Homecoming One

Sometimes I live in a basement and my name is different, there.  Sometimes, I turn into a boy my brother named Zechariah in an attempt to keep me straight with myself.  When I live in the bedroom in the basement, it's not a parody of something I wish I was, but rather something inevitable I can't escape.

In my room, I'm as my brother says I am; moody, often irritated, lacking warmth and humor and replacing it with tact and sarcasm.  My shoes are dirty and had once been yellow.  The knives I have in my drawer more for utility and curiosity than violence.  I grow my hair long and when standing with Brad and John, no one can tell us apart from the back.

This is the first version of myself, if I could find something first.  A part of me that formed free of certain markers of identity once thought to be intrinsic and now feel trapping.  The sleeves of my sweater fray and wear, the cake of sweat and dust hardens the canvas of my jacket.  There is a gradation of masculinity I learn watching my brothers - a way they are determined to be formed by the world - which challenges me to see beyond a tension and release of my presence in humanity.

There is a way I am forced, or just naturally assume, to penetrate the parts of the world I was not welcome in before, and in doing so, claim them for my gods and countries, which might only be the will to do so and the men who would join me in that.

Every movement forward is damning, and ever movement begets a retreat to a place eons more inhabitable now that it is no longer the edge of known space.

And I come back changed, if only in the moments after.

The place I belong is the Garden, for all the tricks of light and slip of time and gender it foists on it's children.  But, lacking a garden, the bedroom in the basement will do, where I sit and listen to Nick on repeat sing about girls I've met which he never thinks are real.

I write to her on my back, my ankles crossed.

You're the person I want to take home the most.  The one I want most to show what home is, or what it could be like.  I wasn't ready to do that before, but I think I am now.  Of course, everyone who's ready or not would think that.  

I can't promise you anything except that I want to, and why.  The Garden has to be home to you, because it feels like the permission of all things.

"Zech," Brad tries to get my attention, and I ignore him and pretend to be sleeping.  "You wanna go to the boathouse with me?"

He means to find someone else.  He means he's looking for Clyde.  He means to dampen the piles of white rope with his sweat and mark each surface with the stain of his kiss.  He means to create a moment detached from all the moments that came before it; to get buried in someone's skin and confess something I've heard already, maybe a hundred times.

"No," I tell him, and I hear the mischief drain from his timbre.

"Aw, okay.  Are you alright?"

"Yeah," I try, more chipper this time.

John knocks gently and cracks the door.

"Are you hungry, Zech?" he asks an hour later.

"Not now," I admit, and he slinks away again.

She fought with me instead, and I walked around for hours in the cold, tripping on rocks and trying to get a hold of the black waves threatening to carry me away.  She placed walls between us high enough no one has ever been able to climb, and how sad for her to have done so and done efficiently enough to strand her on an island of herself, where no one could now get inside.  She put distances between us and came back the long miles to tell me she had done wrong in existing, and how very little we'd both been able to make anything change.

I drained myself to two-dimensional flatness, knowing she wanted Drama to save her, not me.  Save, of course, as an expression of resolving the issue of existence as opposed to emotion.  I decide to trash the letter and tell her to her face instead, her eyes weak and crying with the loss of her sense of self in the dark of my lava lamp.

"I just don't know where I'm supposed to be," she says to me, and I want to tell her it's with me, but the idea is so preposterous I can't bring myself to form the words.  The fact is she's not supposed to be with me, and I have many miles to go before I sleep, but she lets me pretend for a moment.

For a moment, I pretend that Drama doesn't exist and never did, and I was the one who came home to mend her broken heart.  I cum inside her to put that much more distance between her and the fate of him.  That much more fury, that much more doubt.

I think to myself as I empty into the black space of her something like, "I'm sorry I betrayed you."