THE BOYFRIENDS (INTERPRETATIONS)

Boyfriend #7 / Nicholas

Let’s say for a moment you find yourself confined in a room of fractured rays of light (or we could say “little rainbows” to make them sound prettier). Now, would you feel empowered? Or like you were being attacked? I found no way to answer when a friend confronted me with this autobiographical question and revealed that the protagonist in the story for sure had felt attacked. She also asked me to bear with the protagonist, as he was not always easy to love. As my friend explained it: “Well, it’s very easy, easy, easy to love the easy to love … isn’t it?”

Boyfriend #33¹⁄₃ / Oscar

I drink firewater, often and late at night. Double-barrel—like a shotgun—and knock down every evening like a building past its prime making way for the new. Usually after midnight (after the fourth, fifth, sixth shot)—that’s when he comes to me. (I come back to me.) Fresh from a blackout dream, like a ghost I’m not afraid of anymore. I see him in the mirror and I recognize him. The boyfriend beyond? The boyfriend within? No—he’s real. You could just eat him up. There’s a feeling of fleetingness with him. I’ve tried to escape before. To the canals in Amsterdam, artist in exile–style. But it feels like a fabrication on my part. (My exile was self-imposed. No one begged me to do it.) Why does it feel like this has to happen? I wish I could explain better … He felt the days creep like an old muscle car, gunning its way up the highway. He was in the back seat between two lovers. Ain’t love grand? In the nighttime, one of the lovers shakes violently—it happens all the fucking time. He wakes up in a panic of red all over his brown face. He looks at me calmly and says, “I had a dream they were coming for me again and I couldn’t escape with my true love.” That statement cuts deep. True. Love. He says. Just by themselves the words “true” and “love” are pretty sturdy concepts. Put together they can knock down any man who’s lonely enough to believe a lie as long as it’s said politely. But back to the lover. This fake dream lover he was dreaming of. This fig of his imagination. Am I really fucking jealous of this ghost man? I am. “TRUE LOVE”?! DAMN! WHAT ABOUT ME, BITCH?! I feel as useless as a paperweight now, in stark contrast to the weightless feeling I get when I sleep next to him. These people who are coming for him in the dream—he fights them. But if the dream were mine, I would probably let them take me. It seems more reasonable than waking up all the time, and then maybe one could finally know thy enemy. I guess?

Boyfriend #0.000001 / Theo

It had been easy to him. What was not to ? I would see his Black blank flesh caressed in my nigger sheets of dawn; he would be always burrowing below the sheets. Relaxing his way into fetal position, the blanket wrapped all over his head and feet. It seemed that it became easier and easier for him to forget the things he had promised me. Like the rock I was, I parted the bedsheets in a pillowy white truce of surrender, his body slamming into my root chakra like a thunder god of undetermined ethnic origin. For the moment I pretend to be transformed by prompts and lies like any out-of-work actor whose ego demanded a paycheck. Let’s say for instance, if by magic, and very suddenly, some small part of the eternities we are wrapped in could agitate the dark particles and turn time into a loop (or rather, picture a loop here—it’s hard to get the right picture sometimes). As sure as our love had found its way into the dark one night, it evaporated as soon as the light switch clicked on.

Boyfriend #71 / Sagar

I felt raw. He had left me gagging for it … the truth. This had been the same mistake I always made, that is, expecting more: this was the last time I would bother myself with trying. I was annoyed by being imprisoned every time he touched me. Would this touch be different? The one that would be here for the day but gone for the week? I tried to tell him, but there was never much breathing room in the cadence of his fucking voice; no matter what—I was always drowning in him. Would it forever mean nothing at all? I wanted to be something else when he looked at me. A walking fiction. I wanted fake teeth, a fake accent, a fake sense of knowing where it was leading. I understood soon I was a liar, i.e., an actor.

Boyfriend #4/4 / The Drummer

What does love feel like? I’d imagine a rush, or, as a poet once put it, “twenty million tom-toms”—either way? I went to an artist lecture with my boyfriend the drummer and I remember the artist saying specifically, “Incoherence: the point where you are in the middle of making something and it no longer looks like art to you”; my butthole puckered when she said it and I looked to my boyfriend for eye contact, because what else is a boyfriend for but to share in mutual epiphany? That nigga was sleep as fuck. I even tried to decipher incoherence in his snoring, but no, he was all rhythm, even in his dreams. His snoring read like little kitten purrs of breath. It even read like drum tablature: left, right, left, right, right-right-left triplet, etc. We walked home in the streetlights and I saw the pattern in his steps—left, right, left, right, right, right, left. He wore all black like his teacher, a jazz master from some forgotten decade whose records he always played when I was walking naked around his apartment. His beard was thick like a Black man’s and without it he looked Arab—“My mother is Black,” he explained. The white man whose record was always playing when I was naked is his father. If incoherence truly is the point where art no longer looks like art to you then I guess a drummer can never be a real artist because even an incoherent beat is still a beat—no drum strike is ever truly out of place—even when it tries not to be. “You never stop looking like art to me,” I said, all curled up, naked and lighting a joint under his black-clad body, and he held me for three more beats that hold space into forever.