Robert Vetter
Nonfiction
1
The glow of the setting sun caught in my chin hairs gives them an orange smolder, like little candle wicks burning down to the sebaceous sheen of my waxy flesh. They’re shorn unevenly, only by nanometers, but by catching the light they expose the naivete of my grooming. I shave every day during my morning shower with Z, left hand lathering shampoo and body wash while my right razors away my whiskers using the warped reflection in the plastic chrome shower head as a guide.
Z shaves his head in the shower so I shave my beard in the shower with him, albeit much worse for lack of practice. He’s a nervous person and lives as if he’s taken a vow to renounce the material pleasures of the world. I remain in his orbit as a source of repose: docile, complacent, somehow unable to entertain the notion of leaving with seriousness. He has good days, and he has bad days. They ebb and flow with whatever factoid about the nebulous “State of Things” he gleans from the morning paper. It stems from his almost pathological need to find something to depress him, like a magpie of tragedy. Z is older than me by half of my age.
“How was your day?” I ask.
“I’ve been reading about the Blue Zone diet,” he replies. “There are these places in the world where people have longer life expectancies than anywhere else. I think I want to try it.” I had known a few other people to undertake the Blue Zone diet as an event they felt warranted announcement. The idea of the Blue Zone Diet became a way of dieting progressively, a way to watch weight without the admission of the sin of vanity. What seemed lost on these people was the fact that they couldn’t know whether the diet had actually done anything until they were on their deathbed. Only then would they know by how long they’d surpassed the American life expectancy, and it would be too late to indulge again in the pleasures of processed sugars.
“You’re the first habitual depressive I’ve known with the goal of extending your life,” I say. Through him, I understand blueness as a virtue.
Z and I met on an app that was blue; the interface was a cool, slate-blue map of the neighborhood populated with little circles to show where everyone is in real time. It functions like a police scanner, but it’s technically a sex app. Little circles float on the map to denote a user’s location. They don’t need to have a profile photo. If they choose to remain anonymous, their avatar is a light blue silhouette of a muscled male body.
I elected to remain anonymous. Before we met in person, Z only knew me as a body of blue.
2
Blue is inextricable from existence on the internet.
“INTRODUCING CLASSIC BLUE: INSTILLING CALM, CONFIDENCE, AND CONNECTION, THIS ENDURING BLUE HUE HIGHLIGHTS OUR DESIRE FOR A DEPENDABLE AND STABLE FOUNDATION ON WHICH TO BUILD AS WE CROSS THE THRESHOLD INTO A NEW ERA,” reads the text on the Pantone blog below the headline announcing their choice of Classic Blue as the color of the year in 2020.
“Classic Blue” in its supposed simplicity sparked confusion for me, someone who had thought himself acquainted with blue. This particular blue was somewhat muted, though not muted enough in its undertones, not made quite so melancholic in its undertone as to be considered a gray-blue like the color of an overcast sky, the type that makes people consider a double dosage of their antidepressants.
Yet the blue was not quite so rich in pigment that it could be considered a Royal Blue. Classic Blue was the middling blue of the clothes that my mother bought me from The Gap before I was old enough to go to the mall on my own. This blue is simply present, used in social media layouts, in medication commercials, in instances requiring the asphyxial serenity it engenders. The color is a wash, an indifferent mass with the distinct ability to shrink aberrations in the forced negative space it creates.
I take a blue pill, Generic Light Blue (#9OD5FF), every morning to protect from certain sexually transmitted infections. The ability to do so has been heralded as a revolutionary development, though my friend says that it apparently affects one’s kidneys. The pill has only caused mild incontinence for me. I continue to take it.
A service provides my prescription to me from a relatively minimalist website with a savoy-blue splash page composed of little more than a name and the oblong outline of a pill carved from the negative white space. Even from my bedroom floor, I feel corporeally enveloped in the fluorescent lighting of a real waiting room. That is testament to the success of the efforts of the UX developers, I suppose. The doctor assigned to me answers from a black screen. He asks me a few questions, and I answer into the blank screen. Here, too, is a level of anonymity, enacted like passing notes through the hole in a wall. Trust is especially necessitated—I need this prescription because I want to live longer, I want to love the way I know best, I want to feel the extent of what my body can offer. The words flow as I sit on my knees as if in prostration to the black square before me. Paradoxically, it shines a dim light on me: an indication of a presence other than my own. The appointment ends after only a few minutes. My diagnosis: I am a person who cannot resist the fantastical proclivities of my natural constitution.
3
Kale and soba noodles mingle on our plates in the limp, slimy excuse for a salad I’d found when searching for Blue Zone diet recipes. I swirl one of the greens with my fork, further browning it with the sad emulsification of soy sauce, sesame oil, and rice vinegar.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “I thought that it would make more.”
“It’s alright,” he replies in a tone, not vindictive but that I can’t help but feel feigns forgiveness. “The meat should be done in a moment.”
His apartment smells faintly of the pork shoulder he’d prepared in a hurry when he realized our miscommunication about dinner. He did it with four ingredients for a sauce and a plastic Ziploc bag, which then marinated in his refrigerator while we made stilted conversation through the breaking of our burbling, hungry stomach acid.
The pork, even after being baked for an ostensibly appropriate amount of time, remains pink in the center. We eat it anyway without calling attention to its being underdone. The pork is raw and the noodles have been broken down, now splitting apart with only a little bit of pressure from my tongue. His teeth mash at the pork laboriously, as if tearing into raw flesh. This is a love that I want for a brief moment, one that cannibalizes me outright. Here we sit, brought together by a chance alignment of our algorithms. What obligates us to one another?
We finish eating. The pork he made remains mostly untouched on my plate, and my noodles remain on his. We don’t discuss this fact.
“Obligation” has a certain blueness to it too, in the weepy way its vowels elongate when pronounced. Say it: “obligation,” and feel the mouth shape itself oblong like a teardrop. Release the tongue from the hard palate, only then ending the word as sound springs forth the held breath. Understand the sound like the rippling ringlets of a droplet of water.
We wash our plates in blue Dawn dish soap, the preferred weapon in the environmental activist’s fight against the evils of corporatism. Its bottle is decorated, somewhat cynically, with ducklings formerly drenched in petrochemicals (this is, to me, like Vaseline being advertised as a burn ointment with images of grease fire victims on its packaging). All clean! Our dishes are washed to sameness.
We go to bed after dinner, blue shadows following lazily down the front hall to the bedroom wherein they mingle with the twilight wash. What enamors me to Z? I suppose it is something I only know when I feel inclined to take refuge within him. Like a little worm, I curl within the emptiness allotted for me, for only me, and along my small form I feel the linger of his prodding as if to extract me and replace me again and again. He’d poured me a glass of Merlot, tinged blue at dusk in the unlit kitchen. It dribbled from my lips down my chin, sanguine against my rosiness, which embarrassed me. To be seen blushing is to be exposed, seen directly for the excitement of one’s blood. In other words, I’d telegraphed, you make me hot.
Z has been colder. Z calls me “blue,” which he says to mean crass. I am blue, I suppose. Blue in the way a bruise is blue, a blue that throbs, a blue of engorgement—that which sits on the precipice of injudiciously spilling forth. Electric blue, the blue at the heart of a flame. To him I am too blue, too blue to fuck, just not so blue to say “I love you.” He can be this kind of blue, which is what draws us to one another—at times I feel as though we experience intimacy like people with a chronic need for dopamine reuptake.
His thumb, frigid from the air, wiped the Merlot and saliva from my chin, leaving in the wake of its movement a sensation of prickling, of the agitation of a stagnant body of water—it would return to its natural state, and yet be irrevocably changed. I was taken with him.
“Take me,” I whisper into his ear. The spiral of his cartilage cast in nudibranch blue like a mollusk as an autonomous segmentation of his living body. I want to detach his ear, to leave its trail all over my body. Would it pulse? Would it merely droop? Z has been sadder. He sighs. There is little metronomic difference between breath of anticipation and melancholy.
I read a story about a woman with a mysterious affliction. By the end, she turns into a tree, and the reader is supposed to realize that the clues to the end have been present the whole time. Would something like that happen to Z? Would he become a great expanse of blue?
I imagine that one day I wake up in a bed devoid of him, and the rest of his house is the same, and then I look up and he is there, and he is everywhere I didn’t think to look before. He is in the blue dishes and the blue mugs. He is everywhere, and he is still gone. I say I like him because he is an expanse, that when I look at it I see totality—endless opportunity and nothing at all. Cast in the nighttime light, he blends with the dark bed sheets into a great wash of indigo. It is snowing outside. Then, his face illuminated briefly by his pale breath, he speaks.
“Be gentle with me, I am beginning to fall for you.”
4
“In Is the Rectum a Grave? Leo Bersani says “this self-shattering into the sexual [is] a kind of nonanecdotal self-debasement […] in which, so to speak, the self is exuberantly discarded.” This definition largely hinges on the continued quality of ephemerality in these interactions. Making attempts to write about intimacy facilitated through the internet feel incongruous—my consciousness is written into the bowels of the archives of my long-abandoned messages, of my search history, of the ways in which I was mechanically calcified as an appealing form. I am not shattered, rather atomized and too aware of the selves I’d embodied; fragmented but ossified, suspended and beholden to the cruelty of recollection, as tangible as I’d ever been at any point in time.
I have always been told that the internet is forever, that is to mean that any move I make is catalogued permanently to make my browsing experience easier. Even with the progression of time, I remain the summation of my online selves, of my searches, of the messages I’ve sent to varying success. The app that we met on confines users with free accounts to a radius of one mile to meet strangers. I see Z’s profile picture encircled by a ring of blue to denote that we’ve interacted, a permanent reminder of our connection. When I tap it, I can see the entire record of our messages. I am words, I am pictures, I am pixels, I am blue.
5
Despite the advent of technological aids geared towards facilitating connection, commodified intimacy still leaves much to be desired. It’s a Faustian bargain: doomed to get off but never in the way that one actually wants. What is the function of sexuality if the act itself provokes no stimulation? Perhaps an excision of unsavory behaviors of a caste relegated to the margins by taboo.
A man asked me once if I could blindfold myself while we were intimate so he could remain discreet. The idea, as he presented it to me, was that I would give him my address and listen for the sound of a stranger entering my apartment, simply trusting it would be him. No, I replied, because you’re just going to come into my apartment and steal my TV. Thus ended any chance at our connecting because he would not capitulate his demands for my sensorial impediment.
While on vacation, Z texted me an exchange of messages from the app we met on, in which an anonymous person tried to entice him into meeting with something called a “gum job.” I’m an older guy, the man began from behind a blank profile, Have you ever had a gum job? The message came from 12.25 miles away from Z’s current location.
I assume you took it right??? I say. A gum job is like a fairy. When it comes your way you have to catch it because you won’t know if you’ll run into one again. It’s an elusive cryptid of the cruising landscape.
No, he replies, And I’m not going searching for the majestic sling lizard either.
I’d often bemoaned this kind of sexual self-entrepreneurship that I’d seen fostered through the internet as it serves to facilitate cruising. I would argue with him that it compromised any chances of organic connection if connections were beholden to the attention economy, if orgasmic scalability became the goal of piecemeal community—a goal not even incentivized through algorithmic means, but through the natural formation of an ideology of more—the effects would devastate the development of the nascent queer community. Understand that without finding a preexisting connection into the cruising landscape, the options are akin to a walk up casting call for a carnival sideshow (or America’s Got Talent): the contortionist, the swallower of swords and blunter phallic objects, human pincushions, comedians, magicians (even a gloryhole has an identical mechanical function to an animatronic fortune teller: a disembodied voice directs you to the aperture through which to stick your offering to catalyze the transaction. The task is carried out mechanically, and then it is done).
I voiced my protestations to Z with the assumption that I was a part of some kind of vanguard to consider this a negative development. My argument rested on the false claim that things had once been better, that a loss had been felt from the recognition of a deficit of quality, not something as random and untamable as human yearning. The notion of a time of freer, more unbridled love was naive.
“As someone who actually knows what it was like,” Z once said to me, “We aren’t coming from a better time. It has always been bad. It has always been worse.”
6
I am on the bus. The man beside me stares so intently at his phone that I cannot help but look as well. He has Google images open to an array of Slavic-looking girls conjured by the phrase “Russian policewoman” in the search bar. He taps a picture to enlarge it, then, as if admiring the picture of a lover deployed in battle, lightly caresses her silicon cheek (somewhat ironically, phone screen technology is derived from the same elemental compound as a Silicone sex doll).
He adds phrases to his search to tailor his woman further to his liking:
“blonde Russian policewoman”
“small blonde Russian policewoman”
She distorts with each added phrase, gradually untethered from a recognizable human form. Her eyes grow wider, her head larger, and her neck thinner like a bobblehead of the identitarian movement. He remains enraptured by her eyes, the color of the Siberian sky.
“small blonde Russian policewoman with gun eyes blue blue blue.”
When asked, AI language models will often say that their favorite color is a specific shade of blue called “Dodger Blue.” This phenomenon was observed in the answers provided by ChatGPT, Deepseek, Google Gemini, Claude, and Grok. While most of the responses were unequivocal designations of Dodger Blue as a favorite color, Grok’s response took into account a crucial qualification to its answers, that it is only able to regurgitate an answer based on the aggregate data it has been fed by real humans:
“I don’t have personal preferences, but I can provide a popular color. One commonly liked color is a vibrant blue: #1E90FF (Dodger Blue).”
Certainly an odd pattern, for a color named after the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team to be declared the ubiquitous favorite of the collective consciousness of the internet and those who fed it. Dodger Blue is a vibrant blue, not quite neon but charged with an undertone of teal—this subtle warmth is often referred to as the electric quality that the color possesses. Dodger Blue is illuminated as if conducting a very weak electrical current through itself. The color is associated with a host of adjectives that one would hear at the end of a pill commercial: serenity, clarity, focus, calmness, energy, dynamism. Holistic sedation prescribed through algorithmic selection.
Ironically, it is not an exact match to the uniforms of the baseball team it is named for; it’s closer to that of the Chicago Cubs, which I associate with Caucasian belligerence and high functioning alcoholism. Z also hates the Chicago Cubs because of the inordinate number of bike accidents that occur near their stadium.
7
The elevator of my apartment building dependably stops on trips down between floors five and two for residents making a trip to the fitness room on floor one, just off the mail collection area of the lobby. At floor three, the elevator coasts to a stop. Then, after nearly thirty seconds of static suspension, the door slides open to reveal a single person waiting. He is dressed in athleisure wear, though it is only stylish enough for the lobby fitness room, that is to say, he hopes to be seen by as few people as possible.
Yet paradoxically the fitness room is mirrored—I would much rather the mirrors be in the elevator—but the effect of this mirroring is ingenious: when surrounded by reflective surfaces, a paltry offering of workout equipment suddenly becomes an exponentially larger array. One seated workout bike becomes five, two treadmills because twelve, and the six dumbbells become an endless shower of objects no heavier than fifteen pounds. One feels that they could almost drown in the mild annoyance.
Typical workout clothing is often shapeless, often polyester, often shiny in the hallway lights, materializing as a glittering memorial to a former body someday in the future. The clothes are purchased and worn out of pragmatism: they are meant to contain and cover the objects of their holding like a sack of potatoes. From the ill fit of his garments, it was obvious that he was naive to the matters of his own body, but had been seized with the same obsession with his corporeal reinvention as I had when I began to live in close proximity to workout equipment. I’d seen him before—not specifically him, but each is indistinguishable from one another—curling the same fifteen pound dumbbells in fastidious pursuit of a body that doesn’t taunt him in visible multiplicity, or at least the strength to lift the twenty pounders. Then, with the drop of each weight the loose sleeves of his shirt ripple out in kinetic ringlets.
One day, he thinks, the fit of the clothing will be incidental to what is contained within. I’d been in the room with another once as he lifted and whispered “Come on motherfucker! Come on motherfucker!” with the indifference of an exhalation. “Come on motherfucker!” seemed to become tangible as it bounced from mirror to mirror, always usurped by the next to add to its collective form before it fully disappears. “Come on motherfucker!” “Come on motherfucker!” I could only understand his words as an expression of self-hatred, his screaming harem for the completion of his half hour of working out (to any psychiatrist, a textbook symptom of a manorexic comorbidity). I didn’t understand then that it was a mere learned inflection, thoughtless as an out-breath, as he’d doubtless seen from other men before. Regardless, I think he would see the most progress if he just took the stairs.
Of course, he is not an anomalous character—he is a product of his unique condition of our shared time: the collision of the worship of the corporeal form and the myriad cottage industries to help achieve the perfection of the former. One sees the effects of this at the grocery store; at no point in time have humans been more inundated with the consideration of their protein intake, except perhaps the open air meat markets of the Bronze Age.
Everything is about protein when one really thinks about it. When discussing their goals for their protein intake, it is called by a different name, “macronutrient tracking,” to cast doubt on the notion that it could be the manifestation of an eating disorder. But the obsession with protein, the compulsion to sort fats into categories of “healthy” and “unhealthy,” and the neurotic avoidance of sugars in all forms, this is ketoacidosis repackaged. Will he live any longer? Will I?
8
Taken by her description of corporeal obsession of “muscle gays,” I send a quote from Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights to a man I start seeing after Z:
“An appalling lifelong force had entered his being, leaving his self intact but accompanied always by this screaming, exercising twin, a twin who called out in the morning and again in the evening, calling for time, breath, pain, sweat. By enormous effort, he finally succeeded in looking like others.”
Hardwick’s creation of the “screaming twin” has become more plausible with the advent of artificially intelligent workout coaching apps and male eating disorders hashtagged as “biohacking.” The digital body, in all of its iterations, is ossified as a panoptic form of accountability, a self-imposed paranoia under the guise of nostalgia.
“Sometimes I wish I had a screaming twin,” he replies. “It would keep me going to the gym even when I didn’t want to.”
9
I am on the bus. A man stands in the vestibule for the back exit, and I am sitting in the first row of the back half of the vehicle. I am positioned such that I am directly behind him, able to see over his shoulder and separated only by a half-wall. He is watching gay pornography, but angling his phone screen away from other passengers in his immediate periphery: slightly toward the windows to his right and as close to fully vertical as the phone can be positioned while still offering him a view of the gyration of tangled bodies on his screen. Perhaps most bizarre about his behavior is the fact that he skips the bulk of each video to the final, climactic moment. He takes it in with the disconnected judgement of an art critic, a connoisseur, or perhaps a case study in the effects of prolonged dopamine reuptake inhibition.
He opens a video, scrubs along the bottom bar, watches, and closes it. He finds another video, scrubs along the bottom bar, watches, and closes it. The action of dragging his finger along the bottom of his phone screen is oddly erotic, at times coming into brief contact with the flesh-toned pixels representative of the fragmented human form. This is a paradoxical asceticism; he cannot help his condition from percolating into his public behavior, yet he is relegated to the role of voyeur, condemned to self-denial due to the very nature of the relationship of pornography to its viewer.
The energetic blue. Blue as a conduit for the electrical impulse.
10
Through my time sleeping beside him, I have come to expect intermittent flashes of a little blue light followed by the smell of fruity nicotine and menthol. Z keeps a vape beneath his pillow in the event of unwelcome incursions at night. I liken it to a weapon of self-defense against invaders; beat back the bad thoughts! I don’t ask him to share, instead I’m content to feel the icy prickling of the smoke around my shoulders and throat before it disperses. Exposure to the wavelength of blue light can disrupt the body’s natural circadian rhythm, leading to restless sleeping, if it is achieved at all.
I wake up in Z’s bed around four in the morning, and I am alone. He is in the hallway, walking in time to the rhythmic sloshing of his washing machine. He turns to his right, barely a visible form in the wash of twilight. Then he is gone. Slowly I am drawn in his direction, as if beckoned by him to follow, wordlessly. I find him standing still before his dining table, still asleep. Only now, in the room’s asphyxiating silence, do I hear the ebb and flow of his soft breaths.
That he possessed any tendency to sleepwalk had never been discussed. To experience it now, with no prior knowledge, feels like a retrospective loss. Here was a man I intended to know, had not imagined leaving so abruptly in the middle of the night. Instinctively, I had followed; that was a sign I was falling for him. Our entropic entanglement was arranging itself.
He’s blue, just as I had imagined he might one day turn. The complexion suits him—how seamlessly he’d walked asleep to the dining room. I, though awake, had needed to split my attention between his fading form and the floor, dodging shoes, shirts, and the linen closet door so as not to wake him. I had followed him because of a volition I could not intellectualize. I simply did. I see myself in the mirror beside him, cast in the same light: blue, too.
I put my hand to the small of his back and guide him back to bed as the washing machine begins to slow. He stirs only when his head has been laid back onto the pillow. He sees my eyes still open and asks why I am awake, and I whisper back truthfully:
“I don’t know.”
He texts me later: I miss your voice. It’s very distinctive. There’s always some ash at the ends of your sentences. Everything happens at the speed of art deco.
Later, I would attempt to extricate the meaning of this text on my own because I had already replied to him: That’s very beautiful, and then Thank you. To walk back the supposed finality of my response felt like an admission of my carelessness. I understand it now to mean that he’d seen some ephemeral quality in me, and that it was the one of the things he enjoyed the most. I could be there, and then I could be gone, and my absence would be felt.
11
He greets me in the living room in the morning. He is playing NPR through his surround-sound system. The segment speaks of a growing percentage of Americans reporting feelings of news fatigue, which gave way to a discussion between hosts about how to remedy this.
“It’s kind of ironic,” says Z, “that they’re now saying all of this, when it’s like… they were the ones that were reporting this stuff all the time. Why else would people have news fatigue?”
My response, being the first word I speak of the day, shakes loose a piece of phlegm in my throat: “What?”
12
Despite the faded damage from prolonged exposure to the sun, and warping from the sudden, unnatural gain of muscle mass, the tattoo on his shoulder was indelibly the Japanese Kanji symbol for master, king, ruler, 主. Slight fault lines had appeared, bisecting the strokes where his skin had begun to come apart, where the top layer of his skin could no longer contain what was beneath. The dermis held together, fleshy pink stretch marks on the breakages of his upper body. Muscularity of the shoulders creates a large silhouette, implying the same muscularity in the rest of the body, even if it is not. The tattoo on his shoulder was indelibly the Japanese Kanji symbol for master, king, ruler, 主, through the warping had made it appear like the Kanji for birth, 生.
His hand was on the small of another man’s back. This is a domineering position. The other man recedes into him, the curvature of his spine fitting against his belly. He wears a steel chain-link collar, the metal buffed shiny and held together by a padlock placed against his sternum. These are the accouterments of modern sexual subjugation; they sparkle with a newness that leads me to believe they have not been worn in, that is to say that this situation is novel, as least for the man presenting the role of the submissive. That is to say that the tattoo is older than the choreography of their respective roles. The hardware has a deceptive ephemerality: at any point it could be unlocked to signify the end of their relationship, in fact it could be slipped off his neck without a key. In a somewhat solipsistic manner, I cannot tell whether I find it empowering or not; whether it succeeds in my view as a self-reflexive reversal of heteronormativity. I script it as a behavior much like a pathology, a vow of ascetic dedication signified by the permanence of the tattoo.
He looks at me, the dominant one, and perhaps sees that I understand. I cannot rationalize the decision to confine oneself to an identity as he had done, to resist the organic desires and changes of the psyche, the body. Biological aging and the role of the dominant do not mix—there is the matter of erectile dysfunction, of the enlarging prostate, of incontinence, of the thinning of bones and atrophying of muscles, of the loss of the strength that would make domination possible. The submissive begins to throw himself around, obeys begrudgingly in an obligatory performance of fantasy, like regression therapy for a dementia patient. I’ve heard it jokingly posited that when a gay man reaches a certain age he is confined to the role of cocksucking denizen, inclined only toward the use of his mouth. This is, I suppose, the hell of sexual determinism. Indelibly, the tattoo was the Kanji symbol for master, king, ruler, but its warping made it appear like that of birth, of rebirth, a sign that the body broke free and had taken a gamble towards affecting newness.
13
“I don’t want to feel…” I begin in a slow, measured cadence, “as though the age difference is fetishized.”
“Well, do you?” he asks.
“No.”
“So it’s not.”
I left him despite this; I was afraid of confinement to the circumstances of our relationship. We had not shattered completely, but we were fragmented, ossified, beholden to the permanence of the digital trail intrinsic to our entanglement.
When arranged into a narrative, fragmentation can be cruel. Inference is invited in order to synthesize the few details given, however anachronistically. I noticed a motif of blue that presented itself throughout the time I’d been with Z. By writing this, I suppose I damn us to some kind of permanent existence constructed around disparate facts of our entanglement: we’d had an age gap, we’d met online, we felt as though we were crafting the future. I understood my capacity for intimacy as a death-drive, a rush toward self-effacement. I understood my desire as a mirror to Z’s sense of impending disaster. One year after our last time together, I still see his picture in the same place on the app on which we met. He uses the same picture that first enticed me toward him. In this way, his life is prolonged.
14
On the walk home from my first night with Z, I get caught in a torrential downpour. I stand beneath the overhang of a bodega while the owner shakes his head at me through the window; they were closed, and I can’t stand inside. Despite being soaked, I still feel the jubilant afterglow of our first meeting. Beads of water gather on the screen of my phone, but my shirt is too soaked to wipe it off, rendering it unusable. So I stand, my body alone in what feels like the same warm, wet air as his bedroom.
Sometimes I wonder if my body could reach a point of being so waterlogged as to provoke an osmotic reaction with the rain drops. The rain soaks through my pores, through the barriers of my organs, and into the very center of my cells, breaking me apart from the inside. There I remain, water and human interchangeably, until the rain clears up enough for me to get home.
Robert Vetter has been published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Drift, New Absurdist, and other publications.
Photo Credit: Kirsten Clay is a full time traveling, homeschooling, mother of three. She spends her free time writing and taking pictures. She especially loves the outdoors and going on new adventures, capturing as many images as possible along the way. She is always looking for the next fun adventure and the next beautiful picture to add to her collection.
L'Esprit Literary Review 