Black Hole Sun

Fingertips have memories. It's not my fingertips so much as my right palm that remembers you, remembers being infused with Jil Sander from holding your hand in frame. Long fingers, light grip, perpetually dry palm. It's amazing to me that some time during that time, while I was falling in love with ballroom and the body sensations it gave me, you had a doctor's appointment where you found out you had AIDS. I know you're dead now, but I still carry that in my body. Such a tragedy, the way beautiful people and things get taken from us and the ugly things remain. Why should the Wolf be alive and you're not? I find myself living a collection of people - no, living for a collection of people. In memory of. Always for others, myself last. That's such a terrible habit. Such a tragic embodied narrative. It's not my fingertips that remember you were the first person who's clothing I ever noticed. The way clothes can project who you are in this world, or who you're trying to be. The aspiration and truth in your heart. There's so much hardness around my knowing you and being in your company.

That whole story was me in an Edgar Allen Poe story. Walled in, bricked in, trapped in a wall - masons holding shovels and wet cement all around me. But my fingertips remember wrapping over your dry palm. Gentlemanly palm. Fragrant, non-threatening palm. And your silvery blonde hair. And your hair flip. And bitchily pursed lips. And the way your eyes had that twinkle like all the best gays do, no matter how desperately I didn't want you to be. Gay. Far away from and disinterested in me, except as a pet. When everyone else wanted a different kind of pet from me and they still do. I've been cursed to be able to feel it my whole life.

Now my looks are starting to go, and all I'm left with is this golf ball in my throat and this grief in my lungs. The terrible memory of my fingertips right after you died. When they went hollow. They felt ashamed. They missed you and had no idea how to say so. Fingertips carry memories and so many of mine hurt or feel threatening. Thank you for that tiny slice of time when you gave me something different.

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