I once tried
to love a botanist named Jesse. He lived
in a trailer in Wichita Kansas with a fat video game nerd who was also a queen.
Our long distance romance was upheld by the telephone, the wires of which
transmitted our deepest secrets of regret, failure and hope. He said to me once over the phone that all he
wanted to do, more than anything in the world, was to smash a bunch of glass, “I
just think it would calm me down,” he said.
I only met Jesse in person twice, and I must admit I had high hopes for us, if only for the fact that he loved plants, and I was aware of my own heart’s frailty which at the time was as easily torn as the petal of a rose in the hands of a clumsy child.
I met him the first time in the West Bottoms of Kansas City, where we went to haunted houses in old factories and clung to one another both because we were scared shitless and because we both needed so much to hold on to someone’s arm. Sometimes I get like that. I need to hold onto a man, physically, because if I don’t, I feel like I might float away or fall down. What I found out though, through years of leaving gay bars with handsome strangers, is that I’m not alone. On several occasions I got to these strangers houses or them to mine, I told them I didn’t want to have sex, I just wanted to hold them in the nude. On those occasions those men let out a sigh of release comparable to the air pushed through someone’s lungs when they are told that they do not have cancer, or that their mother will be okay. And I held a lot of beautiful lonely men that way, and they held me. I also slept with a lot of beautiful lonely, angry men that way.
The second and the last time I met Jesse was in Topeka Kansas. I drove him and I to a creek on a road that enveloped the world in its vast grey flatness. The creek was tucked between trees and an old semi truck loading dock, it glittered with boulders and pebbles. I opened my trunk and motioned for Jesse to look, “I have a gift for you.” I said. I had filled my trunk with plates, vases and coffee mugs from every thrift store in Kansas City.
We smashed every single piece of glass.
He was right, it did calm him down.
I only met Jesse in person twice, and I must admit I had high hopes for us, if only for the fact that he loved plants, and I was aware of my own heart’s frailty which at the time was as easily torn as the petal of a rose in the hands of a clumsy child.
I met him the first time in the West Bottoms of Kansas City, where we went to haunted houses in old factories and clung to one another both because we were scared shitless and because we both needed so much to hold on to someone’s arm. Sometimes I get like that. I need to hold onto a man, physically, because if I don’t, I feel like I might float away or fall down. What I found out though, through years of leaving gay bars with handsome strangers, is that I’m not alone. On several occasions I got to these strangers houses or them to mine, I told them I didn’t want to have sex, I just wanted to hold them in the nude. On those occasions those men let out a sigh of release comparable to the air pushed through someone’s lungs when they are told that they do not have cancer, or that their mother will be okay. And I held a lot of beautiful lonely men that way, and they held me. I also slept with a lot of beautiful lonely, angry men that way.
The second and the last time I met Jesse was in Topeka Kansas. I drove him and I to a creek on a road that enveloped the world in its vast grey flatness. The creek was tucked between trees and an old semi truck loading dock, it glittered with boulders and pebbles. I opened my trunk and motioned for Jesse to look, “I have a gift for you.” I said. I had filled my trunk with plates, vases and coffee mugs from every thrift store in Kansas City.
We smashed every single piece of glass.
He was right, it did calm him down.
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