my marfa crush takes a nap and texts me after. something about imagining i’m there with him, on the couch, in the crook of his arm. something about him playing with my hair.
i follow his direction. i text back, telling him i get up from the couch to make myself a sandwich. i tell him that while i’m making it he quietly strokes himself without my noticing. i turn around and see he’s hard. i stare at him then, taking a bite of the sandwich.
he has black hair and blue eyes and his name translates to crimson.
i daydream about it. marfa and the lonely scorpio men it gifts me every time i visit. their sun-beaten surroundings.
i’d like to be there now, out in the dust. out in that emptiness that goes on and on and on.
anthony bourdain wrote about it.
“i drove three hours through ghost towns and dead gas stations and nothing but nothing,” he said.
i’ve driven across texas a handful of times. i think i’ll do it again soon. and when i get there, to where i’m going, to that solitary outpost in the middle of that nothing, i’ll lay in the crook of my crush’s arm and i’ll wake up and make a sandwich and i’ll stare long at his desire and i’ll taste his red hot fever.
but today. today i go to a park in brooklyn and lay in the sun and close my eyes and listen for the sound of birds but all i hear are children playing. they make so much noise. and there’s so many of them now school is back in session. they take over the neighborhood in the afternoons and early evenings. they’re everywhere all at once. i don’t know how there can be so many. then again, i’ve seen what seems like a hundred pregnant women over the last few weeks. in all stages of gestation. maybe god is trying to tell me something.
and with them i see a precious desperation in everything else. a man feeling up his girlfriend on the train, her stepping away. a woman grabbing for her boyfriend’s wrist while they walk through the park. a mother walking her baby in a stroller, its cries reaching far beyond its tiny body. i want to cry sometimes too you know. on my knees. sobbing. that’s how i imagined myself as i listened to the baby. begging. please god, let me see!
i look at photos from septembers passed. i see us in the beginning and miss who we were to each other then. my heart breaks at the illusion that no longer holds any truth. what i would do to believe again.
i’m so often up late at night now, into the morning. i don’t totally know what i’m doing all those hours. living my life i guess.
i go to the lower east side to view a premier for a film my friend is in. then i go to tribeca for the after party at an old firehouse turned venue. then i go to soho for the after after party. i call my marfa crush as i walk 20 minutes to the f train at west 4th street. we don’t talk on the phone much so it feels like a novelty. something special. the illusion is still going strong.
i wonder how your illusion is going with the new girl. the local. how is she? i bet she believes so hard. i bet she’s so eager. god, i feel for her. if only she knew.
i wonder, does she think you’re her boyfriend? does she think you’ll be true? will you make her crawl when the illusion starts to slip and she gets desperate to believe again? will it make you hard, watching her beg?
i get sort of caught up before my curiosity transforms. does she have what it takes to beg? does she have the stamina? the guts? is she willing to go to the end of herself to win a phantom prize? i doubt it.
a professor in one of my classes talks about how we, as writers, lie the most at the beginning and end of a story.
“just like in a relationship,” i say to the class.
everyone laughs.
