The Sum The Sun

marc4marc:

If you think about it—

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I remember the way things tasted and smelled. This is no mystery because I have been trained as a neuroscientist and so now I know that smell has the greatest influence of all senses on both taste and memory. I remember the way he smelled—like beer and something wild; the way he tasted salty and it was different from the tastes I’d had before which were boyish and always had an undercurrent of soil. I remember thinking this is how men taste and how my mouth filled with vomit and I choked and he grunted and said fuck yeah.

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The transitive property is defined as whenever an element a is related to an element b, and b is in turn related to an element c, so then a is also related to c. In language we call this the function of pronouns. Pronouns which need an antecedent. The function of pronouns which is to point backwards in language, to take a noun and haul it forward without repetition. When I think about my life as a gay man I think about how he said, do you wanna come suck a dick for a minute? And how he said, I love the way you suck my dick. And how he said, do you like my dick? Tell me you like my dick. And how he said, I will not watch you die. Different people with the same pronoun. I can’t add it up. I can’t relate. Where have I been and what pronoun can summon those places to me?

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I have an argument with someone about the power of abuse and cycles of abuse. And they want to find a place where it’s ok, where it’s legitimized or reclaimed and something in me does a sick little spin around while I try to add it all up. I’m thinking about love and loving this person or loving any person and how being raped didn’t shut me down it made me so open to the idea of love because I keep trying to find a place where someone can tell me to suck their dick and it’s about love because all words are informed by the affect that underpins them and I know that so I want someone to say the same words but love me.

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If he raped me and I am element a and I have sex (element b) with you (element c) then did he rape you? If I am celibate who wins? If you think about it—

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Between

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Trying to reclaim your past is always a losing battle. It happened and it’s over and you are the wreckage you are the wound you are the power you are the weakness you are the only thing that has ever existed in this site and it belongs to you and you belong to it so maybe you could make it all ok if you had the power or if you cared or if you thought you had a future but there’s nothing past this and you’ve known that since the first time you put your lips on another boy and felt the shock of finality and you knew then that you were part of another world where things would be harder but beautiful and ugly and harder and someone says, swallow so then all these lives go into you and you are humiliated and free.

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The sum is less than the totality.

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The sum is less than

The sum is—

1. Have you ever tried to hold the sun your mouth
2. Have you ever tried to remember
3. Have you added
4. The different parts
5. Together—
6. And what did you see?

Pieces.

1. Ricky has coaxed me out of my room with the promise of kale juice. As he crams the greens into the juicer he tells me about this older black guy he used to fuck who would hold him by the back of his neck when they walked down the street, as if Ricky were a baby animal. The man lived in a converted warehouse and he would padlock his bedroom door shut at night, so Ricky would have to wake him up to go to the bathroom. I look at my pretty, blond roommate and imagine him being hauled down Atlantic Avenue by the scruff of his neck, and I am jealous.

2. I was always trying to get you to fuck me harder. Once I asked you to hit me, and you looked like you were waiting for a punchline. The first time we had sex after our relationship was officially over was the first time you were the person I wanted you to be. You bit my thighs hard enough that I wore tights in August to hide the bruises. If you noticed I was crying, you didn’t say so, and you didn’t stop. 

3. Now I have a lover who tells me my pussy is magical, and bites without being asked.

4. I had a dream I was swimming in the ocean, way, way out in the middle of nothing. I could feel something viney and threatening swirling around my ankles, but the water was lifting me up and away from this, so the ocean and I were working together to keep me safe. But when I kicked at the vines, I felt the kicks in the pit of my stomach, so the vines were my insides the ocean was saving me from. When I woke up, I knew it was a dream, because I can’t swim.

5. In Mexico, the Caribbean was so salty that I just floated on the surface. I wore a snorkel and a lifejacket and barely had to twitch my arms or legs to move, and the current carried me over the coral and the sea grass. It was like I was a jellyfish, just pulsing along by contracting and releasing my body. My mind was completely at ease with this feeling, but my lungs, trained to be panicky by years of asthma and claustrophobia, could only be quieted for so long before I had to go back to the beach and breathe through my nose for a while.

6. A group of jellyfish is called a bloom, which makes them sound more like insane exotic flora, and less like brainless, venomous umbrellas.

7. When I saw you again in New York, it was pouring. Six months earlier I’d moved away from there because I felt like the skyscrapers were menacing and the visible sky was too far overhead. I gave you a copy of Frank O’Hara’s collected poems for the birthday I’d missed by three weeks. I wrapped it in a trunk-up elephant bandana from the Seventies, which is a collectible textile. I used the card to mark “In Memory Of My Feelings,” and I told you it wasn’t intentional. I hope you know that was a total lie.

8. When I am confronted with facts that I do not want to know, I develop a temporary amnesia. I will say and do anything to escape the confrontation, and I will remember none of it.

9. For example: I do not remember our break-up.

10. I remember that at some point I found myself sitting on the kitchen counter in my underwear, but I do not know how I got there. I told you that the girl you were leaving me for would not know to lick the corner of your mouth, and you told me that was the worst part of leaving me.

11. Worse parts of you leaving me: uncontrollable tears in the middle of the night keeping me awake. The immense amount of money I spent on illegal substances. The hostility of friends who could not be told the whole story. Taking the subway home from Planned Parenthood alone.

12. I would like someone who licks red wine from my ears, but because I often date men in AA, this is an impossibility.

13. I am speaking, breathing, naked. What have I done lately that is lovely? I ask myself this after I do something particularly disgusting with my body. It must be the third-generation Catholicism slipping in.

14. I spent a large portion of the year after you very, very high. I was having trouble turning my brain off and it was making me anxious and weepy all the time. The only way I could relax was if I smoked a joint in the morning and then another one at night. Being stoned also meant I would be just paranoid enough not to say any of the awful things ricocheting through my brain out loud, which explains why you and I remained civil for so long.

15. In my head, I still think of myself as being fourteen. When bus drivers and bartenders and TSA agents ask how old I am, I always pause in an incriminating way. Either my brain can’t catch up with how fast the years pass by, or I would like to be a prodigy forever.

16. Or maybe I’d rather pretend the six years with you didn’t happen, and I’ve jumped from fourteen to twenty-one seamlessly. I often feel this is a strong possibility.

17. Every time I move to a new city, I feel awkward there for a long time. Then, one day, I wake up and walk out my front door and feel a part of the world again. It’s a cathartic feeling, like a runner’s second wind, or the relief after a hard day of work, or getting good news from a blood test.

18. One day, I woke up and finally did not want you any more.

19. Now all I want is someone who will pull me down the street by the scruff of my neck, gently and without being asked.