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suiciderealestate · 6 years

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It’s almost time for me to move to New York. At twenty-seven years old it doesn’t feel like a romantic coming-of-age story anymore. It feels more like a last-ditch effort to salvage my youth and escape the precipitous cusp of mediocrity.

In New York I hope to find my voice. I hope to find my beauty. I hope to find something that gives me a more complete sense of fulfillment, that eases the journey of my life in a way that reassures me I haven’t navigated this maze with a proclivity for every wrong turn. Life’s path is winding, and I often feel like I’ve just been running in circles. Maybe I will never escape that feeling. Maybe it exists by design.

Now that I’m preparing to leave, it feels like the Universe is tossing every obstacle in my way, draping cosmic interruptions in veils of everything I’ve ever thought I wanted. I think New York is what I really want now. I think being alone is what I really want now. But a short line of all my past loves seems to be traveling in a grim colonnade over the horizon to capture my attention and redirect it to the same sinkhole I’ve been stuck in for what seems like forever.

I told Elic I loved him the other night after I took him out for his birthday and paid for just about everything. It was funny because that’s exactly what I said I wasn’t going to do, but it’s exactly what I did. I said I wanted to reestablish our relationship. I told him I wanted to put our spotted past behind us and start over as friends. I said it was important for me to move to New York feeling like I didn’t harbor any lasting grudges against people who had taken up so much of my life, my money, my emotions. He was an investment for me over the course of two years when I thought I could salvage a future between us. I no longer feel that way, but that mother fucker still finds a way to sweet talk me into paying every time. He has a boyfriend. He says he wants to leave him and move to New York with me. What he really wants to do is move to California. I’m not stupid. I’m malleable and far too forgiving, but I think I can finally say that I’m not stupid. I told him I would look into the possibility of him coming with me. He gave me two days to give him answer. But whether it be two days or thirty, it will be a cold day in Hell before I tie myself down to another needy, selfish man. I love Elic, but I love him in the same way that I would love an old car that sits in the back of the house, unused. He represents a museum, a mausoleum, of some of my worst times, some of my highest hopes, and all of my greatest delusions.

He isn’t the only one, either. I started talking to a boy named Jonathan again the other day. I guess he was passing through Garden City and thought I was still there. I guess he wanted to fuck. I always blamed that nameless fuck that came after him for giving me mono, but the more I think about it, the more I’m sure it was him. We had decent chemistry but there’s no doubt that he’s a nasty guy into nasty things, and it’s really a wonder that I didn’t contract something more serious. I sent a flirtatious picture of my dick, surrounded by hundred-dollar bills. It was a tacky thing to do, and sure enough he dropped out of school, left that island off the Florida coast and moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he now resides in what looks like a flophouse. He said he hadn’t eaten all day when I talked to him. He said he needed a hundred bucks to get him back on his feet. But I’m not making any money right now. I’m just hiding in Nashville waiting for my escape. I just want to leave all these keepsake pennies behind and start over. All these boys want is money. I guess that’s probably all I’m good for, since sex and beauty aren’t exactly my strong suites. Cynicism, biting humor and random bouts of wild, unhinged exhibitionist behavior are more my strong suites.

Elic made a funny remark the other day when he was professing his love to me. He said he needs to stop dating for looks (his boyfriend) and start dating someone who has the key to his heart. I’m sure as hell I don’t have that key, and if I do I lost it a long time ago. Maybe he wants it back, but I couldn’t help but feel like I’m the ugly duckling in the list of people that circle in and out of his life for romantic or pseudo romantic reasons. He asked me if he looked OK. I just stared at him. His glacier blue eyes look emptier every year. His face looked hollow. His skin was flecked with little red marks that suggested drug use. He bleached the front of his hair. I told him he looked fine. When I asked him the same question, he just kind of looked at me. I am constantly reminded that I haven’t cornered the market on conventional good looks, but if anything I like to believe that I look unique. With thinning red hair, small, almond-shaped blue eyes, alabaster skin that turns red in my chest and around my cheeks, and an otherworldly cranial shape, give me what I would like to believe is a distinctive appearance. Unfortunately, I’m hardly photogenic. Sometimes I like what I see in the mirror. Sometimes I hate it. When I feel good about myself, I cling to those feelings for dear life, for as long as I can. Inevitably, I lose my grip on them, and in a world that prizes an online presence, beauty and all the hallmarks of success that come with it, I often feel crippled. My inability to take a good picture of myself feels like a curse. I am terrified of being filmed. Some people take bad pictures and it doesn’t faze them. For me, it feels like an indelible reflection of divine favor, or the absence of it. For many years I felt like a holy flower. Now I feel defiled by a wilting bloom. But I think there is peace in that feeling, somewhere at the bottom or in the center. From my dreams to my waking life, I walk a narrow road of endless illusion, just as we all do. Reality is part truth, part phantasmagoria. But despite the gradience of its actuality, I tell myself that even the highest mountains are little more than rushing rivers in the molecular onslaught of time. I hope to find some transient meaning in New York. I want to be an artist: a writer, a photographer, an incarnation of life’s highest values — love, creativity and acceptance. I want to feel every moment of my life, and even though it all blends together and folds away like an origami sky in the end, I hope to walk away feeling like I did my very best to be a complete human being. I don’t want to die a languorous, drunken man-child who can’t be bothered. Though I may not have been blessed with modelesque symmetry, a talent for mathematics or even a terribly exciting story, I think there is always time to build.

When I was a little boy I wanted to go to Harvard for law school. I didn’t. I went to a college preparatory school my freshman year of high school called Montgomery Bell Academy that would have put me on a steady path to that dream, and I was miserable. It was a school for boys, and being gay made that hard for me. “Gentleman, scholar, athlete” was their performative mantra. I didn’t live and haven’t lived up to any of those archetypes. I left after a year and went to several high schools, ultimately graduating from an alternative school that hardly anyone I grew up with has heard or ever will hear of. After college, the Peace Corps declined me. I couldn’t think of a project proposal for a National Geographic Fulbright scholarship. I didn’t get into the European grad program. Sometimes I feel like I took a devastating wrong turn in life, if such things even exist. I simply can’t keep up in the constant, mindless race to snatch credentials. But at the end of my life they would only ever be a hiccup in my elegy, things hardly worth mentioning. When I die I want people to tell stories about me. I want people to capture the essence of my personality and convey it like a myth, something that, in time, may or may not have happened. Whether or not it did doesn’t really matter as long as people talk about it. As long as, somehow, to someone, I’m worth remembering. I guess the greatest approval we can ever achieve is our own.

More than anything, I’m going to New York to be reborn. Twenty-seven years may have passed, reflecting nearly a decade of adulthood. Can anyone really stay young after thirty? I guess I’ll find out. Maybe youth is just a state of mind. Maybe there is something in me that has never seen the world, that the world has never seen. If it really does exists, if it’s hiding deep within me, I hope New York — and the labyrinth of opportunity it represents — will awaken in me the person I’ve always wanted to be: hardworking, creative, disciplined, fearless, colorful and fabulous beyond imagination. I want to transform my canvas into a work of art. I want to wash upon those fabled shores and for the first time feel the essence of the American Dream. More than a star, I want to be a force to be reckoned with. I want to be a loud voice in the world that reminds everyone, and myself included, that anything is possible.

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