The Man
The evening air drips from the gutters, slithers in my window, fills my room with the scent of the weather-change. It makes me feel like a young man, waking up suddenly after 15 years—been a child trying to fall asleep in an orange twilight, imagining what it meant to be ‘out on my own’—as if I didn’t grow here but beamed directly to manhood, trying to stay awake in the twilight.
Who turned on the music? Who put the bass beneath the mattress, whose music is this? My comforter is crumpled and damp with sweat. It feels so odd, suddenly, to be me. Exhaustion is a time-bending drug. When I was a child, my limbs could make snow-angels in the creases of the yellow sheets: that was a pastel twin bed my parents gave me.
Now, wearing almost nothing, I spread my legs, my arms above my head, I smell earthy and a complement for the evening air, like what was missing when I tried to imagine as a child.
The music is so subtle and so loud, imagination mixed with exhaustion—how lucky I feel to be me. How much I’ve longed to be this man. Like a child woken up in a man’s body: I declare everything I lay eyes on ‘mine’ by context alone.
The music is mine, the king-sized bed and the snow-angels I make are mine, the man who stands at the foot of my bed (boxers only and sweaty hair, trail of chest-hair matted to itself) seeing the sunset through the open window… he is mine.
Everything comes to me, fighting to stay awake. I have been so many places, I did not beam here. I have been so many places where the evening air didn’t make me feel like this. I have had lovers in dreams and weekends that did not watch the stretch of my limbs and the sheen of sweat on my chest like a sunset. He looks at me, now, light in his eyes--my light.
I feel such myself, and I love this drug. I love everything the evening air touches, I will feel like a young man again, I will wake to this moment again—someday—when we have grown old. Come with me. Come to the bed, or I should come to the window.
