01
The only gay bar in Helsinki is in a mall.
Third floor, past the food court,
as if desire required escalators.
02
We weren't speaking—
you and I, not Robyn.
Robyn was there.
Robyn held my coat
like a witness holds a jacket
while the defendant becomes weather.
03
Her Doc Martens still reek of milkshake
from the Burger King I don't remember buying.
That's how the night starts:
a purchase without a purchaser,
evidence already forming
without my consent.
04
A Finnish woman poured her drink on my head.
Gaga singing Abracadabra—
the cheap theology
of making something appear
by naming it.
05
I bent like I was praying.
I don't remember the bending.
06
But I have the video:
two Germans sent it the next day,
a file from strangers
like a lab result I didn't order.
07
Subject remained a body.
Subject capable of staying.
08
In the footage I am laughing.
In the footage I let her.
The drink hits and I keep dancing,
I keep dancing after,
as if the instructions finally made sense
by disappearing.
09
I want to call it cleansing.
I can't.
It's a mall.
The baptism is beer.
No one is being saved—
only rerouted.
10
Later, apparently:
the fanciest hotel in Helsinki,
Robyn's shoes filling with vanilla,
my hands doing something
my mind had already left.
11
I don't remember the liquid.
I don't remember the joy.
I remember the silence
sitting in my chest like a stone
I carried through the food court,
up the escalator,
past the kiosk selling phone cases
for phones that keep vibrating anyway.
12
Robyn's boots still smell like milk.
The Germans still have the video.
You still weren't speaking to me.
13
Somewhere in the gap
between what I remember
and what I was,
a stranger cleaned me
in a language I didn't ask for.
14
I said yes with a body I wasn't using.
I said yes the way weather says yes—
not as agreement,
just as what happens
when you stop resisting passage.
15
It wasn't redemption.
It was contact.
Unsponsored. Improper.
16
Enough—not as cure,
as proof.