Outline of My Lover by Douglas A. Martin

Author:Douglas A. Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

C) The World

A little more than a year after the first night, he goes off for an extended tour. Occasionally, I’ll be able to go wherever his work takes him. One of these trips takes me out of the country for the first time ever, to join his tour.

He wakes me that morning before his trip, a long time away from each other, longest yet. Maybe he’ll never feel the same again, once he gets back. You never can tell.

He drives me back to the apartment I rent, and he tells me to think about him.

He says he’ll be thinking about me.

Vacated, emptiness in this place will never be that sharp again, it just dulls everything. Around me. I have a long wait ahead of me. A year that will feel like a yearning already.

This initial pricking in my heart, swelling panic, like now he’s gone and has left. There is no way to get him back.

He enters me deeper than even my father leaving me.

Heart beats to strokes he pushes into me, I count how many times before it is done.

I know he’s going. I’ve always known that, that he would go.

He’s at a picnic table. Figs are falling from trees they are so plentiful. He is calling me from somewhere.

He flies me out and I start to travel. He gives me money to spend. Play money, he says. Spend it all there, wherever we are.

Before I leave.

I try to stay longer.

In California, he rents me a car. Not since high school have I driven.

We almost always at night touch each other.

Views from our hotel rooms.

We sit on the couch in one hotel and he cries with his arm around me. I’ve put on an album from his childhood. Before his life became this dream.

We are holding each other.

He says come over here, and he puts his arm around me. They’re happy tears for him.

In that hotel where he always stays, he is hearing his past means something to him. The song about what a boy does when his father dies, how he dreams of recapturing that father’s body before it left.

It touches him. I am there, sharing this moment with.

I try to imagine what it could possibly mean to him, this song.

I start to think I can reach him, just by thinking about him. That I can figure out exactly what he wants, doesn’t say, if I pay close enough attention, and try to be just what he wants.

If I contain seeds for songs.

That boy, beauty, he sees.

California, 1994. I was in the place of the dead boy. We went to where he died on the sidewalk. My lover shakes the owner of the club’s hand when we go inside and have a drink, meet some actors, screenplay writers. Right outside is where the boy hit the ground. I’m wearing a fancy coat of his, because it gets cold at night and I didn’t know. I hadn’t packed properly for the desert.

My lover was still only feeling out how realistic his future, further career goals were.

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