this was initially an email, but I thought I’d post it anyhow

I sit across the room from parents who, for approximately 55 minutes, will play detectives. Bemused by the labyrinthine plot of their new favorite mystery-in-syndication, they scratch their chins and occasionally comment on the suspicious behavior of the show’s characters. Its a redundant game of role-play; they’re pretending to be the detectives who are pretending to be detectives. After the
conclusion of the show, just before the preview of next week’s episode, my father will say something along the lines of, “I knew that Latina Harlot was embezzling money from the business.” This astute
observation was clear from the beginning of the show, when the aforementioned Latina was using the company credit card to make a cathartic shoe purchase. My mother, as if she has actually remained
awake during the entire episode, will endearingly reply, “see, hun, you could have been a lawyer.”

The next day my mother and I are outside of a bridal store, where my grandmother and sister are inside for the final fitting of my sister’s debutante dress. Through a covert plot, one not unlike a subplot of
the previous night’s show, my mother and I salvaged a cigarette break. “I think I left IT in my car,” my mother said as she fumbled desperately through her purse. Not ever explaining what “it” was, she
rushed out to her car, just before my grandmother could give her a suspicious look of disapproval. Envying my mother for getting her nicotine fix without me, I claimed that I “thought I heard my car
running.” Now, this put me at a bit of a stalemate, as I’m a poor liar, but I risked my grandmother’s scrutiny and rushed outside.

Its no surprise to my grandmother that I smoke. Over Thanksgiving Break, upon leaving her home, she gave me a hug. Instead of kissing me on the cheek, her usual gesture of endearment, she buried her nose deep into my scarf. “I know you smoke,” she whispers in my ear. Next, she pulls away from our loving embrace, waves an acrylic nail in the air and gives a half-smirk that suggests shes “too wise” to play games. Fearful of her wily tactics, I’m still subverting bad habits.

“Your father and I are turning into old people,” my mother says as she takes a drag from her cigarette. Her eyes are fixed between the mannequin brides in the display window, making sure we’re not suspect.
Ironically, her statement was followed by a look of achievement, as if she were saying something quite the opposite. “We have our favorite shows that we watch after dinner, and then we fall asleep before
10pm.”

We share the cigarette as if it were our last joint, and we had one day left of Bonaroo. She puts her cigarette out under her car tire. She gets up the curb and reaches in her handbag, this time with more
deliberation. She opens a sterling silver cigarette case to reveal fancy mints, she pops one in her mouth and then reaches in her bag for a bottle of perfume. After spraying the perfume on her neck and
wrists, she glides back into the bridal store. I can’t help but think that she’s found “it”.

I also remember seeing a blowdryer in her purse. She comes prepared for any beauty disaster that may come her way. In fact, she could be one of those femme fatale spies, the kind that excuse themselves to the ladies room and reemerge as a salacious blonde, deftly escaping the bar without notice.

I have taken after my mother’s symbiotic relationship with her handbag. My handbag, however, takes the form of a more urbane and socially acceptable “man-purse.” I never leave home without it; I can
be seen walking the big urban streets with the security of it. “Why the hell do you carry that bag everywhere with you - it’s full of trash!?” My sister asks with a vindictive glare in her eyes. I don’t blame her for asking such a question, its almost appropriate. My bag is full of old receipts, expired gift certificates, crumpled sketches, gum wrappers, and empty cigarette boxes (false hope.)

Some people eat comfort food; they have emergency pints of chocolate swirl in their garage freezer. Some people have personified stuffed animals; my friend has a bipolar bear with its own friendster profile. The homeless on 4th street share needles, dripping with a serum that’s sure to pacify. People have funny ways of comforting themselves, and my way is no less… funny.

My attempts at comfort have always taken the form of emulations of my mother. As a child, I used to watch her sit in her vanity and dress herself. She’d glide lipstick with such precision, and match her
outfits perfectly with her accessories. Each day, she would reveal a new ensemble, perhaps a new shade of lipstick, but one thing always remained the same: the wig on her head.

I remember seeing her in the kitchen, smoking and bald, pacing around and puffing away. She looked so exposed to me, like a turtle without its shell. When her wig was on her head, she was ‘okay’, and any
notion of her cancer was dissolved. The image of a mother to a child is the most familiar thing they know, so when that image is alterated drastically, the child questions their own identity.

One afternoon, the sight of my mother’s new image was too much for me to bear. I remember running to my closet and sitting there, reentering some sort of womb. I reached into my bureau and draped a t-shirt over my head. Instantly, I felt a sort of release… the same sort of comfort I would find years later in my first drink of whiskey or the first puff of a cigarette. Just seeing the cotton in my periphery was a feeling of wellness.

I didn’t take the shirt off my head for approximately one month… there are pictures to attest to this embarassing fact. I wore it to the mall, the grocery store, school. What really stands out in the pictures is not the absurdity of my ornament… its the nonchalance on my mother’s face. A strange sense of normality. Her and her 5 year old, both wearing their wigs, both battling something, sharing
eachother’s pain and existence.

Its strange that I have been living away from home for two years now. Each time I visit, I see a new development in my parents marriage and within themselves. Its like catching an episode of a show you used to watch religiously, and trying to bridge the story from what you are now seeing and what you know to be true. The strangest thing is staying home for an extended period of time, and actually intersecting their lives again.

“Your father and I are becoming old people,” my mother says, as she traces her index finger along the yellow painted curb. I see such comfort in this confession, a comfort paved by years of preceding
drama and torment. With no car (left in LA) and no active agenda, I’m forced to watch my parent’s favorite new shows with them and then retire early. Its part of a routine that is, in fact, comforting. But
I know that its only temporal, I’m not prepared for such comfort. I wriggle restlessly on my couch, itching for something more. Upon my arrival back to LA, I will find temporary ways of comforting myself.
Some might gain me a few extra pounds. Some might result in more habits along the way. Some might cause me to withdraw from my bank account. But, despite each of these setbacks, I can hope for a time when comfort is something unsuggested and organic; I can hope for a time when I’m comforted by surprise.

The scent of pine needles was always a frightening one, the aroma creeping up the stairs - signaling alarm for my sister and I. We would peer over the sides of the handrail as my father violently dragged a rope-bound tree through the front door. He would then put on a cheerful Christmas record, and holler from the foyer: “it’s time to decorate the tree!”

We were young then, but both my sister and I knew that the boxes of gleaming decorations and cheesy Christmas music were a facade… a front for the ensuing horror. You see, my mother has always been a meticulous decorator. Ours was the home where none of our schoolmates would want to play. Most of the rooms were insidiously crafted, each arrangement of art and furniture calculated, and every fabric and fixture fragile. Our house was not particularily a home, but a canvas upon which my mother expressed herself, every detail a personal declaration, an intentional memento to my mother’s flamboyance.

My father would be the first to take decorating intiative. My mother would stand behind him in her nightgown, already plotting a vision of the tree, simultaneously drafting my father’s demise. I could see her cringe as my father clumsily strung pearls on the tree, and as my sister incongruously and unthoughtfully hung colorful glass balls from the tree limbs. It was through those christmas globes that I saw the reflection of my mother, the boiling enmity in her eyes that would manifest itself moments later.

Moments later: my mother is furiously removing the strands of pearls from the trees… sending some of the porcelain decorations crashing down to the marble floor. And when it seemed nothing could make the moment worse, the tree comes crashing down to the floor, covering us all in prickly pine needles and shattered glass. My mother croons, “fuck Christmas!” as we run for cover in the upstairs family room.

The following Christmas found my mother out of her blue period and into her days of whim and abstraction. My sister and I arrived home from school to see dozens of crisp, white feather pillows surrounding the tree. In the corner of the room, we saw my mother with metal sheers in her hand, hacking away at the pillows. I felt like Cristina in Mommie Dearest, being woken up by the maid in the middle of the night to help my mother (Ms. Crawford) hack away at the rose garden.

“Get a pair of sheers from the kitchen and help me rip out the feathers from these pillows.” We would do as ordered, and without question. Hours later, the living room looked as if it had been the scene of a mexican chicken fight, ending morosely as the winning chicken, seconds after victory, fell to its death. We decorated the entire tree with the feathers, a minimal expression which my family didn’t understand, but pretended to, relieved that we would at least have a Christmas tree, and that it wouldn’t end up in the driveway on December 23.

Luckily, this Christmas, years after a lesson should have already been learned, we purchased a fake Christmas tree from Neiman Marcus. It’s abstract, and looks like something that would be in a Tim Burton Christmas movie, but at least it requires no decoration, and hence can’t provocate tumult and disfunction.

Another aspect of the holiday season that would have my sister and I trembling in our knickers, despite the cold, was our Christmas card photo shoot. We never had the typical holiday cards (the hallmark sort with the glossy cover, Biblical verse, and holly border.) Our photo sessions had the stress of a Vogue spread, my mother directing us as if we were Kate Moss and she was David LaChapelle. We would sit on Louis XVI armchairs, our bare feet akwardly embracing the French rug, with a disenchanted gaze at anything but the camera lens. The resulting photograph would be in black and white, enveloped in a crisp card wrapped tautly in tulle. Our friends and teachers would receive the cards, to which they would reply, “why do you look so sad?” Not undermining the artistic integrity of our mother, we would shrug our shoulders as if to say we were much too wordly and sophisticated at age eight to be enamoured by the clearly superficial commerciality of the holiday season.

One Christmas our photographer called to say he couldn’t take our pictures due to overbooking. My mother, in a state of desperation and frenzy, gave a call to the local Motophoto, the scene of many criminal holiday shots of babies with Santa Claus, and toddlers prancing around guazily wrapped cardboard boxes. “We need to make a housecall,” my mother whispered cryptically over the line.

The next day an average looking man appeared at our doorstep. Forgetting my mother’s phonecall, I assumed he was the new dry-cleaner, or perhaps the exterminator coming to the save the house from vermin. My mother answered the door, wearing a sultry red gown. “Why don’t you set up in the living room,” she delicately ordered as she glanced through the arched entry way. The man walked through the door with a look of mesmerization. I could tell he had never seen a house as fanciful as ours, with all of the antiques dripping in gold leaf, the baroque ornamentation of the curtains dancing in his periphery. Punch-drunk, he walked into the living room and set up his equipment.

For a man used to frustrated attempts at calming babies (by making funny faces and shaking rattles) and backdrops of poorly painted circus scenes, we were quite the spectacle. But he had the equipment, my mother had the vision, and by God we were going to get a good shot out of this. After several shots of us sprawling despairingly on the limestone floors, in Morrissey inspired gestures (”oh, what difference does it make?”) my mother decided to have a photoshoot of her own. Wearing multiple gowns, she posed on chaise lounges, herself reflecting in numerous mirrors, the Marie Antoinette of the midwest. And then of course there’s the classic shot of her holding my father’s foot, in a Mary Magadeline gesture of adoration. Maybe he left our house that day thinking we were the craziest family we had ever met, pitying my sister and I for not having a traditional Christmas card. Or maybe he left that day with a skip in his step, plotting his flight to Manhattan with the wings of inspiration. He could certainly never return to that poorly lit Motophoto studio, squeezing rubber ducks at rotten children.

I recently returned home for Thanksgiving, which in the past was the time we would begin to think about our Christmas card, and start to dread the delivery of the tree. Now we’re much too old to be photographed and placed in a card to be sent to friends and family. And despite the chaos that surrounded the card production, I think I miss those photo sessions - those long nights of acting woebegone in church clothes in front of a feather-doused Christmas tree. Now there’s so much mystery in my mother’s eyes as she looks at my sister and I, trying to understand us as adults, threading the lapse of time between now and the time she last saw us. When we were behind the lens, she knew us, we were with her every second of the day. She never left us with a babysitter - we saw the world from the backseat of her Mercedes. Now my sister and I have our own seperate lives, her in Dallas and me in LA. I wonder if, from time to time, as she looks at those old Christmas cards, she pays attention to the way we were posed - the way she directed us. And I wonder if she looks at us now, as we come home from the holidays, and sees that all of her direction paid off. I wonder if she looks at us, away from the camera lens, and sees the best Christmas card photoshoot of all.

It was cold outside, the frigid wind whipping around the trees gave me a sense of comfort. I watched my mother smoke a cigarette and debated whether or not I was comfortable with her rekindled habit or worried.

“I have to feel… adored,” she said between frantic puffs. It was as if it took her twenty years of marriage to come to such a realization, after she had been adored and just as she wasn’t feeling it anymore. I have never felt more despaired than I did at that moment, watching my mom ash her cigarette in the snow, a hooded sweathshirt draped over her shoulders. I realized how short she is (she usually wears magnificant heels) and how small she is… and how the prospect of my father falling out of love with her made her seem so much smaller. I realized that it wasn’t her heels or her suits that make her so mighty, its the gratitude and complacency that accompanies being adored that adds to her enchantment.

I suppose adoration is a silent assurance. I never saw my father as particularily romantic. He never delivered flowers to my mother for no reason, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t conceal her wedding ring in the “specially prepared” souffle when he proposed. Their relationship was always something a priori to me, and without question.

“I think she would really like that one,” I whispered to my father as I pointed my finger at a display box containing a diamond tennis bracelet.

I seemed to have a certain persuasive power at a young age. While discussing trips with a travel agent, I was always a burden to my mother. At the age of nine, I knew all the hottest hotels in Rome. I knew all of the trendiest restaurants in Paris, because I read Conde Naste while the other kids played kickball. “Mom, why would we stay at the Concorde? Lord knows the Concorde is full of old American ladies with names like Doris who are trying to rekindle their marriage with their gambling addict husbands…crying on the Seine because they realize they’re not young and beautiful anymore. And then their husband runs off with a little Parisian coquette while they order room service from a bellhop named Pierre, who flirts with them out of pity…” The travel agent would look at me with wide eyes, either wanting me out of the room or scouting me for a position when I would be of age. Its a shame travel agencies are so archaic, or perhaps I wouldn’t be contemplating a career as an architect.

My father looks at me, his young son, clearly a fledgling gay man of style, and agrees that my mother would love the bracelet in the display case. I pictured my father giving my mother the bracelet, her face beaming with joy. She would place the diamonds around her wrist and kiss my father, followed by a wink of aknowledgement that it was all my working, because I knew everything. Unfortunately, it always ended in the same scenario: “I just won’t wear this, and I’d hate to see us spend money on something that will just sit in the closet,” she would say as the jewlery box made a horrifyingly loud shutting noise. Then my father and I would drive to the jewelery store early the next morning, not saying a word to eachother.

I always got angry with my father when I saw him looking at other women. We’d be sitting in a bustling department store as my mother busied herself with shoe sales and rows of evening gowns. “We can look at all of the pretty girls from this bench while your mother is in the dressing room,” he would say, with a chummy shoulder nudge. Perhaps it was because of my already-developed disinterest in women, but I was aghast at such a suggestion. I couldn’t understand why he would want to look at other women when he was married to the most beautiful woman in the world.

Years later, I’m living on my own in Los Angeles. I’m at a bar in Silverlake, next to someone I’m trying to get to know better. Someone I’m trying to engage. Someone who is quiet and unreciprocal. Someone who will never adore me and for some reason has power over me.

I call my father the day after elections, and he reaffirms that he voted for Bush. He is consistantly rubbing it in my face that he’s a Republican, chastizing me for being otherwise. But it isn’t a sort of Team A / Team B competition for me… its an insensitivity on his part with some of the things that matter to me most. My twin sister also voted for Bush, and my mother said she was “happy Bush was re-elected,” despite her dabbling into some liberal ideology this summer. She was happy because she was secure, normativity is still in the air and deviating from that is risky and uncomfortable.

It isn’t the fact that my family voted Republican that bothers me. In fact, I couldn’t be less angry… anger doesn’t really describe the way that I feel. It just hurts me that they didn’t even stop and consider the way the platform affects my life as a gay man. It isn’t just being gay… there are liberal ideas that I care deeply about (which my family knows) and still they wave the red banner without consideration. It makes me think of the situation allegorically: if they are so desensitized to my political beliefs, representative of much more, are they completely ignoring parts of my life?

I think about my mother, smoking in the snow. I think about the pain I felt as I watched the ashes sully the white, how I would have done anything to restore her confidence and adoration. I think about the bracelet I foolishly convinced my father to buy my mother so many Christmases ago, and how much I articulated her expression before we pulled in the driveway. Then I think about tonight, a night where I realized that adoration is something that can’t be crafted, no matter how persuasive I might be. How I lowered my head when I walked into my empty apartment, realizing adoration is rare. I saw my father checking ‘yes’ to to the proposition creating an amendment against gay marriages. And as I think about holding my mother on the stairway later that day, as she kept repeating that her heart was broken, I can’t help but be confused at how I can feel so much concern for the love they have for eachother, and they can’t stop to consider my place in the political spectrum. How they could be even slightly proactive about divisive legislation that constitutionally bans a declaration of adoration between two men, one of which could be their son.

“So, Republicans rejoice today!” I hear my father say, with evasive arrogance in his voice. As hard as it was the first time, I feel as though I may have to come out again. And maybe again…. until their consideration for my life becomes remotely parallel to mine for theirs.

Sunset Boulevard… Hollywood Boulevard… the succession became dreamlike, the person in the passenger seat gazing wistfully at the surroundings neither of us could make sense of. Our positions became a riddle plaguing us with anxiety, his unrest evident by the waft of alcohol from his breath that hit me when he walked in my car. His eyes seemed at the same time concentrated and restless, as he looked at me and asked, “show me how loud you listen to music when you’re driving alone.” I looked at him and slowly turned the volume knob as if he asked, “show me how you touch yourself when noone is looking.”

“I feel guilty today, like everything I have done in life is wrong, ” my friend Moira touted as she took a drag off a cigarette. Her words, paired next to the grey clouds and the industrial skyline of downtown LA, formed a dialogue that was all too familiar. There was a sudden sense of over-exposure, as if a spotlight was suddenly wedged between the clouds, us with nowhere to hide. From the abandon factories and scaffolding that surrounded us an occasional jogger or pedestrian would stroll by, each carrying an invisible thread that wound around our bodies, binding us from any sort of emergence.

My boot gets caught in a thick mixture of mud and snow. I hate winter in Philadelphia - its cold and it isn’t pretty. My hands fumble clumsily in my pocket for change, perhaps enough to buy a pack of cigarettes. My heart races in a sort of amphetamine frenzy. Thump. Thump. Thump. The pressure of my heart against my chest is almost unbearable until I find a seat on the subway, where each beat is synchronized with rough glide of the car against the rail. Its much colder underground than above, but its also dark. Its like a subterranean womb protecting me from the heartache above. I ride and ride and ride, until an overwhelming sense of guilt beckons my exit.

Its lunchtime, and I’m driving around Little Tokyo. All of the unexplainable fear and guilt is hiding under my eyes. I put change in the meter. Clink Clink. I stroll into the Japanese mall to use the ATM and eat lunch. The mall is this massive, vacant edifice with hallogen lighting, discount sushi restaurants, and children’s clothing stores. I walk into a little cafe that feels French but it has a Japanese name.

Inside the cafe, I see an older asian lady who wears a wool sweater draped around her neck. Her lipstick looks permanently fixed to her lips, forming a butterfly arch that deviates only when necessary. Her hair is immaculating constructed into a bun, a style that would seemingly defy the most treacherous climates. Every move she makes is deliberate and graceful; the way she glides her hand to retrieve a baguette seems almost pre-meditated, as if it were calculated as she walked down 1st street on her way to the market. The way she slid money out of her wallet was so feminine, so feminine that I thought of virginity. I thought of the first time she made love to a man, as she carefully laid the exact change on the table before her. As she placed the baguette in the long brown bag, I thought of a man crawling on top of her, her younger porcelain face looking out the window, a foreign object splitting her into two. As she walked out into the city street, I saw her trying to make sense of her two halves, hiding under her purple umbrella.

Her silence said so much. Her expressionless face was full of hidden gestures. And it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed.

I look at Moira, her laugh and her gestures so literal. I laugh in response, at the hilarity of our commisseration. We feel guilty because we expose so much of ourselves. We laugh when things are funny. Our gestures cannot hide romantic infatuation. We makes moves that aren’t calculated but are emotional. Instinctual. It could be a comfortability with ourselves and the world around us, or perhaps its an ironic manifestation of insecurities.

As I clumsily navigate my way through the cafe, my every move decided at that very moment, I have to wonder if the quiet woman can read the guilt sinking beneath my eyes. I wonder if she can see the confusion as I drop my change on the floor. I wonder if, by the way I shuffle my feet when I walk, she can see that my heart was recently broken. I wonder if the quiet woman thinks I’m beautiful, too.

I glided the exacto-blade assuredly against the foam board, more precisely than the last time. It was a smooth, clean cut… I already knew my blade would slip in the following cut - I had planned it. So after the blade deviated from the ruler, I pounded at the table furiously with my fists. “I can’t do anything right!”

Because I won’t let myself.

I’ve always had a way of constructing my own fate, or at least attempting to. Its my anti-existential method of self-protection. I create certain barriers for myself, confines that often prevent me from growing as a person. Or even growing, literally.

When I was a child, I took the Toys R’Us theme song to heart. I never wanted to grow up. Growing up meant isolation and loneliness (see, I was a bit prophetic as a child.) “My, you’re getting taller - growing into quite a man,” my mother would say. A worried expression would cross my face, and I would loosen my posture, as if to deduct a few inches. At an even younger age, I would eat smaller amounts of food than I wanted, to give the impression that my appetite was still small which, to my sordid logic, meant that I wasn’t yet growing.

Then came puberty. Still fighting nature’s course, I was horrified to one day realize that my legs were covered in hair. “How could this happen?” I thought, standing in front of a mirror. It was as if they sprouted overnight… I didn’t even have time to prepare for such a spectacle. It was an extremely hot day, somewhere in the middle of sixth grade, and I wore courdoroy pants to school. Waiting for the bus after the bell rung, I felt a mosquito bite swelling underneath my pants. I hiked one of my pant legs up to itch it, and instantly caught the attention of my sister, who chastised me with her eyes. I was mortified and terrified, and found it to be a devastating period in my life.

Eventually I succumbed to the inevitable and grew up. Once I accepted the process of aging, I became indignant and rebellious. Suddenly, I was older and more experienced, never looking back at my anxiety-wridden youth. I smoked cigarettes and wore black leather jackets. I wrote song lyrics in notebooks, ones which had an uncanny similarity to my point of view at the time. I even discovered hair products. Ah, the advent of my homosexuality.

Lately, I have been confronted with many situations that have forced me to grow at an even quicker pace. The catenoid-inspired droop in my maturity picked up again when I moved to Los Angeles. Suddenly, I’m forced to pay bills, commute every morning in thick traffic, and cut straight lines effortlessly - each task going against the impetuous, imaginative, and erratic nature that made my youth so memorable.

The other night I was at a housewarming party in Venice. To my embarassment, I arrived at the party a bit early, bottle of Merlot in hand. My friend guided me around his new home, ending the tour in the small but groomed backyard. He popped open a beer and looked around for a moment. “This is the first house I have ever lived in,” he said to me as he proceeded to take a sip of his drink. I realized he was right, there aren’t very many houses with yards in New York City.

He left to greet some other people, and I stood outside, looking at the yard and the house. I had this overwhleming sense of responsibility, and I was floored. I saw a small, green yard and a home. A home and a yard. I remembered the small house that my sister and I were raised in. I saw my mother and father, both young and unscathed from the events that would later follow in our lives. I saw my mother smoking on the porch, my father looking up from his drafting table. They weren’t much older than I am now.

I stood in the middle of the yard, the rest of the partygoers surrounding me like colored dots in a Monet painting. I was terrified, and I wanted to go back to image I recalled, to a time when nothing was expected of me, to a time when I could get away with crooked lines. And then I had a sort of epiphany - I had failed in every attempt to control time in the past, and it only lead to a more difficult understanding of the present. I had to stop planning, foreboding, and start allowing myself to open to my own potential, my ability to endure change and surprise myself.

“I guess they’re friends of my roomates,” my friend said as he sauntered back to me. I will admit to romantic feelings for the said friend, and at that moment I saw a certain sheen to his eyes. It was a look that was still youthful, still genuinely excited about something. And I looked forward to what he would say next, and what the night would bring. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about the past or trying to control anything… there was possibiity and ambiguity - and, suddenly, I was cutting a straight line.

“You know, when you wake up and mom is just talking to you,” my sister began to say from the other end of the phoneline, her end in Dallas and mine in Los Angeles. She described a scenario I knew quite well, one that was aggravating at the time but is endearing in retrospect. Every summer morning, my sister and I would be plagued by our mother’s early morning diatribes or sermons. Perched on the ends of our beds, she would rant about anything and everything from fundraiser ideas (which usually involved reenactments of Alice in Wonderland) to her Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. We would fade in and out of consciousness, muffling our ears with pillows, unable to escape the disparate words that floated in and out of our dreams and reality.

“Rabbit.” “Satan.” “Versace.” “Addiction.” “Miracle.” “Dopamine.” All examples of the words we would be forced to piece together once awake and starting our day. Mid-day, such things would occur to me as, “The Versace-wearing rabbit, his dopamine levels stimulated by his addiction to Satan, stumbled upon a miracle.” My sister, on the same token, at the same hour, might be thinking, “It’s a goddamn miracle that Satan and Versace teamed up to save that crack addict rabbit.”

But this morning was different. My sister didn’t fall back alseep once my mother began talking to her - it must have been the expression on her face.

“Your brother is on drugs,” my mother began to tell her. Rachel nodded her head, fearful to know too much, but admitting that she already knew.

“Mom told you I was on drugs the morning I arrived home from Philadelphia?” I asked, as I relocated to the balcony to smoke a cigarette. I looked out onto the Hollywood Hills, trying to make sense of how I arrived in Los Angeles, and trying to piece together the drama that preceded my move - something that didn’t fit very jig-saw like.

“Yes, and then two mornings later I woke up to dad hollering my name from the kitchen. Immediately, I came to the conclusion that I was in trouble…” My father has a very austere nature about him. His intentions are usually warm-hearted, but his expressions and voice always signal trouble. A statement as disarming as “I made brownies for you and your sister” may read as “I found a revolver in your mother’s clutch.”

“I walked down the stairs, afraid, and saw him sitting on the kitchen table. He looked very serious - he had his hands folded in front of him.” It was a look I knew all too well. It was the same posture he was fixed in when I would arrive home late from a party in highschool. It was a folded, armed-and-dangerous gesture that made one think of an eternity in a small cell, furnished only by a metal chair and a urinal, and a lifetime building relationships with carefully-named vermin.

“Why didn’t you tell me your brother is gay?” He asked. It was a question that was uncalled for, a question that endowed her with a responsibility that wasn’t hers - and she answered as such.

“I left for the rest of the day, and didn’t come back until late at night.”

I would arrive home approximately one day later, stumbling out of a plane, high on painkillers, to a fiery furnace that, until that point, had been continually fed with coals. I would be thinking only of myself, how misfortunate I was to be gay, and how my drug use was excused because of all of the repressed shame and guilt. I wouldn’t even be able to piece together the sequence of events that made my “coming out,” foggy because of the drugs, until several months later.

And I wouldn’t be able to understand the feelings of my sister on the situation, until now. Once I finally put the pieces together of the two weeks that preceded my very dramatic arrival from Philadelphia, I saw a completely different story. It was no longer about me. It was a story of a girl, twin to a gay brother, daughter of a recovering addict, forced to build her own resolutions and strength from within herself.

I threw my cigarette over the balcony, the ashes falling through the air, the embers collapsing on the cement four stories down. “How did you feel?” I asked, shocked and ashamed that I had never asked it before.

“What is gay?” my much younger cousin asks at the dinner table, as some of the older cousins and I were talking about a new reality show. His eyes are curious but knowing, as if he knows the answer to the question but still needs more convincing.

A sudden wave of anxiety envelops me before I can conjure a mature response to the situation. His parents know that I came out about a year ago. I imagine him asking his mother, my aunt, for an explanation that night, and her automatically assuming that he overheard sordid details of my big gay urban life. Or possibly she was going to assume that I was trying to persuade her son into a homosexual lifestyle with an initiation ceremony consisting of a Neimans card and a John Kerry pin.

One of the older cousins chuckles and takes a sip from his whiskey and coke. “Something you never want to be,” he replies.

My sister looks at me, with a hint of remorse in her eyes. “He doesn’t know,” her eyes say. “And I’m sorry.”

While I would like to be unaffected by the ignorance and unscathed by such comments, my head still feels heavy. “Don’t say that to him,” I declared as I lit a cigarette and walked away, leaving a trail of smoke hovering above the table… just above the surfacing realizations.

I wish I could have explained to my younger cousin the answer to his question in different words, without feeling like I was tainting his innocence. Because I know that at such an impressionable age, he will remember that gay is something he is never supposed to be. Its something I heard at his age, and with every puff of a cigarette and every drape of my hands over my eyes - I carry it with me.

Digital images cast a reflection in her glasses as she glided a computer mouse back and forth… back and forth… back and forth as she synchronized herself with the computer in front of her, engrossed in the perfectly arranged colors, fixing her eyes between two vectors, slowly mouthing a digital repetoire in which time slowed by morphine was represented paradoxically by quickly moving traffic and a static alarm clock.

Sullen and focused, she became her creation. She became the streams of light flooding a city highway. She became the static clock. Reciprocity; She flowed, circuitously with the machine, rewiring life… stopping time.

4.44
4.44
4.44

A time in (not at) which, several months later, we would be sitting in her Philadelphia apartment, mindlessly smoking cigarettes while creating a surreal life tempered by the speeds of amphetamines. Her computer screen would reveal black and white pictures of ourselves, her floor littered with convenience store reciepts and mountains of shoes. In our occasional outings to nightclubs, she went home with other men, and I tried to give life to a dead romance. But we always found ourselves magnetically drawn back to that seventh story view, where she would gaze out the window… unfocused.

I woke up next to her, with a sense of alarm. There was an uneasy pitch to the wind. It was no longer static. The clock was moving quickly in a day that I dreaded - picking up HIV test results. I swallowed blades of saliva, and left her sleeping.

It was windy that day, but sunny… and I was shocked to find myself in such movement. The way the students flowed through the university quadrangles was offensive. The way the branches danced in my periphery was alarming. At a moment of relief, at repose due to negative test results, I see her… being guided around the campus by a middle-aged black woman.

She walks by me, making a furtive gesture with her hands. I’m not supposed to recognize her. As she faded into the movement of things, I felt an existence being erased, the overwhelming feeling of change stopped the branches in their swing.

I knew I wouldn’t see her again.

The dim lights of the train station seem like part of a reverie. The cool plastic of the concession stand. The sharp pitch of the phone ringing, a siren… Her voice unaffected and monotone she described the way she died:

A small shower, with plastic shampoo bottles. Her fragile body severed with razor cuts. The lines of blood flowing from her arms… herself unwiring into a drain. A disk left with intention on her desk, revealing the pictures that both painted and constituted a friendship that was either a dream or frighteningly real.

She lived, but her suicide attempt was successful in many regards. Every drag of the razor across her wrist, every line of blood, made her feel real. And with each penetration, a moment in our time together was erased. The suicide happened.

It reignited time.

Its often hard for me to remember the way someone appears at first impression. Usually such an impression is washed away by the reality of that person. Their demeanor, the feelings they provoke. But I remember Claire. I remember her focus. The way she trapped herself in vectors. Wiring herself into a box that would protect her. The quickly moving traffic. The endless repetition of time, and how it simulatenously seemed to go so quickly and drag on… it lapsed without ever occuring at all. Perhaps only severance can lead one back to remembering that first moment of encounter. Otherwise, things are still in motion, organically creating new moments to replace the feelings of unfamiliarity. I remember the shapes reflected in her glasses. The shield around her.

I remember wanting to remember her.