Coke Lines

There’s something special about the way people invite me into their spaces. Over the years, since entering adulthood, friends, cousins, strangers, hookups, and lovers – each has welcomed me into their houses, condos, apartments, even the occasional cabin, with this open warmth that holds a tad bit of wonder. And I get it; there’s pride there, real, unrestrained joy in showing off their worlds. Some have given me the full tour, down to the last bookend keeping On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous from falling onto the carpet purchased from a Persian shopkeeper in Stellenbosch, or the stray trinket found on a drunken night in Jackson Hole, spinning stories of where they found this or that, the memories tied to souvenirs, the art on their walls, that out-of-place throw blanket they swear they found in a Parisian flea market.

And then, almost invariably, we get to the room that makes them light up the most: their home office. With a certain reverence, they say, “this is where I work.” The desk and the chair are ceremoniously shown off, ergonomic in all the right places, with back cushions tailored to hold up shoulders worn out from hours of typing. There are fancy gadgets to hold their screens at the perfect angle, maybe a few plants to offset the glow of screens, an exercise ball they bounce on when the chair’s too much. And as they show me around, they’re genuinely proud. Happy, even.

It’s in these moments I find myself hesitating, smiling politely, but inwardly a little lost. Just how much must someone love work to build a whole room for it? Not just a quiet corner or an empty table to scribble notes on, but a dedicated space, a shrine almost, to daily labor. For me, the kitchen table has always been enough. The corner of a counter, a laptop, maybe a mug of tea, and I’m good to go. The thought of putting four walls around my work-life makes my breath catch in a way that’s not exactly comforting. It’s like caging a part of myself I’d rather let roam.

My mind always goes to Baldwin. Like him, I don’t dream of labor. Sure, I’ve worked hard in my life, put in long hours and deep energy into things that matter to me. But a room for work? A dedicated place in the home where the soul’s supposed to rest and breathe, a space for emails and Zoom calls and project boards? Somehow, I can’t wrap my mind around it. And what confounds me even more is that often, the people giving me these tours – the ones beaming over their desk setup, their corkboard of deadlines, and the precisely chosen lumbar support pillow – are the very same ones who’ve sat across from me, half a bottle of wine or bourbon in, lamenting work culture and how they just want to be free of it.

If we’re so fed up with work, why does it get a whole room?

I’ll admit, sometimes it makes me sad. Not just because they’ve turned a part of their home into an extension of a job they don’t even particularly love but because of the alternative spaces that could’ve taken its place. Imagine opening a door, and instead of a desk and swivel chair, there’s a room washed in soft light, a place designed solely for meditation. There’s a thick, woven rug on the floor, maybe a singing bowl, a low hum of incense in the air, a place made for quiet. “This is my peace room,” they’d say, and I’d look around and think, yes, now that’s beautiful.

Or it could be a room for art, for play, a space just for them, far away from email threads and Zoom calls. A room filled with paints and pencils and paper, piles of half-finished sketches, stacks of coloring books, and dandelions and golden pothos hanging from the ceiling. I want to see them proudly show me a corner where they’ve strung up a hammock or made space for an indoor adult jungle gym, complete with a rope swing. “This is where I come to be free,” they’d say, and I’d feel their happiness. Or maybe, instead of a sleek office chair, they’d show me an old, comforting sewing machine, one handed down from their grandmother, with fabric scraps strewn across the floor in chaotic beauty.

But instead, what they often end up sharing is a roller mouse that’s gentle on their wrist, or the standing desk that rises with the push of a button they found on sale. They’ve meticulously designed this room to minimize strain while maximizing efficiency, but I can’t help but wonder what it’s all for. “Are we bringing our souls home? Or just our work?”

And maybe this thought comes from spending time with my writing students, many who tell me they have office spaces at home – rooms perfectly arranged to get things done – if only they could get past their blocks. They tell me they haven’t written anything in years. Somewhere along the way, work stopped being a place for play or expression, and they drifted from the part of themselves that loved to create. Sometimes, I take them outside, sit them down in the sun, or toss them a kickball, a hula hoop, or give them a boost to climb the tree, and let them reconnect with what it feels like to play. To let their minds run wild, to tap into that raw, childlike energy that doesn’t know cubicles or deadlines. And after a while, after they’ve let themselves feel that thrill again, creativity rushes in, like air to starving lungs, and the tears flow out. They remember what it’s like to bring their joy home.

I wish this for those who proudly show me their home offices, for anyone who feels the need to build walls around their labor. Because a home should be a place of welcome, a sanctuary that cradles and holds us just as we are, without expectations or deadlines.

Your testimonies are easy now. You swear to god and declare to family and familiars about the man who didn’t handle the wildness of your emotions or body properly. As a rule, you’ve told the story many times – the first three or twenty times to yourself – me always the exception – over and over to a requiting rearview. You gave me your harder years. You don’t get to hang me. You won’t hold any apologies over my head while my feet dance beneath your fingers. 

Weren’t we busy? Weren’t we figuring out how to make it look like we were surviving on our own? Busy driving hours to meet just to fuck and fall asleep and wake up grinding our teeth on compromises? I died from you in the strangest places, watching you pick the weakest parts of me to wash down. You didn’t even blink and I stumbled. I crashed once. You didn’t inch. I was afraid I’d never forgive you for not showing up as plastered as I did and I started building the box in which I eventually buried you. 

I was plaster.

You cuddled your dreams in your palms and I made them come true. 

“I love you” was an overture to anxiety. You gave me years of uncertainty and I threw it back to you or regifted it like the colognes I take home to my dad, knowing he’ll find greater use or at least pretend to love it until I leave then tuck it neatly in his sock drawer until I come over again. You were unsure how to balance who you wanted to be, who you needed to be, who your parents raised you to be, and who I saw that night we couldn’t find a place to sleep and decided to swallow drugs on that West Virginia mountain overlook. Scorpion grass dripping from your lips could not have made you more beautiful. Or maybe you were just more like me – high and completely honest and failing to keep up with moments while fighting back tears harder than you fought back telling me you felt unloved – not by me, but them.

All our lovers stitched cracks into our softness and we watched them comfort us like blankets in the middle of the afternoon. You knitted in the early mornings before work and fixed yourself by yourself in the years after me, but you give credit to the man who’ll only have to love you through these softer years. Your deathbed groom. There is no integrity in that, but if you’re lucky, the tapestry needles can be quartered with your wedding dress, the picture of us kissing in a hallway at a party, and the other beautiful things you never have to see again.  

In your dreams, disquiet was there. Next to you, outside, was me. 

Gently, I held your ponytail over a toilet while you offered up the drink you needed to settle your nerves after your insecurities drove you mad, then drove you to my apartment. I wish someone took a photo of that. I knew I’d fall in love with that memory if I could make myself forget all the shit that happened after. I did a lot of lying. We survived each other. We were hard. 

You found someone. There are years between us – me and him. There’s a therapist between us – me and him. There was no one between us – me and you. When you look back, was there anything between us? He met you after you took your grandma’s advice and learned to not need a man. That advice broke you and it’s okay that you weren’t okay, but I need you to tell them you weren’t okay with me and I loved you anyway. Tell them how I met you after years of bad advice from your mother who never spoke when your daddy was around. She spoke softly to me when you weren’t there, her words softened by the hard laughs jammed in her neck. I wish they made it out. She told me I was funny, but gave no proof. I wish she knew how to go to the store without a man. She could have given you more. She’s miserable in that marriage, “but at least she doesn’t sleep alone at night.” I hated you for seeing it like that.

I never wanted to wake up and say “I love you” to someone I didn’t. I knew how to leave you.

You were sometimes gold and sometimes blue. I was mostly me. You were sometimes you. I was always some boy you knew you wouldn’t marry, wouldn’t bring to your parents’ house twice, wouldn’t be soft for. I showed you a box that would fit your armor and sharp tongue when war dulled you and you tried to bury me there instead. I knew you as stone. 

You’re soft now because all the harder parts of you flushed down the toilet in that bathroom we never got around to putting a light in because we weren’t sure if all the blood was scrubbed from the under part of the seat or if all of the best of us both was flushed. Just the same, you moved to the smaller room and let your roommate live with our ghost. You’re soft because I never showed up for you when you were unmalleable. It was never my intent to mold you, I just needed you to dent a little under my thumb to know you were mine. I never felt you were mine enough. You mostly belonged to a place I could never see myself in and to a people who loved you for who you told them you were. They loved that about you – that gold part. Lucky them. Lucky him. Don’t rust. We never found what iron could do.

I was wrong, you were wrong. Don’t change.

You were sometimes tungsten.

You’ll settle thinking I never thought about those nights no one found you crying

                                                                                                             Alone

Thinking I was out partying with friends

                                                        Offhand / fingers to the winds

Maybe I was but I was fucked up too Tequila upstairs in a Hollywood bar

                                                                                     Sunrises / not too far

Betty -

You don't approve of drugs, I get it. But I feel everything when I'm high. My body is a pulsar, a wonderland of emotions you never thought you'd find and became fine with. I feel the earth spinning and I'll wake up or never sleep and tell you exactly what time it is in any part of the world. I feel the stillness of the fading summer and I remember me at 11 wondering when I'd reach an age when yards and catching chicken would no longer be fun. I cry for him. I feel the tears running down my mother's face each time she left me somewhere to enjoy a few moments without me. I feel the hundreds of kisses she planted on my face each week.

I feel this drip in the back of my throat.

I remember the many women before you, all who loved me in their own way. I remember that one the most. I feel every stroke that pushed me deeper into Her and every second that passed pushing me closer to leaving. I felt her 3000 miles away and I needed her closer. The only somebody I ever needed and I felt her slipping and did nothing. I feel Phil Collins.

I feel my left nostril fighting for air.

My heart moves to blackness. It navigates its way through a void. There's a  lilt. I feel too much. I can still feel your flesh, the coolness of your nails, and the air crawling under the door bringing with it the smell of sauteed garlic and fabric softener. It's sweet like your breath on my shoulder, your lip barely touching my neck, your eyelashes batting against my ear every 14 seconds, and your sadness. You keep cumming reluctantly. You know each time means we're closer to sleep. I feel sleepy.

I feel the low that's on its way.

April 30, 2019 9:15am Tokyo, Japan

L (You) –

I got lost in the smallest of your makeup. I walked by a stranger yesterday when coming out of the Ueno station near the Spanish restaurant with the half-decent paella and there was this scent. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t cologne or an oil, but probably a really good soap, and because scent is the sense most linked to memory, I suddenly remembered everything about that day on my balcony when my face tried to find its way into your neck. You were almost late to work and I was so far behind on a deadline, devouring you wouldn’t have made much of a difference. It would have been quick. There’s a difference between the exhaustion in your eyes when mixing the beats with the vocals isn’t as easy as you thought it’d be and the exhaustion in your eyes when you just want to be done with life. Your words trail when you’re talking about things you love. When talking about people you love, your words are crisp, like you’ve been thinking of how to phrase them all day. I’d know your hand wherever you placed it. Your fingers are fat and so are mine. Until you, I’d never been kissed with an intensity that made me question if I could be loved so much. Your bottom lip flinches when it’s in my mouth and your top lip does not come to its rescue.

Your fears – and I know the scariest of them, I think – are yours to tell, not mine.

I know how you like your salmon’s skin to crunch, but so does the chef. The chef doesn’t know how slow your blinking becomes after the first bite. He doesn’t know your almost-thick, slightly-thin eyebrows disappear into your forehead when you’re excited, and the bags you’ve grown under your eyes become so much cuter. You don’t want to work so much, but your goals won’t let you sleep like the others. I was awake, too. I was across town, across the ocean, across the room. I was awake, too, wondering how it was possible to exist in the same space at the same time and not explode.

I checked on your soul – your gristle and your marrow. Your father died and a continent away, I wore the ugly shirt I almost wore the day I met him. He fed me, even after catching me staring at you with an intensity normally reserved for stalkers or men who feel they’ve finally found home. I knew you were tired because you hadn’t bothered changing out of your sweats and a few times, you held my hand longer than you normally did in public spaces. Your sisters fed me later and filled me in on your childhood. I learned your inflections and each time your tone changed, I knew why. You gave up on a fork early and I could smell the stewed meat on your fingers when you’d touch my face. I knew you were going to tell me you loved me that night. I was prepared this time to say it back, but not first.

Your head lowers slowly toward something soft or toward me when you’ve given your wall a rest, and you talk about all the stuff. All the things. I tell you in those moments you are fine – hoping you believe it as much as I do. I listen because I love how your skin by your temples pull down over your cheeks and how your mouth and tongue form words – your accent an architect of intricacies. I once watched a colorblind man put on special glasses to see the colors of an Upper West Side, New York sunset for the first time. And you, wrapped in newness and in stories you’ve been dying to share with me, rivet my eyes. You become sunset and I the color blind man, not wanting to remove the shades.

A man sitting far from the path I was on in Yoyogi Park beneath trees blocking all light used fallen leaves for padding and folded pieces of paper into odd little complicated shapes. I wondered who made you. How long does it take to make such a complicated thing? He handed me what he said – in pretty good English – was his only Goliath Frog “because too difficult to make.” I paid him fairly. I carried it in my hand all day to keep it from tearing or falling apart, fearing I’d never be able to put it back together.

I walk, moving my fingers across the folds, laughing at myself for being resentful of those who shout obscenities – though they are probably lies – like, “I get over people quickly.” I’m resentful because I can’t. Because I write and know things only a writer knows. Because the smallest of your make up is stuck in corners my fingers are too fat to enter. Because I was told to never use “Because” to begin a sentence.” Because.

January 1, 2019 1:55am

Barcelona, Spain

To You –

I walked through an alley just an hour after midnight, after hurling bottles at the fountain at Placa de Catalunya, after drinking what felt like vats of cava and after eating grapes from strangers hands, after learning just enough Italian to sing along with the patriotic men who found cheap flights to Spain, and I walked by a bar that had no cover, no smokers outside to give me a headache, and no obvious threat of being pickpocketed, and all I could feel was the beat vibrating through the plastic window on the door. My reflection on that plastic was warped, but I still needed a haircut. I walked inside. Nothing dramatic about the way I walked in. Nothing I’d talk about over dinner, but something I’d share with you when our walls are down, in those hours before working to build them up again. I’d tell you how my body surrendered and I created a dance floor where a woman waited for her Negroni. It was the music.

My body has implored for water, for touch, for release, but never for a song. It moved without me until I admitted how bad I needed it. I needed something to zone out to. I needed something to pacify my temperance and numb my feet. I wanted to rid my mouth of the bad taste the cava left. It was the music. It pulled me in. Remember the second time we met? Remember that pull? Remember how we’d pull each other until we acquiesced to the impossibility of being closer? It was the music. I stood in front of the DJ with my eyes closed and my head moving slower than the beat and he saw me, and he played the whole song. You used to play whole songs for me.

More than any other need on that dance floor, I needed to tell someone about you years ago. To tell someone how dangerous it is to be loved by you. Odysseus had his men. Tonight, there was no one to tie me to a mast. No one offered me wax to put in my ear. Instead, I foolishly fell in love with the sound on the other side of a bullshit door and stood there like a fool, dancing slowly. Just before the song ended, I asked about the sirens. And there you were, hanging on to that part of my brain that makes me most human. I shouldn’t have asked the DJ about the song or singer, stopped at the bar, kept you away from everyone I knew, let you tell me you love that second time, given you my number, or ever listened to that Sade song that made me ask who was spinning that night in that bar. There you were, spinning.

It was the music tonight, the lyrics, me remembering you playing that very song for me the last time I sat next to you in a tight space, playing with your thumb, examining everything new on your face because nine months is a very long time. And the DJ played it to the end and I let him, knowing exactly how I’d feel when it ended. I knew whatever he played next wouldn’t keep me. I knew I needed to get back to write this letter to you before I pissed out the cava and before the wistfulness, like you, left.

I walked to the train. I didn’t care about picked pockets, the souring taste now sitting in my throat, the wetness on my eyeglass lenses, or the man staring at my hand not as close to his wife’s purse as he probably imagined. I thought about that time - that second time you told me you loved me – and how I told you I was in love with you and nothing else.

I still love you.

Darnell Lamont Walker

Beautiful men. She stops. She sounds like early days in a young boy’s summer. Like a good sizzling on my godmother’s stove. The joy a kid finds when she discovers the sound a slap bracelet makes on contact.

She goes. Beautiful men should have flowers too. Lips. Parted. Beautiful men. Should have her. Be loved good. Be good.

A friend was killed and I’m here, in this large room with no hanging art, no chests where the mattress ends, no bed frame, and no character. A somber vastness, this space, with a small mattress on a shiny concrete floor that’s been chipped and slightly matted in places by those who wear their boots and their heels beyond the shoe cubby I’ve placed at the entrance. The trail from that door to my bedroom is unsympathetic. The monster killed her daughter, too, leaving her 11-year-old body to sour under a super moon, leaving the neighbors with stories they’ll tell for the rest of their lives about a woman and a daughter and a murder and they’ll somehow rationalize not hanging up the phone with the pizza man to call the police with “the police always come late if they come at all” or “it didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary.”

My eyes are strained, my hands keep busy, I’m popping store brand pain medications to cure this headache, and drinking ginger ale because I miss my grandma and because it burns my throat and for a few seconds, steals the attention away from this heartbreak. They won’t ask why I’m crying if I cry or why I’m still in bed in the afternoon if I choose not to move from under this sheet. If they do, I’ll blame it on the murders.

All the things between us were ugly for a long time. We met early and loved late. We’d disappear and reappear like creations between matter and socks.

I’ve languished between you and every man you’ve loved since you were 15. How are our memories so beautiful?

In a South African township overrun by children who will die early I met a mother. She collected the casings of the nine bullets that killed her son then melted them down and made the only piece of jewelry she wears. Strangers tell her how beautiful it is.

It is easier to ask for sex than it is to ask for a hug. I’ve had a lot of sex in the past few months, and hated myself after the consummation of each date, each walk around town after midnight, and each app conversation, each pretending to be genuine, pretending we had more to give than a night. All I wanted was a hug. I wanted badly for those fillers, those strangers with familiar names to speak beyond the bounds of low hollers and ask if I was okay when they noticed I was doing more pseudo hugging and forehead resting on neck curves than I was thrusting. I wanted each of them to hug me back. Some did, and it was like that shower I hated in that hostel in Spain when it was cold outside. The water would come within milliseconds of getting hot enough to wash off the soap residue, then turn off. I’d push the button again, but it’d start from scratch. These lovers would hug me back, raise their shirts so our bellies would connect, but those hands on my back became nails, and the thin space between our bellies thickened with the arching of their backs, and I remembered, each time this happened, why I was there.

In a small room lit for thieves and helmet head geckos, on a bed made for small-framed lovers who oblige nuzzling, nestling, and slow, close fucking, but not much movement, I left no air between me and the debauchee with no name and dilated pupils. We didn’t move much, we didn’t speak, and we showed little signs of life if anyone outside happened to be listening. It felt like we were standing on opposite ends of intemperance, wanting badly to be neighbors.  

We walked two hours uptown From Christopher to 72nd You pulling me apart Me doing the same to you Thank god for summers Winters here are not for the naked but for the sheltered and guarded The unbecoming left us with almost nothing to speak about And barely mouths to speak it Anyway and naturally, I commented on the flowers still growing

You said, “we can’t help ourselves. We constantly undo and ruin each other.”

Ruin: the physical destruction or disintegration of something or the state of disintegrating or being destroyed

You asked "are we ugly people?"

I’m just not made for relationships. I’m made for those undefined and strange things that happen when neither of us is paying attention. It’s what happens in those hours when we’re not worried about titles, only how many tacos we can stuff into our stomachs and who’s going to fall asleep first on the film we both chose, that make sense to me. I’m made for that strange thing we’re doing when everyone else is wondering why I’m in so many of your photos and what’s made me pick up the pen again. 

I don’t know how to need. As a minimalist, I look at life’s needs a bit differently than most. Hence why I’m always broke, all my clothes fit into a small bag, and I’m always happy. As the descendent of folks who did most things on their own and allowed me to sit in the room while it all happened, I am well skilled in self-reliance. I will probably never need you. I will want you. It will always be my choice to be with you, and to me, that’s so much better. Don’t need me.

I will never chase after you. The soles on my shoes are almost completely worn, my knees are cracking, and my feet hurt sometimes because I walk too much. Relationships in the past have failed because I didn’t show up on the other side of the closed door, where they waited for me to stop them. Don’t tell me to leave when you mean “stay.” If I say leave, I mean leave. I only know how to get up when I’m done, but not before. I learned that at my best friend’s dinner table when I was 8. When you’re done, I expect you to get up as well. Don’t keep me company for the hell of it.

I’m a believer in opportunities, but not so sure “opportunities” is the word I want to use here. If you’re sitting in a coffee shop and a man enters and strikes up a random conversation about field mice and you laugh while the ice melts in your chai latte, and 45 minutes later you find yourself wondering if he’s your “person,” I will encourage you to find out. I will be hurt, but I will tell you to be sure. I have this foolish notion that we should always be sure we’re supposed to do this and with each other.

If you’re happier with titles, I will take a title. You can call me “boyfriend,” “lover,” or “him.” I can be him. I could also live out our relationship having never called you anything and having never been called something in return and I’d be just as happy. Any title you want, I will give you. It will mean more to you than it does to me, and that’s fine. We don’t belong to each other, we’re merely two people keeping each other company for a very long time.

I’m selfish and while I don’t require you to be, I will not allow you to make me feel bad about it. I will never sacrifice my inner freedoms for you and I won’t let you play a martyr. Whether I enter your space or you enter mine, you are here to share me with me, and I look forward to sharing all of you with you without compromise.  Humanly, naturally, we will evolve if we are meant to, but we can’t sit idle, waiting for that evolution.

I’ve been told it’s unrealistic to always want to feel springtime. I see couples eating dinner in public, each wishing they were alone or with whoever’s making them smile through the phone they can’t seem to ignore. It makes me think of the old women in dry marriages who make toasts at weddings, saying things like, “there will come a time when it’s not easy and may hate each other, but you will get through it together,” knowing it’s not always true. Some of them will grow in those dark places, but they will never bloom again. Undoubtedly, we will always grow, but I want to always bloom. I want us to always be new.