Love Story
Six summers ago, on a sun-bleached dock in Beaufort, South Carolina, my friend Galen gave me the best hug of my entire life. He was in the midst of a round-the-country boat journey, and he’d wanted company for the Savannah-to-Charleston leg, and I’d wanted company, too. I’d just gone through a breakup, the sort that makes you wish we had a better word than “breakup,” a word that conveys how it feels to know that you have murdered someone you love but have the power, in every waking and sleeping moment, to bring them back to life. So, I’d decided to go for a boat ride.
I held up well enough at first. I laughed aloud when I first glimpsed Galen, walking through a cathedral of live oak, his skin bronzed by sun and dirt, shirt like something pulled from beneath a sink. I recall us hugging, and though this wasn’t the hug I’m writing about, it was a good hug, a cheek-to-cheek, chest-to-chest hug, the sort of hug for which boys get no training but which had by then become routine between us. For the rest of that day, we biked around Savannah, wearing broad-brim hats and threadbare backpacks, collecting groceries and gas. And then we set off, drifting through salt flats, watching dolphins dance in the boat’s wake, eventually ending up on a tiny island where Galen and I took turns hauling each other, one of us on a bike, the other in a trailer made for a child, both choking on dust and laughing and sneaking into a condo and plunging our filthy bodies into the pool while residents stood on balconies, looking down, whispering. I was so close to happy after that day that I posted a photo to the internet of me sitting in the trailer, smiling, as Galen towed me back to the boat.
Not long after I’d posted that photo, though, the person who was no longer my person sent a message saying it hurt them to see me so happy—to see me, at all—and so could I block them, please? And just like that, I understood that I’d been wrong, that I hadn’t murdered anyone, that the person who had been my person was alive and in pain and just sitting behind a screen, or maybe a door, a door that was only closed because I’d closed it, a door to which I had a key.
I still can’t imagine how it must’ve been for Galen, watching me recede into my grief and my shame and my journal, in which I kept writing sentences that kept ending in the same place. Everything kept ending in the same place. When I stood on the bow, looking at the waves, I remembered a day, on another boat, when the person who was no longer my person had given me the sort of look you don’t think you’ll ever get from anyone. When Galen and I went into a shitty bar on a shitty island and a shitty song came on, I remembered a long-ago night in a loud bar, a kiss under window neon. And when I biked to a thrift store in a town where we’d docked, and I found a mug that said “Everyone Needs a Little Tender Loving Bear,” I remembered how my no-longer-a-person had called me “Bear,” and how much I’d loved that, loved being seen as a big furry thing with a sweet tooth and a soft belly.
When I got back from the thrift store, Galen was on the bow, fixing some boat thing or maybe reading Harry Potter, I don’t know, I don’t remember, because I was shivering and clutching a bear mug and crying in a way that boys are not trained to cry. What I do remember: Galen wasn’t wearing a shirt. And neither was I. And when he dropped his book or his carburetor or whatever, and he pulled me close, his skin was warm and wet and so was mine and he hugged me so tight it seemed like maybe his skin might melt into mine. There was something uncomfortable about that. Something having to do with decades of training about what it is to be a straight man with other straight men. But neither of us pulled away. We just stayed as we were, me convulsing, Galen holding me, as my chest suctioned his, as his arms squeaked against my back, as I blew hot breath into his neck and felt him shaking in such a way that I could tell that he, too, was crying. The longer that hug lasted, the longer I wanted it to last.
A few times over the past few years, I’ve read this story, or a version of it, to fellow writers. Almost all of them have liked it, and almost all have found it confusing. Originally, I wrote it as a letter from me to Galen, but when I read that version, one writer said she thought, right up until the last paragraph, that Galen was a woman. So I dropped the epistolary approach, added pronouns. When I read the revision to a new group, though, the consensus was: it was really hot. “It reads,” one writer said, “like a love story.” I laughed, and I started to correct her, to clarify what this hug was and wasn’t, but then I stopped myself. I thought about Galen’s body holding mine. His tears on my cheek.
“Yeah,” I said, finally. “I guess it is.”
Please Take Your Litter Home
One of my exes, the ex against whom all exes, mine or otherwise, will forever be measured, had this habit of tossing her spent cigarettes into the street, not at all clandestinely, but in plain daylight and with no small amount of flair, like she was spinning a pirouette or maybe doing some fancy sleight-of-hand magic trick instead of dumping into the street a cancer stick that would over the coming days surely get drenched by rain and squashed by bike tires and Labradoodle paws until it resembled a limp runt of a Cheeto a little short on Red #5, and even though every time she did this something inside of me died, I never said anything, just like I never said anything when she got jealous of my love for my fourteen-year-old cousin, or when she called people who disagreed with her “idiots,” or when she called me one, which, come to think of it, is probably the reason I never said anything—because deep down I agreed that I was an idiot, an idiot dating a woman I worshipped and feared in equal measure, a woman I could not bear to imagine losing, so fully was I bought into our Hollywood honeymoon origin story that I could not see the nightmare we had become—and anyway, it was just a cigarette, it wasn’t like she was clubbing baby seals or clubbing baby children, she didn’t even want to have children, which in my book was a plus, as was her taste in music and the way she smiled when she swam and the things she said in her sleep and the way she’d hold only my pinky when we walked around the neighborhood together and the way she’d just casually toss her spent cigarette into the street—because, yeah, okay, I liked it, too, I liked that she was edgy, confident enough to transgress, and I hoped some of that danger dust might rub off on me and make me a little less of a normie kale-eating rule-follower, though of course I wasn’t yet ready to really think about this, about how I was always too timid or cowardly or narrow to change myself, about the way I perpetually pinned my hopes and my happiness to the latest pretty person who made eye contact with me, made out with me, made promises to me, and that, maybe, is what I really hated about that casual flick of the wrist: the way it made it so clear that something could be desired, then savored, then tossed away, left behind.
