BURNING HOUSE PRESS

I am going back to the beginning place before sun and sky and sea, before the slit discloses difference, before the shock of time abides…

I love the boys who fight the pain that’s been passed down to them: pain at risk of turning into evil.

I love the desperate nobility of their struggle, suicide’s shadow landing on their cheek.

I love the boys who have already died, all the better if it’s several times over.

You taught me Buddhism, so it’s because of you that this paradox exists: you died many deaths on your way to the “final” one, the biological one — but there’s an aspect of death that’s not real, because nothing is lost to existence. We die so many deaths, and we never really die.

You never quite made it past the womb, and the way you slept was evidence of that: thirteen hours, or twenty, or twenty-six, the only competitor at the R.E.M. Olympics, trying to best the highest scores you’d set. Sleep, in your case, was less the cousin and more the doppelgänger of death. I try to shake you from slumber so we can go to our philosophy class together, but nothing stops the momentum of your dreaming.

I imagine your waking to be the waking of the world, to be the first eyeful of light received by the human species: a snowglobe of floaters, then the sun through basement slats; cockroach, nosetip, sorrow, smell of the crypt; the stir of limbs, the turning of soil, slow, the ash off blank coals; history like a line of chimes hanging from the ears, blue sky over Rusholme, swollen veins and skull, ragged mind with the future wicking off of it.

As I’m scrolling through Instagram, trying to recall you better through images of you, trying to jog my memory or at least resuscitate it, I see a photo that someone took of you sleeping that is almost exactly the same as a photo I took of you eight years earlier.

Someone who loved you the same way I did — full of good intent and nuisance horniness and selfish fantasy and blanketing desperation — frantically trying to rescue you from the bad weather of your inner mind.

In both photos, you’re wearing a white dress shirt browned at the edges and tight black jeans and your face is nearly serene, the suggestion of a furrow etched into your brow. Your body is a chalk outline at a murder scene, soaking up such sun that you allay a sunken shape into the bed. Suddenly my love for you is not singular, but public: the two photos act as proof of that. I’ll see you again when I return to the fold, another bucket of cosmic dust tossed into the ether.

*

To call what we did sex is to stretch the definition. There was a body between us to cushion the blow. To call it a threesome is to ignore the fact that none of us were in the room; blacked out, purple bursts of consciousness poking out from beneath the stone; not distinguishing the limit from the edge; musk, polyester, mildew, Delilah; a rain of triangles that lose their shape; the sting of jealousy from the instantaneous sidelines; wretched sinuses, sour orgasms; “hooked up to break like waking to say words wobble in oracle vapors”; a leaning tower of Pilsner Urquells; unsatisfied, unsatiated, hunger all over the mouth; flopping through my calendar to reanimate the remainder; time’s cruel twist, fate’s brutal curl; fur on the wrist but totally ethereal, a garden foxy with petals; your sister searching for you like clockwork every two years in the dark but knowing you had fallen down and I became a mercenary for your safety; Old 40 sediment; buffeted by descending winds; the “I love you” utterance spoken in repose, as if “I love you” had the power to seal away the shames of death, as if “I love you” were the mere and the most that promises redemption; to conclude, I am going back to the beginning place before sun and sky and sea, before the slit discloses difference, before the shock of time abides; where you are, horse and rider, fool and crown prince, last peanut at the rodeo, a corpse on a plane, an angel in waiting, both Abel and Cain, thunder in the mirror, my last worldly apology, forehead to the floor, ankle fused to the brakes; my effable infinity, my pain conduit, my teeny dancer sliding off the astral plane.

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Fan Wu is a performer and poet who’s never stepped into the same river once. Read his writing online in Seventh Wave, C Magazine, and The Flaherty Seminar.