I.

I spend the early summer watching reruns of King of the Hill and swimming in other people’s pools. In the afternoon, the sun hangs around forever, baking everything in an endless wave of heat and dust and shame. I try and keep cool by hanging out inside or drinking bad beers at bars with funky aesthetics and custom-crafted illustrations for their beer cans.

In July, I go up North to visit Stacey in Portland—sleeping on her couch to save some money. I’m unemployed and touch-starved, spending my days going from apartment to apartment and kissing men whose names I never bother to learn. At night, Stacy and I go out and drink beers or wander around abandoned shopping malls, taking pictures of bad graffiti left by street artists in training.

“When are you moving here?” She asks, and I can’t give her a direct answer, even though I’ve been planning a move for years now. “You could live here,” she reminds me. “For a few weeks while you find a place.”

Stacey heads home to get ready for work, and I wander around the city trying my best not to look like a tourist. I like the crowded city streets of a proper city. I like cities where you can walk from one place to another; places built with big, tall buildings, public transportation, and tight spaces where it’s easy to get lost. I think about B and his big chest and goofy smile. I think about his eyes and his lips and his thighs and the way he rocks in his seat when he’s happy or upset or intensely focused on a project.

II.

I’ve been doing the boring work of enjoying life while trying to prolong it. I’ve been collecting hobbies and trying harder to talk to friends. I’ve been trying to build my body confidence, hating the fact that I’ve gained weight but tentatively acknowledging that maybe some people find me hot.

I want to get back into lifting weights and eating better. I’m trying to swap snacks for fruits and prepare breakfast and lunches in advance to not fall victim to the constant allure of delivery apps.

I bleached my hair, or had someone do it, because I felt like it. I spent the two hours sitting around the barbershop, sipping beer and scrolling on my phone. I hate going to get my haircut because I think I generally suck at small talk and, because I’m half deaf, I suck at hearing what people are saying to me.

I start too many sentences with I, but this is basically a blog, so I’ve decided to stop caring as much. Next week I’ll start a 10-week writing course where I’ll try and focus on two short story ideas I have:

1. A man returns home after a tense time in his relationship and falls back into a routine with an old flame he had in high school, while around them, wildfires burn.

2. A collection of short vignettes, loosely connected, about the men someone has loved in their life.

Committing to a writing course is kind of scary to me because it feels personal and a little too honest. To participate, I sort of have to admit that I actually like writing and want to get better at it, which (for whatever reason) feels too vulnerable. I’ve been reading more short stories this year in participation (around 58 currently). I’m trying to keep track of a bunch of different things: sentence structure and tone, metaphors that work, great dialogue, how each person structures their stories, and how everyone finds a plot that’s not totally boring.

A more confident person would say that there’s something brave or cool about committing to taking a class based on your interests in life. After all, isn’t the point of life to do things you love doing regardless of what other people think of it? Still, I think people think so little of me.

III.

After a few days, I left Stacey’s and bunked up with Jacob for the long weekend—just to give her some space. He worked a busy schedule doing engineering work for some product I didn’t bother learning much about. But he had the holiday off and no plans.

Mostly we watched Netflix and got high, but occasionally we’d fuck, and then, on the 4th we walked around the waterfront and waited for the fireworks to start.

He asked me about my first date with the Man, and I told him it was “Nothing special.”

“What did you talk about?”

“A lot of things,” I said. “Though not much of anything. We made the type of small talk you make when you’re new to dating and still think there’s a routine list of questions you must get through.”

“Like an interview?”

“Like an interview: where did you grow up? What are you studying?”

“What would you have asked, now that you’ve known him?”

“Something vastly different,” I chuckled. “Something scathing and straight to the point.”

“What’s your greatest trauma?”

“No,” I said. “That’s too easy—too simple. I would ask what he does when someone loves him. What does he do when he feels safe and secure? And does he, like me, get the urge to run away?”

“That’s a big one.”

“Yeah, but an important one.”

“Anything else?”

“I’d ask him, if there’s anything about me he thinks he’ll remember when we break up. My laugh or my smile. The way I pronounce a word or schedule a day. What quiet part about me would he take with me?”

IV.

At night, in a dream, I met an ex-lover for coffee in the spring. We chat cautiously, careful not to reveal too much, lest the other obtain more power and tip the scales.

In a moment of weakness, I ask him something personal—not why he left, that much is obvious, but why he never returned.

“I saved every message,” he said, “and every photo. I wanted to return, not to a relationship, but to something else. But each feeling felt strange, and each encounter left me weary. I found myself in San Francisco, watching the fog roll in over the water, and wondering what I wanted and where I wanted to go in my life. I needed to be somewhere else or something else. And in truth, I was scared.”

In my dream, his figure morphs and changes, though I do not see the process. Once awake, I imagine it as something quaintly magical: a cloud of smoke tinted purple or pink, rays of light, and trumpets slowly rising in the background. His figure seems familiar to me, though it is nobody I have ever met. Still, I am certain it is him.

“Everyone is scared,” I say. “Or I guess they’re not. Some people are never scared.”

“Do you ever feel?” He asks. “Like you are in one big chess match with me? Like, even when we are not here, across from each other, we are still competing?”

“I suppose—sometimes.”

“I feel it all the time. I hate the feeling, as if I am competing in my life against your life. I imagine you seeing me and wonder what you would think of my choices and how you would rank them.”

“I don’t think I’d judge them.”

“No,” he says. “I’m certain you would, even if you would never say so directly. In truth, when we were together, I felt that too. I felt the need to impress you or not impress you. I felt the constant pressure of performance and hated the way it ground me down.”

“When you are young in love, I suppose you always feel a bit of that.”

“Really? You think so?”

“I think so. In young love, you have something to prove. You want to prove you are strong enough to conquer those feelings you are having, sometimes for the first time ever. You want everyone to know you are doing things right. But you never do. You fuck up, you fail, you yell and you argue. You are learning now to love someone; it’s natural that you would get some things wrong.”

“But you never competed against me?”

“I had no reason to. You were always better than I. I was weak at the time, barely getting by. The only thing I had was a group of artistic friends that strung me along, making me feel more important than I really was.”

“I thought you were so special. I thought you were so tapped into what you wanted to do in life. You had this artistic skill, you could read a piece of fiction and understand it intuitively or you could output all this creative energy into the world just for the hell of it. I was jealous of your success.”

“I had no idea who I was,” I laugh. “It’s what I envied about you. You knew who you were, you knew everything you loved the moment you experienced it. You knew what you wanted to do with your free time, what you wanted to drink, and how you wanted to fuck. I was living some facsimile of life, trying my best to act the part of put-together.”

“Is that why you fell in love with B, too?”

“Yes and no,” I said. “By the time I met B, I was a different person. I had done the work. I had rebuilt myself, even if I was still learning.”

“Then why?”

“I sensed in him a genuine love for the world,” I said. “I suppose, I saw in his eyes a reservation or skepticism that people are always good, but at the same time, I saw a determination to not let that be his ultimate view. He was open to the beauty of it all, unashamed at craving softness.”