01
I was not supposed to be there.
Start there.
02
An hour’s notice,
a list no one gets on,
Cyrus like a minor saint
at the side door of the republic,
my name passing through his mouth
and becoming admissible.
03
I had almost gone elsewhere.
Another city.
Another boy.
Another weather system
I could have mistaken for fate.
Instead I came home
to the city that knows my body
and is only sometimes kind about it.
04
All night
the room kept saying yes to me.
05
Not abstractly.
Not in the polite way a room says yes
to someone who has earned it on paper.
I mean men I did not know
looked at me like I had arrived
already carrying some small legend.
Strangers were delighted by my face.
Someone said dancer
as if my flesh had filed the proper documents.
Someone else laughed
like I was exactly the kind of mistake
the night had been hoping to make.
06
For hours
I felt gorgeous in a way
that did not require proof.
I felt inside.
That was new enough to be dangerous.
07
Because when a kingdom finally opens
the cuts arrive differently.
Not from outside the gate
where you can still call them injustice
and make a clean little poem about exile.
No.
Now the injuries happen at court.
08
Marco was there.
09
Of course.
10
I had liked him for years.
Then the body thing.
Then the boyfriend.
Then, more curiously,
the passionate exclusion.
He has perfected a certain kind of no,
the kind that still needs an audience,
the kind that glances to make sure
it is being witnessed by the correct people.
11
And still, when he sees me,
especially among everyone he cares about,
he looks.
And I look too.
And both of us recoil
like we have touched a live wire
and need the room to think
it was static.
12
I do not want to date him.
I like his boyfriend.
This is not one of those dull theft fantasies
where desire wears a tuxedo
and mistakes itself for destiny.
It is worse than that.
It is residue.
It is current.
It is the body admitting
what the social self
has already put into a very tasteful grave.
13
Everyone said,
Austin, please.
The fact that an international DJ
clearly has beef with you
is honestly a compliment.
14
And I laughed
because camp is the nearest cousin to pain
that still knows how to dance.
15
Elias was there too.
16
How to say this right.
17
I do not need romance from him.
I am not asking for a moon,
a movie,
a future with matching groceries.
I just love being around him.
I love the ease.
The humor.
The way my body quiets a little
in his orbit.
The low private frequency of him.
I wanted something smaller
and therefore more humiliating:
18
to feel that I lived
somewhere in his reflexes.
19
Not first forever.
Not chosen with violins.
Just counted early
in the small emergencies.
Just quietly included
in the low arithmetic
of what a body protects
when the room gets strange.
20
And the room did.
21
There was some crazy guy,
friend of a friend
or friend of the fog
or friend of whatever republic
we were all temporarily serving,
and I had to kiss him.
Not because I wanted to.
Not even because anyone said I had to.
Just because the room had arranged itself
into one of those tiny civic humiliations
where being a good sport
arrives wearing the skin of consent.
22
So I did it.
A brief tax.
A social tariff paid in mouth.
Body as administrative surface.
The kind of kiss that feels less like desire
than signing for a package
that should have been refused by the building.
23
And Elias knew.
24
He knew I had to.
He knew I did not want to.
He knew the difference.
25
After,
he hugged me
and held me there
long enough for my body
to finish returning
from where I had sent it.
26
This is important.
Do not let the poem lie.
27
He cared.
He did.
He gathered me back
without making a performance of my damage.
Without asking me to narrate it.
Without confusing endurance for pleasure
just because the lights were low.
28
And still
some hurt remained
from before the hug.
29
The body is petty about timing.
The body is a clerk.
It keeps sequence in a little ledger
nobody gets to audit.
30
First the room.
Then the mouth.
Then the arms.
31
I hated
how much order mattered.
32
Meanwhile,
because beauty is always punished
with tasks,
there was the clown show with the coat.
Therapist-chat in the middle of bass.
Should I hook up with this guy?
Me, drunk and glowing,
handing out advice
like some municipal oracle.
Then twenty minutes later:
can you ask Cyrus to find my coat?
As if desire were a help desk ticket.
As if all night
I had secretly been staffed
to provide emotional infrastructure
for men with better curls than plans.
33
Cyrus and I watching the whole thing
malfunction in real time.
Everyone so beautiful
when they are incompetent.
Everyone’s little panic
looking so expensive under strobe.
34
And yet.
And yet.
35
The room kept voting yes on me.
36
That is what I cannot get over.
How wanted I felt.
How much I liked it.
How true it was.
How many people I did not know
seemed thrilled that I existed
exactly in the configuration I did.
How I felt less like a visitor
than a citizen.
How the underground,
that ridiculous little nation
of queue raves and rumor and shoulders and sweat,
looked at me
and more or less said,
fine, you live here too.
37
I think that is why everything hurt so sharply.
Because the welcome was real.
Because the admission was real.
Because now the cuts arrive
inside belonging.
38
I got home at 10 a.m.
already too many things at once:
star, fool, citizen, body, witness,
new kid, insider,
beautiful municipal error.
39
And then,
because history never enters
as confession
but always through side channels,
my ex-boyfriend’s best friend texted.
40
The one most of the book is about.
The one who has not spoken to me
since Cinnamon Buns.
Or rather: not him.
His world.
His weather routed through another phone.
41
Mr Clyde!
Might I be able to swing by
and grab Liza’s steamer tomorrow?
Ps I hope you are well 🙏
42
As if grief were a laundry setting.
As if the old life could arrive
not to apologize
but to retrieve a small household machine.
43
I answered correctly.
Dryly.
Like a man who still owns silverware.
Absolutely.
The time at which you can
is up for discussion,
but I would love for this steamer
to return home, Mr Mercer.
44
That should have been the whole joke.
A little domestic vaudeville
at the edge of emotional collapse.
45
But no.
46
While I was grabbing the steamer
I spilled the dirty water
all over myself
and the carpet.
47
Of course I did.
48
Even the appliance
arrived full of old water.
Even the handoff from the past
had to touch my body.
I was trying to return history cleanly
and it leaked all over me.
49
At that point
the allegory became rude.
50
I stood there at 10 in the morning,
sleep-deprived, chemically and socially dissolved,
fresh from one kingdom
and not yet undressed from it,
holding a leaking steamer
from my ex’s orbit
while filthy water spread into the carpet
like a final administrative note:
51
nothing in your life
ends without contact.
52
And the absurd thing is
none of these truths cancel.
53
I was wanted.
I was hurt.
I was cared for.
I was looked at.
I recoiled.
I was admitted.
I was spent a little by the room.
I was given back to myself
inside someone else’s arms.
I was texted by the archive.
I was baptized by domestic runoff.
I remained hot through all of it.
54
That last part matters.
Do not let modesty erase the record.
55
I remained spectacular.
56
Not untouched.
Not pure.
Not narratively available
to people who only understand desire
when it behaves itself.
57
But spectacular.
58
The room wanted me.
The old charges still sparked.
The right man held me after.
The wrong man still looked.
The past sent for its appliance.
The appliance bled.
59
What is a life, then,
if not a series of systems
failing beautifully
around the same body?
60
Maybe this is adulthood
in the republic of desire:
not getting spared,
but getting let in
without becoming less breakable.
61
Maybe that is what tonight taught me.
That the kingdom is real
and still poorly administered.
That I belong there anyway.
That even minor injuries
can sing in harmony with joy
if the body keeps all its instruments.
62
So let them play.
63
Let care be care.
Let recoil be recoil.
Let the old water spill.
Let the carpet testify.
Let the room keep voting yes.
Let the tiny knife complain.
Let the impossible ticket
go down in the record.
Let the clerk inside my chest
stamp every exhibit in red.
64
I came home changed.
65
Not healed.
Not resolved.
Changed.
66
The city opened.
The past leaked.
The body kept dancing.