouting out thimbles of briny sweat, bells of tears clapping against our faces, right hand in the air, then the left, then right again, left again, like Sicilian marionettes, like tin robots, melting into the nebulous horizon, where sparrows chirped, ravens cawed and woodpeckers pirouetted on bamboo leaves.

One Thursday afternoon, when I was eleven, I went back home and masturbated in the shower stall, when no one was around. Globs of semen came gushing out through the nozzle of my foreskin, and I was absolutely terrified. I thought I'd done something wrong, that I would never be able to urinate again, and that God would punish me. The gooey white clumps gave off a musty odor, and I was sure that my parents would find out and that I would be grounded. But the release brought with itself an intoxicating experience, a kind of loosening up, a gimmicky pleasure that I had never felt before. It felt like, what I'd imagine to be, releasing steam from a steam engine, letting go of a pressure build-up. It felt like a rubber suction, siphoning out aches and pains from every square inch of my skin. It was intense, it was fierce and it felt exceptionally good, like someone or something had flossed the inside of my body, polished every valve, and scrubbed every bend of my elastic blood vessels. I was overcome with drowsiness afterwards, a satisfied mellow state, the kind where you are snug and comfortable and a peculiar motionlessness consumes your body. And you don't want to move, or tap your fingers or even lift your eyelids and just stay the way you are, listening to the ticking of the wall clock, running water or commercials on television. The pleasure that came that day from the simple act of genital contact was completely unprecedented, and despite the momentary panicking and ignorant anguishing, it became an addiction. An addiction that grew and grew over the years, driving me mad with desire, dictating my moods, surrounding my day-to-day with sexual affectation.

When Marjorie asked, a few years ago, what do you think about when you play with yourself, I said, "An older man or perhaps an older woman, taking control and giving me pleasure." I added the part about the older woman because, at the time, it was a fetish fantasy that other boys my age had and I didn't want to admit to my queer train of thought, not just yet. The idea of a sexual father figure engaging in fierce role play, exchanging kisses, touching lasciviously, licking and groping and caressing every fork of my body, me in submission, being charged and controlled, a face full of hair nuzzling my chest, calloused hands fondling my legs, wrinkles of age folding over eyes, eyes that dazzle like agate marbles, burning with desire, scorching with lust, bubbling with anticipation, soaring with climax, titillating and tonguing every pellet of sweat, every dribble of body oil, aroma of pheromones, brushing and nudging in the swirl of activity, in the flick of an overturned power dynamic, electrified me in a way. And then there was the other side; the side of being used. I wanted to be used as a sex object. Being made to moan, being made to writhe and squirm from edge to edge across the perimeter of the bed. Being tied to a wooden bed frame with woven ropes, metal girdles and a leather harness. Treated with disrespect, total powerlessness and abject humiliation. How this was acceptable under the gamut of hormones, I really do not know. For someone who protested violence, domestic abuse and sexual agency, how I could justify my own desires, I have no idea. How I could reason out the spectrum of my pleasures, I have no answer. What we did for pleasure, what I did for pleasure still confuses me sometimes. I am not ashamed by any means, however; I have no hesitations in admitting to my desires. Because I acted on it, many many times. And it felt so damn good. 

letter to mother

Dear Mother, 

I came out to you 2 years ago in a letter I had written, on the night I took the Admissions Test. I had been rehearsing what to write for several months; where to begin, how to introduce the topic, in which part of the letter it would be. When the night finally came to write it out, however, I put aside my scratch paper and just let the words flow. It felt like pumping water out of a well: a few spurts of forcefulness, a few spurts of ease, and gravitational physicality in between. But I completed it in a few hours and mailed it to you the next day. 

I cried as I wrote, and little balls of tears rolled down my cheeks, splashed across the length of legal pad paper and bounced off, momentarily, in the shape of an embossed water crown. They must be wrinkled now, those edges, if you look at them carefully. But you can spare yourself that inspection and do more important things with your time.

In that letter, I remember, I asked you, specifically, not to internalize the nature of my identity as something you and Daddy did 'wrong' and requested you not to look at my sexuality as your fault -as anyone's fault. I realize that this can be hard, especially when I see kids in the playground with their wrists clamped gently around their parents' silk finger-tops, that raising a child screams responsibility and requires exposure, often inadvertently, to a catalog of social pathogens, unfavorable circumstances and contestable situations. I realize that the product of parenthood morphs into a human formula, and that along the way faults and responsibilities and feelings of ownership for deviance cannot be avoided. But I still hoped that you would understand that my being queer has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with you, even while the rest of society, the radical feminists, the academics and the politicians included, hypothesize and argue back and forth between the unknown effusions of nature and nurture into the funnel of the developing brain. 

If nature wins, there is then a political legitimacy, a social hands-off: it wasn't me, it was the DNA, and if nurture wins then there is cause for dystopia, silent support for social cleansing, for territorial eugenics on behalf of the social conservatives to reinstate the "natural order" of things, bolstered by Biblical kingdom, unforgiving theology and the cataclysm of Darwinian fitness. If we have a conjunction of both elements spilling into the foundation of sexuality, into the moot point of the histology of desire, what tug-o-war man will play to politicize human rights, uphold equality labels and make profits from a psychological quandary, I cannot even imagine. But as long as the answer -if you believe in a concrete scientific agenda, that is -remains contested, suffice it to say that the twinings of my inner erotic, emotions and aesthetics have origins in me, and in me alone, the frazzled territory to which you gave birth, and does not involve you. At all.

Towards the end of the letter I wrote "please call me if you want to talk about it." But you never did, neither of you, and it made me very sad, tacit and extremely embarrassed about myself. The reason I wanted you to call was not that there was anything new to add or particular to deny but that I wanted to explain to you the nature of my life in a society you have never seen. The nature of my life beyond boundaries you have constructed based on pop culture and Hollywood and contrast it against the sawdust of grievances that corrugate and spark anger in your own neighborhood. I wanted to tell you that I am happy overall, that I found myself on the edge of an enormous breakdown and that I picked myself up and found the support to waddle through days as a first-time queer. They never talked about us, people like me, through all the years in Catholic school, where the boys locked eyes, kissed at night and gave blowjobs to each other behind grease-capsuled food stalls. The revelation of my tendencies, the awakening of senses, therefore, came utterly unprecedented, wrapped in a confusion, in a hasty metastasis of self-loathing and second-guessing and in a cancerous aversion that I didn't know how to make sense of.

I sometimes wonder how you reacted when you first read my letter. Maybe you were in the living room, your arms rested against the coffee table, gazing at the fish tank and sweating through your temples. Or maybe you were by my nightstand, staring at the piano, adjusting your frames and blowing your nose. Or maybe you were at the kitchen table, frothing your coffee, rattling some ice cubes by the swooshing of the record player. Maybe you bawled, maybe you whimpered, maybe you smiled and knew this was coming. Or maybe you froze in the middle of the backyard, while the honey breeze of sweet mangoes clucked at your ears. Maybe it really didn't matter to you, because I had been on my own for seven years by then, and we had drifted apart like 2 melting icebergs in the middle of our own realities. We had forsaken, mutually, the status of mother and son, on the ream of a violent disagreement and on the turn of the century, became 2 private individuals on a facade of business -caring sometimes, chatting sometimes and existing beyond accountability. Despite how broken we are, I thought I should let you know because this has become fundamental to who I am and if you thought of the vignettes of a once-upon-a-time son, you should know that your child wants to love boys, passionately. It would complete the emotional portrait of your Midwestern lovechild, who spent half of middle school cross-dressing in a closet, masturbated to Hustler at the age of eleven, had role playing fetishes with Joey the mechanic and yearned to be fucked by a gaggle of gays at the 2 am raves in Towbridge Court. 

Your picture of me is of my era of morality, studious, principled, and intoxicatingly religious. But the chunk of me that I wanted to show you in my letter is that of the national criminal, who breathes heavily, the aroma of sunshine, prances around fields of honeysuckles and bees, dreams of a husband, a reformed Semitic and jangles his mind with the politics of identity. I am also a human, you know, just like any other person, capable of loving and smiling and singing, and breathing and learning and educating. But a difference remains in the commodity that is me -the difference that you may have guessed, scrolling through hours and hours of Internet logs or periodic screen pop-ups sprouting from viral fenestrations in the memory chip of your computer, that that typified the nature of my violence, my menacing yearnings, the cavernous outcome of my dangerous desires.

You are probably shaken, feel uprooted and think that you have failed your responsibility, whatever that may entail, as a dutiful mother. Perhaps, you want to protect me, with words and love, and cradle me to silence as I whimper, seismically, at the peninsula of injustices. You want to hug me and kiss me and re-tell me the stories about the big bad world. You want to be by my side and touch my cheeks and talk about doctoring, the riskiness of bare sex and the untimely death of Melanie Gerschel. And I will sit and listen in silence, as the phonetics of your words needle my ears, and stir within me a pantheon of thoughts, lickerish and severe, an hippodrome of burning animals, raunchy temptations and sadomasochism, stimulating the tentacles of underground sexuality -only to wake up on a Sunday morning to a buffet of drugs, hallucinations and self-pity. I admire and respect your ability to protect, to love like a lover and bark like a father. But the way we dealt with our ideological flora, the variegations and nit-picky microfilaments, de-magnetized our stances a long time ago. We are threadbare in our present time, you in your concrete pink in a pit of poverty and me in a cubicle, woven with starlights, chandeliers and hope.

Do you know how it feels to be an identity criminal? No, you don't. But I do, because I love boys, sweet harmless boys. I am a criminal in the land where I breathed my first, learned to walk and said your name for the very first time. I have no rights, I have no say, I have no audacity to show my love because I am a delinquent, an uncharismatic wrongdoer in the panoply of culture. If I were to reveal, even a tiny sliver of my affection, I could, in theory, be handcuffed away, confined in a cell with the vortex of laws -and why? Because my fundamental rights do not matter. Because yet again, my desire constitutes a minority, alien, unnatural compared to everyone else's. They say -but it is only the conservatives who think that way, to which I say, but does that change the fact that I am still a criminal? You talk about liberalism, about outrage to tradition -well, then show it! Show it to me! Scream at my face you are welcome here as much as I am! Howl at my senses you can love whoever you want and we will not jail you, we will not victimize you, we will not burn the reputation of your family! I feel homeless at home, and severely bruised. And when you write to me and say "come back home and serve your people" I scoff out loud and clasp my hands so hard that my thumb nails bleed. My vessels burn with the anger in my blood, the shame! the outrage! They say, give it some time, the wheels are already turning, but there is no going back for me; no energy or desire left in me to fight relentlessly. I have ceded responsibility. Call me a cop-out, call me weak. Maybe I am, and regretfully so, but I will leave the pall bearing to other heady activists. Feeling homeless at home -it makes me choke.

I have a lover now. A curious doctor-to-be, from Burlington, Vermont -a historian, a philanthropist with a wide-open window. You will probably never accept a husband for me, ever, even though you responded to my letter saying "I don't really care. Do whatever makes you happy." So we never talk about it or even come close to questionable territory. The politics of my identity, however, does not end with the bigoted jurisdiction of your paralyzing subcontinent. Even in the cavity of the dangerously civilized, across the permeating sands of the wild far West, on the plateau of the corporate and the cafeteria of the powerful, matrimony is a contest. 

A few months ago, they said history was made. You probably read about it in the daily Telegraph or heard about it on the radio, while driving to work. The agents of law decided to redefine marriage, sloughing off the part about a man and woman exclusively. This winnowed into Americans a crisp odor of justice and raised among them a thunderous cheer. But when you break it does to the basics along state lines, the legitimacy shudders and the confusion of identity politics is put in place. Think about a situation like this where my lover and I marry in New York, and make our home on Central Park West, with Dora our child and us as dads. If we go to Indiana to visit Marsha Eckstein or Cayla Schwartzberg, our relationship becomes illegitimate and Dora has no legitimate parents. But if we drive away to Illinois to visit Beverly at school, we are "married" again and Dora has parents. Can you imagine how confusing and unfair this must be for a child born into non-traditional families, growing up in a society that chooses to make gashes and poke holes like this in queer people's lives? No one has and ever will question your marriage. Not like you are in a mother-now-friend-next situation, but I hope that the laws change and that my lover and I and little Dora can live like anybody else -as humans first and then as gays. 

Suffice it to say that I am a little confused by some of the social mores of my adopted home. When I heard opportunity and freedom, the bedrocks of this land, I had imagined a utopia in a civic society of progressive minds, and the liberty of enjoying the celebration of identity. But that, I realize, was the voice of my naivete and I have learned to adapt to the eyes of judgment, the reality of a nation, that prides itself a Gargantuan, the developmental magnate, the power pool of humanity. What meaning is there in a "developed" land that still contests its humans rights? That, to me, defeats the foremost tenets of being a developed welfare. It feels like insidious advertising, like a marketing lure -come here, and be free, as we squeeze out your rights of an alien identity, as an immigrant, a gay and a man of color.

Despite all this, I am happy overall. I have a place that I call home on 82nd Street and Park Avenue. I have a lover who brings me joy, immense happiness and comfort. And I am happy that the politics of this land made me challenge establishments, practice everyday anarchism and question what is existing. I attribute a lot to my liberal arts education, for which I am forever grateful. But how do I answer a boy from your globe who envisions only happiness when he thinks about America? He expects freedom, acceptance and the glamor of identity. He finds an outlet in the history of this land -I can run away from my criminal reality and seek asylum in America. What do I tell such a boy who asks -I want to breathe, can I come to you? I do not know yet, but I will think about it. But let this be known to you and to everyone else that no child is born criminal, your society makes him one. 

Hope you are doing well.

Sincerely,

T.

my letter to Marsha Eckstein

Marsha,

I saw someone in the 73rd Street Deli last night, who looked just like you; or I should say the way I remember you looking three years ago. I froze for a second and panicked, probably, wondering if I should say Hello. I did not, however; knowing that if you were in New York City from Livingston, Illinois, you would've probably made a phone call or let me know that you were here.

But we've been in touch, and that's important. We chatted via text messages at first and then moved to e-mails. From time to time, you sent me letters, postcards and greeting cards that I read out loud, smiled gleefully and stuck to my yellow plasterboard wall with lime green push pins. I've wanted to write back, for almost 3 years now, but every time I sat down at my cherry-maple desk I either felt lazy, or didn't know how to begin or just couldn't translate my thoughts into words. So I gave up, each time, and walked away, feeling heavyhearted and sincerely defeated, and played card games with Billie Jean in her apartment on Hastings Road. Or went to the Opera with Stanton and Alexa or the Koch Theater with Mary Jane and Martin Pillsbury.

You have been extremely particular about keeping me updated on your whereabouts, your sing-a-long's, your countryside Mad Libs and the deep, dark truths of your inner womanhood. Your stories of desire, of heart break, of insecurities and embarrassments -you have told me without reins. Your lust for life, your tingling genitals, the vapor on your breasts and the thunderous, noisy bellowing of you rain-washed vagina -you have conveyed through alliterations of words. I could sit down and make pencil sketches of the pivot points of your emotions, like a Ferris wheel in a rubber fulcrum or a wooden swing in air ballet, and scribble around the graphing sheet in severe disarray. You are everywhere at once, and then maturely collected, pocketed into a tungsten bulb, and smashed into pieces. And then you are a nothingness, you are a nobody, a theoretical non-existence. How does this happen Marsha Eckstein? Tell me, why does this happen? You are in my mind, a lot of the time, while I'm working, or swimming in the ocean or biking past Grand Central terminal. A lot of the time, when I'm reading Homer or creating art or simply walking across Central Park. It is, as if, you are bare-exposed; naked in my eye of personal knowledge and uncovered from a sheaf of deadly monograms. You wanted love, you craved to be wanted, for years and years on end, even at the cost of jobs, professions and quasi-relationships. But if there is one thing I have never told you before, is that I cannot love you. 

You may, again, wonder why that is. You may, again, feel crushed like a candlewick, ridiculed and humiliated, despite the manner of your endeavors. You may feel cheated and violated at the revenue of circumstance -but I cannot love you. Why not? You will ask. I have given everything, said everything, done everything I possibly could -and yet, why are you not satisfied? You may say. The answer lies not in what you have or have not done -but in the fact that I have found love in my inner queer. An inner queer that gets projected onto the calligraphy of my desire, the faculty of my sexual prowess. It is a category, a denomination and a delineation that I have struggled with, and battled with since my age of eleven. And experimented and pretended and miraculously succeeded even, though only for a short while, to live in a cage of facetiousness. To live in a cage of theater gongs, to reside in a lie and to make promises without meaning them. Lisa Weinberg was a former, the one I knew would be my friendly wife, without the passion for romance, or the art of lovemaking. She was a friendly lover, an ex-corporate, transactional in the nature of our conversations and kissing. To be a token, scared of the single life, holding hands and wrestling, internally, the calling of lesbians and the queers.

The reason I am writing this to you today, this little sliver of my thought chronology, is that I want you to find love in a man who can love you back in the way you deserve. You are central to the development of hormonal adults, in your job and at your church, and the outcome of your perseverance and keen concern will be the epigram to success of many many people. I want you to smile, and be happy in life, flutter and float like a bird in the sky, cheer and scream to the heavens that you believe, holding hands, tapping shoulders and kissing under the canopy of eternal sunshine. With your lover on your neck, a ring on your hand and a marble of motherhood perched on your bed, you will be wonderful and invigorating and the answer to a prayer.

Let us sit and discuss, come September, Marsha Eckstein. Till then, farewell.

Best, 

T.