BOYS DON'T CRY

I’m starting to understand that my writing doesn’t belong to me. It is full of beginnings and endings and in-betweens that hold homes with other people.  I may be the one committing it to memory, to a kind of floating artifact, but that doesn’t really imbue ownership.

You did that just as much as I did. You lived it, breathing life into our story. I think it would be selfish of me to pretend otherwise.

We came of age at a time where your away message said as much about you as the people you were connected with. In some ways, being unavailable was aspirational.  There were blogs too. Iterations and revisions of places for ourselves that no one could argue with. We weren’t good at building things in the digital space but we didn’t need to be. The legitimacy of your own website meant you could be an authority. For a time we were both luminaries—about music, politics, movie scripts, fan fiction, and alternate worlds that could only open up if we were clever enough. We were always so clever. It was our electricity and the truth seemed clear. I wonder if it was as ever real as we wanted it to be for the time we spent dedicating keystrokes and sweat.

Looking back, I see that you would find your way into my fiction too. Sometimes as a proxy for the real you, cowboy boots, dark sunglasses, and a desire for soda so sweet it rattles your teeth, even if you preferred diet in real life. I suppose those were always choices I made, to paint you larger than life. It suited you, the version of yourself that we wanted you to be. But sometimes, you’d show up more as an outline of you, more of a choice you made, like the time you told me to be right with my soul after a night of drinking something stronger than diet, or the time you puffed out your chest and ordered a big plate of oysters because of your promotion, because you had to show me how important you were. You were always John Wayne stubborn and that works well when you’re young and wild, less so when you confess that you’ve been cheated on. I could never describe a belt bucket big enough for you in my stories. At a certain point, it stopped being believable. Maybe that’s just fine, nobody was reading them anyway. But it was always easier to dramatize our truth. Fiction can be a place to obscure the edges of what isn’t working by punishing imaginary people. The real truth always lies somewhere on the margins.

As our time together flowed into something more transactional, our writing reflected something more contractual. We itemized for tactful clarity in text and in email. While I appreciate the architecture of efficiency, there is a point where the economy of words isn’t precise, it’s just empty. I stopped holding on to the illusion that there was anything authoritative behind our words. Maybe that’s the difference—my writing became about a kind of unraveling and yours tightened, because you wanted something I was tired of giving

I think about the last time we hugged and how I didn’t know it would be the last time. I remember that you were the one that held on. Hardened at first, mean even. Vice-like. Then sturdy, firm. I had given you an expensive bottle of liquor and if I had to guess, I would bet you used it to forget our embrace. I should have asked you in that moment—why the force? Why the aggression at the end of the world? All I thought was that we’d be back together again. Next time. Struggling against ourselves. And that would be an excuse for me to be the one who was forceful, to show you I meant it even if it was harder. I think about that a lot, how our embrace crashed in that moment and in every moment, echoing as endless versions of ourselves across a painted sky. I think about the last time we hugged, and how it should have been like that every time.

The world beats up boys who cry. The boys take it. They have to be stronger than the rest of the world could ever be. It’s a story old as time. One that, again, someone else has written about better than I ever could. So when I saw your face, staring up at me from that coffin frame, frozen like a version of you, sleeping, I realized that you had always been my world. I knew that I had to be strong for us. That’s how our story goes, so I had to write it down for you.