Chapter 1
I had been hoping, with him to achieve the feeling of love, like being dipped into a container of light and softness. But with him I was only to be pulled upward and outward and back into some stark, dimly lit, cold and hard wall of the mundane.
But it’s heartbreaking when you realize that the look on a man’s face, the way his teeth sit in his mouth, the way his jaw clenches when you ask a question and the way he stands; that it’s going to be the wall you climb for too long.
I was reduced to this.
I really loved his chest; the way his hair peaked up near his clavicle. In the mornings, lying there next to him, I would gaze through it as the sun passed over it and danced around each hair, creating a glow, an aura of golden thistle.
I awoke with my eyes directed to the inside of his underarm. Forests of yellowish-orange splinters were jutting out from under his skin. They seemed like armpit hairs but they were thicker. Each hair, crusty and sticky, held a kind of substance I couldn’t identify. On one hand the hair looked almost candy coated, a jagged forest of dried brown sugar. On the other hand, the effect was almost soft as if each hair were padded by the comforting fur of individual, miniature, chenille blankets.
Quietly and carefully I moved from the bed to the bedside table, reaching into the drawer, where I kept an old small chrome zippo engraved with my father’s initials. Slowly flicking the top back, I sparked the flint and checked for the neat flame to erupt, billowing out around the dusty edges of the lighter tip. Carefully, quietly, expertly I moved towards his exposed armpit with precision. The closer I got the better I could hear, in my mind, the fizz of his eventual hair stalks as they would crumble, onto the crisp white sheets, broken into ash.
But he inched his way to the side of the bed and got up leaving behind him, a single armpit hair. I held it up to my eyes, turned it around in the sunlight a bit, and then put it aside on the table as he milled about my room looking for his boxer shorts.
He as the man who was making himself known to me only through the clothing he threw around my living room floor had the potential to draw me closer to understanding him. He, as the actual body that went to and from my bed was something I would never really get to know.
The true nature of his armpits, their more unappealing side, seemed only to be the circumstance of bodily fluid and poor washing. It seemed to me that the worst traits are often the ones that reveal the utmost truths. In this case he probably didn’t rinse the soap from his body well enough. It wasn’t good enough to burn.
The sun, though peering through the window, was starting to fade behind quickly moving clouds. Thinking of him now, I wanted the sweet something of him in his oversized white wool sweater next to me. I wanted the unkempt hair and the sullen eyes of him as a sick boy with a nose wet with cold snot drippings. I wanted the smell of his unwashed hair. I wanted the flavor of his overly worn shoes and darkened socks. I wanted his unwashed underarms near my nose as I sleep, feeling the energy in his body and his uncertain heart next to my ear. I wanted everything I hadn’t had of him yet.
