Bedshaped Man

Robb’s Last Tape (Take One)

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

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I turned twenty-eight a couple of weeks ago and, truth be told, I’ve never ever dated anyone. This is not because at one point I chose a life of utter promiscuity and swore my allegiance to a no-strings-attached creed, on the contrary, my existence is as sexless as that of a monk. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a complete recluse living in a fiscal paradise either. I do socialize, occasionally, when necessity requires it. I’m not a modern Adonis, but I’m not overweight either, though I used to be for a very long while. I feel horrible pangs of guilt every time I have ice cream. I’m tall (6ft 0.8346458in to be precise), with light-brown hair, and deep blue eyes, depending on what I’m wearing, and the photo filter I’m using to take selfies. I run, I exercise daily, until everything hurts, until it feels like a punishment. I have friends, at least I think I do. I eat pizza every once in a while and feel extremely guilty every time I do that. I drink beer, Belgian, I know how to make brownies. I read all the time (that is, when I’m not doing anything else), and I’ve been studying ever since I can remember myself studying. I have a bachelor’s degree, and two master’s degrees, all of them in the humanities, and am now doing a PhD in contemporary American literature. I have never dated anyone, and if it ever did feel like I was dating someone, it always turned out that it was all in my head. I’ve had this constant feel that I was being put aside for some future use, to mature and be savored when the time was right.

I’m into guys. I like the way in which they can be both abusive and protective. I like the way they talk at times, I like their facial hair, the way it surrounds their lips, as if those kissing instruments were an oasis on a prickly rough terrain. I marvel at the violence in their hands, their thighs. In them, I look for the things that I could never have. I abandon myself to them, think of them when I jerk off.

I’m also a guy, in case you were wondering (though the jerking off part was pretty clear). I have been attracted to guys for as long as I can remember, even though there had been a time when I did not know for sure what exactly I was feeling. I did not have a name for it (I was provided with the name at a later date). And there had been times when I desperately hoped that it would pass, that it was just a phase I had to go through, a phase at the end of which I would emerge with the same violence and tenderness in my hands, similar thighs, and lips to match that sudden explosion of manhood. That never happened, of course, the phase never ended, and that almost unconscious fight against it feels, now, like a waste of time. And that’s the thing with the heterosexual mainstream covering the sky like the belly of an airplane. It feels as if I’ve wasted so much time wondering what was wrong with me when I could have wasted that time working on my pectorals. Somehow this gay thing is never parallel with the straight thing, it only comes at a later time, in the shape of a revelation. Like scientists in lab coats we move on to the next method only after having exhausted the possibilities of the first one, explored its limits, and the first one is always the straight one, the one statistically natural. Somehow, to be gay, you need to be straight first, and the transition is always a painful one, akin to independence wars. As a gay veteran, I cannot say I have emerged stronger out of that war, on the contrary, I now feel even more insecure and lonely.

I did not date anyone in high school, nobody had shown interest. My high school was full of jocks who thought that every object resembling a book bound in black leather was a Bible. I was bullied throughout my high school years, from the very first day of school until the very last one, when I had to deliver the valedictory at our graduation ceremony. By that last day, their bullying had become subtle, recognizable even in the way they pronounced my last name, obvious in the inflection of their voices. My gym teacher bullied me. She bullied the cheerleaders by slapping them with a hockey stick. Once, she called me a “little cunt” in front of my classmates. She did not apologize when I complained to my tutor about it, and after the tutor confronted her, she simply told me I had a big mouth and I had to keep it shut. As you’d expect, she was very manly and had the body for it, Glee style. I distinctly remember she even had a mustache.

I was afraid to go to school and dreaded the moment I had to leave school at the end of the day. I never went to the bathroom, and never ate during school hours because I was afraid of going to the school cafeteria (which was basically a kiosk under the stairs, Harry Potter style, except people didn’t sleep in it). I never looked up and walked as closely to the walls as possible so as not to draw attention. At least, that is what I thought back then. Once, while waiting for class to start, a guy spit in my face because I refused to give him the cap of a freshly opened Coke bottle. Later on, before biology class, a group of older student got a hold of a video camera and filmed me while “interviewing” me, a plastic bottle instead of a microphone. I asked them to leave me alone and hid my face behind my textbooks. But the plastic bottle kept probing against me, the camera pointed at me, the older students going round and round like little children around a squirrel found dead in the middle of the street. The biology teacher must have found out about it, because later on, during class, she made an allusion to the “interview”. She did nothing about it, I didn’t hear of any students being suspended for misconduct, or at least being warned. Now, when I think about it, the fact that I was one of her favorite students in my class, and the fact that she had shown her affection towards me by letting me use the biology laboratory to read and hide from the world, could have never changed the way I felt about her inability to do something about the older students. Did she not register the fact that I was in distress during and after that “interview”?

Yet, those were passing moments, their terror subsided after a couple of weeks, months, years, a couple of jokes, and friendly pats on the back. It was all part and parcel of the high school experience, right? But none of those moments compared to the one when I was wrongfully accused of bumping arrogantly (and by mistake) into another chubby guy outside the school premises. I was walking home with a classmate when we had to stop because a car was pulling out of the parking lot, and this guy bumped into me. He slapped me with a rolled textbook and tried to fist punch me. He even called on his friends and they all surrounded me after my classmate had fled in fear. He tried punching me again, I ducked and ran home. I will always remember that Thursday; it was the loose end of that constant fear I felt during those years. I started to dread going to school even more. I hid in libraries, I sought the protection of older students, did all sorts of favors to them (helping them pass that drawing class, helping them cheat on their biology tests, that kind of favors). During breaks I would move to the farthest desk in the classroom so I could not be seen from the hallways. I would ask some of the teachers to let me out before the end of the class so that I could not be seen getting out by the other students. I invented excuses, something about roommates having lost their keys. I stopped along the hallways to listen. I stayed behind, feigning interest in whatever the janitors had to complain about until I was sure all of the students had gone home. Once I even heard the chubby guy boasting to his classmates about the fact that he had turned me into a “punching bag”. And what was I if not a passive punching bag? To them, it did not matter that I was one of the best students in my class, and though I kept studying, getting top marks, all of that faded in the face of that seemingly endless terror. I never “got back” to him for what he did, or tried doing, to me. I never got my revenge. Today I can only imagine dreadful scenarios involving him: failed marriage, domestic violence, and a beer belly to match.

The bullying did stop eventually, but only after I went to college and moved to another city, as far away from my bullies as my family’s budget permitted. It came again only when, symbolically, I returned to high school as a teaching trainee. I heard mean comments coming from my students about my voice, about the fact that I had “man boobs”, about the way I moved my hands when talking in front of the class. It may all seem too far-fetched to some of you, but all of these aspects undermined my authority as a teacher and gnawed away at my self-esteem. I swore never to go back there, not even as a full-time teacher.

I did not date anyone in college, but I did hold hands with girls (I bet you weren’t expecting that). A couple of times with the friend who once touched my face nervously and I pulled away, quickly, as if touched by a burning cigarette. She held my hand when we got out of the cinema one night and a thunderstorm was looming at the edges of the city. She squeezed my hand when we said goodbye for the night in front of the taxicab. That same night, during the movie, she had buried her face in my shoulder and I had no idea what I was supposed to do and just carried on watching Transformers.

I won’t give names. My failures are my own.

Then there was that other girl who kept telling me she loved me, though I knew she kept pictures of naked men on her digital camera (men with bulging pectorals). Even today, she still tells me that she loves me, even though she is now married (to a man with bulging pectorals), but the words have a strange metallic feel to them, the sensation stirred by them similar to the awe inspired by terms such as “gold-plated”. The whole world seemed to inherit that feel whenever she was present because all men seemed to notice her, except me. And like a parasite I fed on and binged on the attention she received. She gave me a sudden and momentary sense of power, and I took the credit for it even though, deep down, I knew that I had not conquered her in any way. I wasn’t good-looking, had no bulging pectorals, I felt sorry for myself, and complained about everything. But once, after class, she held my hand, and the others saw us, they witnessed the way she reached out and grabbed me by the hand, and in their eyes I saw envy, felt the gossip piling up.

The sensation was replicated later on after one of my exams. She was waiting for me outside, and when I got out she hugged me, and our “feminist” professor saw us and smiled in a certain way, the way feminists do. Unconsciously, I was aware of the conventions of the heterosexual world because I had witnessed them for so long, in full display. Even the ugliest man, no matter how ugly, dreams of a trophy girl standing by his side, and waves her in front of everybody as if to fortify his own sense of manhood. It was only later on that, in the light of those very conventions, I realized I didn’t want her, I did not desire to possess her, I only wanted to be like her, exert the same kind of power that she wielded over the men that gawked at her wherever she went.

Then she went away. I moved even further away from my bullies to another country, and it was only in this other country where, in my solitude, I started to come to terms with my attraction to other men. I believe that the transformation had started when I told one of my Italian classmates, by text, that I was gay, and she told me that she still appreciated me despite that newfound knowledge. She even promised to hug me next time we met. She did hug me, and her affection did not seem metallic, but prone to being cast aside in a playful manner. What struck me then was not the ease with which she accepted me and promised me unmovable friendship, but rather the way in which my sexual preferences instantly occupied a less important place in the ranks of our friendship priorities. It wasn’t demeaning, don’t get me wrong, I believe it was rather the symptom of somebody who had probably thought about the issue at one point, someone who had read about it, experienced it vicariously, seen it, and decided it wasn’t going to affect the way she related to the people in her life. For her, my sexual preference was not a catastrophe in the way it was for me. For all I knew, all I wanted to do was talk about it, emphasize the drama, turn myself into a victim. Yet, she gave a sense she wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it, the way she wasn’t going to lose sleep over a medicine the effects of which she was perfectly aware.

I encountered that same relocation of energies when I told my best friend about it. He thanked me for having trusted him to the extent of confessing that kind of thing to him. I have never told him about the fact that his masculine presence in my life has been, over the years ever since I met him, to say the least, formative. I decided not to tell him about it, afraid that it might ruin our friendship, give him a sense that I was somehow interested in him in that way. I have never stopped feeling self-destructive, and every time I ask him whether there’s something in me that he would scorn and hate me for, he seems at a loss for words. The question, of course, is never singular. It comes with a baggage of self-loathing, and along its twin question: when are you going to leave me?

I’ve asked this last question, never out loud, every time I tried dating a guy.

I won’t blame anyone. My failures are my own.

The answer came as silently as the question, never out loud, in a series of absences, time filled with nothing. Soon, the answer was, and my insecurities throbbed at the thought, as if on an adrenaline rush. My insecurities knew perfectly well that the confirmation of that thought would come. And soon it came.

I slept with a guy a couple of times. Just that one guy. We had not been dating when it happened because I met him on an online dating site destined for bears, muscle bears, older guys, chubby guys, hairy guys, and (drumroll), the category that every man on that website was basically looking for, the elusive “admirers”. These latter were the opposite of the former: young good-looking guys who spent most of their time doing odd jobs that permitted them to spend insane amounts of time at the gym getting pumped up. And the results could be seen in the many pictures taken at the gym: pictures of feet, bulging biceps and pectorals, pictures often lacking a head altogether. Most important, you didn’t just talk to them, you couldn’t, they would talk to you. The best you could do was visit their profile, leave a footprint, and hope they would return the visit, and maybe even contact you. They were the gods. But not because of some sort of innate quality, rather because all of the other users lacked the narcissist thrust that compelled the “admirers” to suffer for their beauty. We admired their discipline, masturbated to their headless bodies, our way to hell paved with abs, and dreamed that one of them would finally see the shallowness of the world and pick us, us and no one else.

Letter to an absent friend (Wednesday, May 4, 2016)

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

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Dear friend,

Before I say anything else, allow me to thank you for your last letter, the one that never got to me, unfortunately, due to the hectic nature of our planet’s temperamental atmosphere. Black holes must have opened in the very fabric of the night sky while you were writing it. Don’t get me wrong, the letter did get to me, yet it was impossible for me to read it. The pages were all wet, the writing illegible, so much so that when I finally managed to open the envelope, fretfully, the breath running out of me and hiding in the corners of my room, I thought you had sent me an ink blot test to figure out my personality traits. So I immediately sat at my desk accordingly and started to write a response letter about the figures that seemed so obvious on the humid pages. And while I was doing it I was thinking, again, as I did on many occasions during our affair, of writing the letter in such a way so as to show you how good I was for you, how lucky you were to have discovered me on that dating site. I wanted to show you that I had changed, that I did it all for you, and that I still lived in that bedroom-world I had imagined for the both of us. In that bedroom-world we were still together, and I was still the man you wanted me to be, protective, jaw clenched, omniscient in the way American men living in the suburbs with their wives were supposed to be.

What you are reading now is not that response letter, of course, I burned it long after I had realized your own letter was, in fact, not an ink blot personality test. In the fury that followed that realization, by mistake I burned your letter as well, and so I no longer remember the details, as I no longer hear the voice that was so carefully embedded in your handwriting. I now find myself in a state of despair because I feel as if, once again, as I did on many occasions, I lost you once more because of my innate stupidity when it comes to matters such as these. And so, I had to go back to our bedroom-world to find you again and to be able to write this letter.

Our bedroom-world is in a rather shabby state, I’m afraid, mostly because of my carelessness. I’ve been trying to stay away from it for as long as I could, returning only at night when I find it difficult to fall asleep. Because of the brevity of these moments I never have the time to think too much about the context. I never think about the lighting in the room, or the furniture for that matter. The sheets and the pillows are the only elements I manage to think about extensively nowadays. The tapestry has faded, the windows have disappeared, the rest of the furniture is but a presence, akin to the one inspired by invisible gods. There, we are in a constant state of darkened mood, made so by our need to fall asleep in each other’s arms. The greatest detail, however, and the highest imaginative effort are bestowed on that final embrace before sleep comes, on the way I try to control my breathing so as not to disturb you, on the way our embrace turns to heat as if we are about to cross the wide expanses of a polar night. That night never comes, of course, and every morning I find myself alone, not in our bedroom-world, but in actual physical pain.

On a merrier note, rumor has it that you finally graduated from law school. I might have seen some of the pictures from your graduation ceremony, but then again I have seen so many such ceremonies in my life that I can’t remember whether I have actually seen yours. I might have seen you wearing that green laurel wreath that is customary in Italy with graduation parties. I might have seen your friends congratulating you, your mother and father proud by your side. I might have seen you smiling for the camera, and I might have imagined us together in our bedroom-world on the night of your graduation. I could have been in on one of those pictures, not knowing how to stand or where to put my hands. I couldn’t touch you the way I would have liked to because I was afraid some of the people around us might frown and smile awkwardly, the way people whose heads have been detached from their bodies smile before realizing it. I might have flown in from London on that very morning, and I would have acted the way a stranger would, always on the fringes of the conversation, always the one taking the picture without being in it.

I might have listened to all of the congratulatory notes coming from all those people around you, only to prepare my very own special congratulatory note. I might have chanted dottore, dottore… along with the others. I could have gotten you a graduation gift, something fancy and expensive because in our bedroom-world money has never been a problem. I could have arranged your tie and spoken to you softly while doing it. I would have reassured you that everything was going to be fine, and that your thesis defense was flawless. I would have made small talk with your father who would stare down at me from the skies of his own failures, knowing somehow that the question regarding my intentions with you would never come. I would have talked about the weather with your mother, and finally, when she wouldn’t be listening, I would have told her that you are the most handsome law school graduate.

But I wasn’t there, so isn’t this letter some sort of apology for that?

I assure you it is not. You wouldn’t have wanted me there. I would have ruined everything for you. Most likely this letter is just one of those congratulatory notes, written and read at a time when all congratulatory notes have been written and read, and consumed, and returned to their rightful places. The only thing I can wish you now, irrespective of your future academic plans, is for you to find somebody who would look at you adoringly, awe-struck. Somebody who in those moments would think of you as his and consider himself to be the luckiest man on earth.

Yours truly,

Rob.

Random Moment (Guernica II)

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

 

A reading by the author:

 

Seeing the world through the eyes of a fish you see me in ways and colors I could not see myself, stolen from the world, perched on the mountains of my mind, my left hand raised not to catch a glimpse of the sun but to hold on to the entrails of my beautiful gods. Against their ruins I throw my own body to deface it, make it resemble something you could have feelings for. Today, I make myself ugly, awakened, as leeches are, by the smell of the pulsating warm limbs of mindless children, just to give you reasons to uphold your lack of nerve. For once, let your blood talk. Because nobody has ever had the courage to tell me they loved me and you are no different.

I often wonder whether it’s a question of time, or timelessness. Do you postpone your words, promise to utter them tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow? Because when I look up I can only sense the narrowness of a breathing tube, its transparency made to resemble that of swimming jellyfish. The narrowness that curbs upwards like the momentary thrust of anticipation. The narrowness that then plunges downwards and curls into itself, struggles to reach the tiny mouth of a machine. Will that be the moment when you will finally say something? When the plastic lips will finally touch in a kiss bound to go on forever? Say it now, while you can still distinguish between the brownish hues of my skin and the sheets in which I sleep as in a cocoon. For once, let your blood speak, because if I speak the leeches will come out of my mouth and you will turn away, disgusted.

Then I will tell you about the sounds that come from the walls, and the way sometimes construction cranes resemble the skinny limbs of a praying mantis. What are they praying for? I’ll speak of resonance and the ground we stand on, which was once a battlefield. Of the bed we could be sleeping in. Of how I don’t want to imagine you with your back turned to me. Of how I often feel as if people are afraid of me. Is it because they know I’m afraid of their emotions? I am, in fact. But not because I’ve never went through them. It’s because whenever I see them do it I feel as if they are taking something away from me. In time, I got used to it, and started giving them everything until, at the end of the day, I would feel depleted. I gave them my dreams and kept the nightmares for myself. I offered them my hopes and they took them. I gave them my time. And I will keep doing that until you finally decide to speak.

Random Moment (Descent)

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

The shops weren’t closing, people weren’t disappearing from the streets, but the night was falling in a rush on that December evening, and I was just outside the university building having a smoke and thinking of finishing up for the day and going home. And I couldn’t take my eyes off you, glasses and jeans and shirt and fancy jacket and your way of waiting there by the garbage can on 5th Avenue, and the way the light from the streetlights fell on you and your impatience. There was that sense of recognition of you, one I could not escape whenever it occurred, that halfway point between familiarity and the acknowledged impossibility of randomness turning into significance.

And out of that crowd that travelled like wolves in packs downtown, your other half detached itself from the pack like a small rivulet and started flowing over into your direction, and you acknowledged him and he came to you and kissed you, and nobody cared about it except the two of you. I rolled my eyes at you both and at your gesture like I roll my eyes when an old woman refuses to take the seat you just offered her on the subway. Your encounter somewhat resembled the feet of a luminous creature, frail toes and all, like those of an angel, seen for a brief moment by drowning children before they are pulled out by a stranger and dragged on the shore.

The stranger was not saving the child, the child is beyond saving, the stranger was merely considerate of the parents and their investment, all of those years lost in the idiocy of a profane moment.

But then, just like the feet of that proverbial angel, frail toes and all, the two of you disappeared, and I was left floating on my cloud of smoke.

You laughed when I told you this story and said it was hilarious, too saccharine for your taste. You said you no longer believe in love. Once you had fallen in love with a guy out of boredom.

Moment Thirty-Two (Service)

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

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Akin to street vendors, the men aligned. They were stacked rather, according to their spatial nearness.  The whole thing resembled the universe before the Big Bang. Some of them had to elbow their way out of the crowd. Each of the users had chosen their best picture, for sure, and each of those pictures recreated a moment stolen out of their lives. An instant of happiness perhaps? Some of them were faceless, a glimpse of red underwear here, a patch of brownish skin over there, next to the guy who chose to show the picture of a sunset over Central Park instead of his face. And yet, a sense of security exuded from each of those instances displayed on the screen of his phone, the kind of security he craved for and hoped to have attained on that same dating app.

Sunday mornings were always like that: smell of unwashed sheets and sweat, the radiators hissing as if about to start moving, hellish creatures, the desperate sense that showering was necessary and that it was the only day of the week when he could have cake. Then the hand moving downwards, sliding in between his legs to caress morning erections. Just one look at those pictures was enough to unleash waves and waves of fantasies and pleasure. He wouldn’t touch the skin, no, he would merely rub his erection through his boxers and then smell his fingers when he stopped to prolong the sensation. There was some sort of pleasure to be taken out of it, in detecting that smell of urine on his fingers, one that mixed with the smell of tobacco stubbornly refusing to be washed away.

Then he would fall asleep again only to be awakened by the expectancy of that final relief. The cycle would be repeated a couple of times. There had been a time, a very long time before that, when he still believed in some sort of divine retribution and refused to masturbate on Sunday mornings when supposedly the Sunday mass would be happening. He would wait until the afternoon to do it. Those were the times when he had a laundry basket in the bathroom next to the washing machine. Those were the times when he used to clean the house on Saturday afternoon in preparation for the holiness of the next day. Those were indeed the times when he had a nightstand and a bedside lamp. He no longer did that. His dirty underwear was simply hidden from view in a plastic grocery bag under the bed. It wasn’t really a bed, it was merely a mattress placed over a metallic structure, one that resembled a beach chaise longue. The nightstand was a cardboard box that had originally housed a desk lamp. He was aware of the dust settling on his books, which were stacked not on shelves but on a make-believe fireplace, but could not find the energy or the will to do it.

Then the innocent glare of the phone.

The page refreshed automatically to reveal the newcomers, people who had logged on or created new profiles in the meantime. And there he was, the man with the beard and the round glasses staring at him from a selfie taken on what appeared to be a leather sofa. He had seen him before, but never had the courage to write to him. Because why would he be interested anyway? Nobody had ever been interested in him, except maybe for those who had no other choice and imagined themselves next to him. Never contact those who have the better looks. Contact the underdogs, those whose sense of security was often undermined by the way they looked and the way they subsequently saw themselves. He considered himself one of them, living on the outskirts of those dating apps, in the shadow of perfect abs, beautiful eyes and symmetrical faces that had just the right amount of facial hair to give them structure.

At times rage would come and turn him into a renegade. In those moments he promised it to himself not to go there anymore.

But then the man with the beard and the round glasses moved upwards, closer, and a message landed in his inbox. The man with the beard demanded to know how he was doing. Courteously, he replied that he had just woken up but he was still sleeping on his feet. That was a lie. He wasn’t on his feet; the coffee had not been brewed yet. The self-loathing that came with breakfast had not yet been served. But it was already late and so he thought he should just throw in the idea that he wasn’t one of those lazy guys who slept till noon because they had nothing better to do.

‘I woke up a long time ago,’ the man with the beard replied, ‘but still in bed lazy, under the covers, where it’s warm and cozy and nobody can see me.’ And then that ambiguous laugh. Hehe. ‘Go back to bed!’

He said it was okay. The man with the beard smiled. That man was no fun, he thought.

‘I noticed you before,’ he wrote to the man with the beard, ‘and thought you were very nice, but I never had the courage to write to you.’

‘That is very sweet of you,’ the reply came seconds after, ‘I am just an ordinary guy. I noticed you too.’

Liar.

‘I like ordinary guys,’ he told the man with the beard, ‘and I just love the fact that you are so much taller than me.’ The man with the beard and the round glasses was also older, more than ten years older, and had an air of rough maturity about him. He liked that. He was tired of all those little boys who didn’t even know how to have sex. Not that he was a master of sex, but still, a man has to have his dignity.

After they exchanged pictures and told each other how handsome they were, there came the silly question. The question wasn’t silly in itself. He had been expecting it. After all, the man’s intentions were specified in his profile. The man with the beard was looking for “clean and respectful guys, professional, no drama, quiet”, and considered himself average, more of a top, if it came to that. He was also “relationship oriented” and, more than anything, urged his fellow hunters to be polite and engage in conversation only if they were interested in having one. Honesty was also appreciated. “Cuddling?”, said the name of his profile.

‘I apologize if it’s premature’, the man with the beard said.

‘Sure, why not’, he told the man with the beard and the round glasses. He needed to get out of bed, had to get out and do something. He wanted to appear adventurous. He wanted to seem disillusioned and raw.

‘I do sleep in boxers’, the man said, ‘but I will change in pajamas. Where do you live?’

In outer space he wanted to say because where he lived was just that, a room in which he slept, a place where he simply found himself, a hiding place. He told the man an approximate address.

‘You want to come over? Or want me to come to you?’

He told the man with the beard that he had roommates, even though they were long gone to work that morning. He wanted the man to imagine these faceless roommates that wouldn’t appreciate a stranger coming into their home to cuddle with the other stranger.

‘That’s fine’, the man with the beard replied, ‘you come here then.’

The sudden materiality of the situation made him cringe. The man was serious but there was still time to back down and offer some sort of excuse. Maybe he should go back to sleep. Maybe some other day.

‘I don’t know whether I want to come out of bed right now.’

‘I know’, the tall man replied, ‘it’s a tough call.’

The man’s location popped up on the screen. It wasn’t far, but the idea of having to get up, taking a shower, and going out was simply too unappealing. He was also afraid. He had always been afraid of them. Feared their gaze and silent judgments, imagined them hating him, scorning his awkwardness. That is why excuses always had to be invented.

‘It’s alright’, the man said probably noting his hesitance, ‘maybe some other time.’ And he appreciated that. Everything sounded better when it was out there somewhere, about to happen, lost between the folds of a future tense. Beautiful things might happen in the meantime. A beautiful relationship maybe, the man of his dreams might be just around the corner.

‘Don’t sound so sad,’ he told the man with the beard, ‘it breaks my heart.’

‘I understand,’ the man replied, ‘you are all cozy in your bed, me too, and just want to sneak in and cuddle, feel the warmth of the body and relax…’

And suddenly the warmth was so real he could smell it, feel the rigidness of the body breathing next to him.

‘Isn’t that the most amazing feeling in the world?’

There was a long pause. He closed the app and returned to his erection, thinking of the warmth that the man with the beard had planted in his mind. He imagined the roughness of the man’s beard on his face and the red sores it would leave behind. He felt the numbness of the sores that would form around his mouth, that mute reminder, imagined his grunts.

Minutes later the reply came. ‘I feel it now in my mind’, the message said, ‘holding you tight.’

‘It’s like when you hear somebody else’s breath so close to you it becomes a mantra and you wish your breathing could be in sync with it.’

The tall man with the beard and the glasses agreed, it was just like that. ‘Or if you are on top of my chest, hearing my heart beat, your leg slightly over my leg, your arm over my shoulder.’

He told the man with the beard and the glasses that he needed to take a shower first and the man thought it was cool. Then, under the shower he thought of everything that had been said, and he thought he was so weak, so fucking weak.

Letter to an absent friend (July 27)

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

Childhood_under_the_Sun Dear friend,

I apologize for my late reply, your letters never seem to arrive these days, I guess they just get lost on the way. Yet, I know you write to me every day, I just know it, I refuse to think that you have forgotten me. I refuse to believe I now linger at the back of your mind like one of those memories you refuse to acknowledge.

I would like to write to you about happiness, this imaginary friend that we all look for at one point and in whose company we feel like nothing could go wrong. But things can go wrong, sadly, and happiness is always greatest the minute before you realize something has gone terribly wrong. You’ll think I’m selfish, but selfishness, in my case, is like a declaration of love to you, dear friend. Only I know how many declarations of love I’ve written praising you and your beauty. Your beauty, the one that feels like the innocent cruelty of the sun.

I’ve been places lately, places I cannot even name because in the geography that we humans have created for ourselves they do not yet exist. Our friendship is a place. Despair is a place. Solitude is a place too. This very letter is a place. That is why I’m writing about happiness. I want this letter to be a happy place, its walls filled with pictures of happy people under the sun, smiling, loving people, the people that we both long to become. They are all happy, I swear to you, and because they are happy we must be happy too. I’d like to tell you about how the happiness of the others is really the happiness that we should live for, that I should live for. Think how, really, the kind of happiness that you experience every day is nothing compared to the happiness that we share like the jagged wheels of a huge mechanism powered by those who hold hands, and kiss, and can tell these things to each other while having breakfast. This might sound idealistically grand to you, but I swear, it is the most selfish thing that I could ever fathom. I am happy for you, really, because I know that when you are happy at least one tenth of that happiness descends, like the tentacles of a drug, into my own bloodstream, until I become like a sponge feeding on the remnants of that feast we call happiness. Like the prodigal son I return to you begging for forgiveness. Forgiveness is a kind of happiness too. The kind of happiness that I desire. Will you offer me that?

 

Yours.

The other body

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

by Isabelle Vigier

by Isabelle Vigier

Crumpled paper. That’s how my body feels like after the waves. They no longer have an effect on me. My body got used to them. This is cause for concern among the doctors and the nurses, I overheard them talking about it the other day. They said a higher voltage might do the trick. There’s no talk about the thorns though. They’re visible enough. I wanted to remind them of my thorns but I made a vow of silence to myself. Every time I want to say something words seem to turn back inside my throat. I want to push them outside but somehow they manage to get back inside and throw themselves against my brain. My limbs have been growing limbs on the inside. I now have four hands and four legs. Two hands on the outside, and two hands on the inside. Two legs on the inside, and two legs on the outside. I will grow a brain inside my brain. My other body shall move through the density of this body, the one that you held in your arms, and it will breathe blood instead of air. The body inside my body is very different from the one that you see. It is much more beautiful. You’ve had your say into this. That body is a faceless body. I left some room for creativity as I always do. You’ll be able to fill in the blanks, put the face that you wanted me to have all along. Maybe it is the body that you always wanted me to have. I’m sure that it is the body that I always wanted me to have. The one that I almost sold my soul for. I would go outside at midnight and pray to the devil. I asked him to give me beauty in return of my soul. He never replied, naturally. I eventually gave up. My other body, growing inside my guts, is not as transparent as this one. At one point this body will fall off, the thorns will dry and they will fall off too, just like a rose dries and lets its petals fall to the ground. This body is not like the body of a rose. This body is more like that of a serpent. Its skin is made of scales. It will fall off at one point, when the time is ripe. You are the idea that occupies the mind, the idea that transforms itself into a physical state.

Until we are lessened

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

I’ve seen how the flesh gets scared of me, only at the thought of me. I’ve witnessed it in one of my invented memories. I touched this man’s hand, and I could feel the flesh, the warmth, and the hand withdrew, quickly, like a snake, like the body of a snail does, hiding slowly under its protective shell. I got scared myself because in that indeterminate movement I’ve seen myself through the eyes of that man, and I appeared monstrous and alone, like a child who fears being abandoned. I’ve seen that frightening look that for a second made me seem invisible or made me want to think that I’m invisible or that I should be invisible just for that pair of eyes. I am the child and the child-molester, the victim and the perpetrator. How could I not be when every time I touch you I can feel the flesh that has grown into something that only your mind could fathom? Is it the same flesh, that of the child, that has grown dark, day by day, and thought by thought? Aren’t you still that little boy you were years ago that still smells of breast milk? It is the same skin, the same glorious architecture.

The mind has made you furiously dark, laid one by one the brushstrokes of dementia, adulthood, over the scribbled smiling face of your innocence.

The mind grows too fast. The body has to keep up.

I try to understand where this guilty pleasure of yours comes from, derive its driving principles, and in the process understand myself, your lover. To find the spot where the mind refused the spectral image of an angel replacing it with that of an androgynous figure, relaxed and seemingly superficial, yet full of sexual frenzy.

There is no change, no crossing point, that’s why there is no turning back.

I can’t find your number, it seems to have disappeared and for a second I panic thinking that you might have been indeed a figment of my imagination. I finally find it under the letter M. It’s that other name that I have given you this week. Hey, I can hear your voice at the other end of the line, trembling, filled with expectation. I’m just going to get my luggage and I’ll be there in about 15 minutes. You know how these things work, I tell him, but I only do that to fill the air that is suddenly too much for my lungs. I have taken my best shirt, even my best boxer shorts, my best socks, you know, just to make a first good impression on you. We’ll see about the other impressions. The first one is the most important at this point. I’ll be waiting, he says, and as he said that I suddenly felt that 15 minutes is going to take forever. I tell myself that patience is the key aspect now. I’ve been waiting for this for so many months.

I’m still waiting for it.

I finally take the luggage and I put my sunglasses on. I have a terrible headache, I tell him through the phone. We’ll take care of that he says, you’re on the other side of the wall. I could actually hear him.

Was it a flicker? A second there has just passed, consumed itself.

The doors open automatically. I could hear the mechanism working inside.

I step outside. The connection seems lost and I can’t hear you anymore. I stop and look for your number again. There is no letter M in the alphabet. I look through the rest of my contact list, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, unknown people. There is no letter M in the alphabet. One pearl is missing from the string. But I’ve just seen it.

There is no alphabet.

You’re probably waiting at the car.

There is a young man waiting next to a colorless car. I have never told you the color of my car. Once I told you I had dreamed of you, or rather forced myself to dream of you and you were voiceless. Back then I didn’t know the sound of your voice. Now I’ve become so familiar with it.

You’re not under the letter M.

I wonder what name I have given you today.

Under the letter G there is the word ghost. For a second you looked like a ghost. That ghost which comes at night, intent, and full of meaning, full of lust. We kill the lust that grows between your bodies. We strangle it with our bare hands until it breathes no more. The lust that comes to life when our bodies occupy the same space, at the same time, a slight distance required to make things work, the distance and the time that at one point will seem to extend towards infinity.

You are under the letter L, for lust, blocked into a category, my category.

There is the unnamable celestial body, of unknown descent living in a completely white inodorous land, no houses except words. There is the center of consciousness, diverse, totally different color. The body is stained, recorded in black and white, saturated. The body becomes a hypodermic syringe, youth itself, in the flesh. The body is the prerecorded obsession, the sound, no sound of any kind. There’s no specificity there. There is the completely inodorous white land. There are hundreds of inhabitants led by a man who fell in love in the mirror, made love in the mirror until he was trapped inside. They all turned purple and then orange due to the light reflected by the mirror. The skin turned hard, like a crust, perfectly stretched, flawlessly attached.

The body is an open wound, a cut in the air made with a word.

The flesh is the presence of lust.

The body is a curve between two points, the longest way between one point and the other, the longest way between A and B. The ultimate measure of the body is loss. The earth plates are on the move and we’re caught in between, innocent as we come, by nature. Time runs slower in this center of consciousness.

I wouldn’t want to wake up because waking up means facing the inodorous white desert. I can’t find you in that desert. There’s a land of lines put together, laws attached and meanings, and you stop being human, there is only what you’ve become, an entity. There are the repetitive words said every morning, cut obliquely they are empty of meaning though desired to be full of meaning. Good morning, how are you, did you have a good night. The answer is always yes, though by saying yes, I intend to say so much more. Yes means yes and no. The people living in this inodorous white land will understand you, they know.

Human waste, with every touch we go to waste. One step taken towards love is one step taken towards becoming human waste.

We stood hand in hand, our feet into the sand, watching fascinated how the waves came and went. My father knows, he says, he knows that we’re together. Did you tell him? Yes, I told him, and it’s not the first time I did that, he seems to forget a lot.

I’m not afraid of that, I’m not afraid of your father, he’ll eventually understand, what I’m afraid of though is what will come out of that understanding. Next time we’ll meet and we’ll have to shake hands and he’ll have to look into my eyes. I don’t know how I’m going to do that.

We’ll just have to avoid that, he says, be silent, pretend, shake hands like normal people do, wear the armor of common courtesy. In that world we’ll be invincible, in this world we’ll tend to our fragile souls in need of each other.

I try to imagine what his father is thinking about this, I’m the guy who’s fucking his son, three years older than him, taller, with long sideburns. Some may say I’m taking advantage of the situation I’m in. I fear the mercy that he might feel for me; I wouldn’t want to have that.

Your skin, the sun has given it this dark hue, the sun is telling me to look somewhere else. His father told me to look somewhere else, told me his son is not for me that I don’t deserve to have him. His mother smiled and said nothing. I looked down and told them I’m in love with their son. They said nothing, so I said it again. His father laughed but said nothing and I wanted to hold him, right there, hold him in my arms. The world was telling me to look somewhere else. There was this lump in my throat, I felt like throwing up.

I took him by the hand when we went out of the house. I looked back and the house was completely white, painful white. The windows were completely white, the trees framing the house were completely white, the sidewalk was white, everything was of a perfect white as if the house, his parents, time itself were mere drawings on a white sheet of paper. His eyes were completely white, perfectly white, inodorous white, tasteless white, a desert of whiteness at my feet. And in that whiteness I felt so alone and I felt like running away as fast as I could. Something held me, with a strong hand, something held me close.

At one point you come to terms with yourself, with who you are, or at least try to. I did the same, or at least tried to do the same. The whiteness was on to obliterate us, both of us, reduce us to mere drawings on a white sheet of paper.

You were wearing this dark blue sweater and that pair of jeans you always said they were your favorite though at times I disliked them deeply. And you had had your new haircut which seemed desperate the first time I saw it, but I was in love with you so it was the most beautiful haircut in the whole wide world. And there was a smile on your face, like that of a child that for a moment has forgotten about everything. We were in the backyard of your father’s house and you had found this rubber ball, and you were playing with it trying to imitate famous footballers. There was also that friend of yours, I don’t remember her name, something with K, I guess. Look under the letter K, there might be something there. But there isn’t of course, there is no letter K in the alphabet.

You were laughing and I fell in love with you again.

It was autumn. And the trees were not yet white, inodorous white, devoid of color. Back then the whiteness was yet lurking behind us never having the courage to attack us. It was the joy in your eyes that kept the whiteness away.

Or that time in the shopping mall when I could only think of you while watching all those men unpacking merchandise moving swiftly along the aisles as if there was something waiting for them when they got home. Is there anyone for them, at home, waiting for them to come back? A girlfriend, a boyfriend, a wife thinking of them, and I could see them doing things so that they could forget the absence. I went to the cashier and put the things I intended to buy on the conveyor and the woman looked at me and said something about a loyalty card and I said no. But everything happened just like that, without me actually acknowledging it. My replies were already there, prepared, ready to be delivered. And I was still thinking of you and nothing could distract me from doing that. We were in the car speeding on a highway leading nowhere the whiteness surrounding us like it was winter though it wasn’t winter, it was summer, it was supposed to be summer, and there was a white sun ahead of us neither smiling nor frowning at us, just like that, one of those emotionless suns, nothing special. But we weren’t running away from the whiteness, by that time we were accustomed with that, it had become our daily routine to live submerged into this sea of whiteness. We were going to that place called home, though in fact it wasn’t a home; it was the only place left in the world where the whiteness hadn’t reached yet, the place where we weren’t afraid to be ourselves. We were in the car speeding on a highway leading nowhere and you said you have to tell me something. Should I stop then, I asked you, and you said yes, I should stop, and I pulled over. It wasn’t the place or the time to say it, you said while other cars went by us and the sound was at times too strong to bear. And you said you love me and I took your hand in my hands and kissed it passionately and I saw you smiling, and I said I love you too.

There is no whiteness here because the room is too dark and the house is hidden away from view. Nobody can see us here, not even ourselves.

For miles there is no house in sight, just the occasional illusions that lure us into believing we are not alone in this white desert. There are no lights, and the weeds have outgrown the path, outgrown those who might venture around the house. The house resembles a fortress, painted in scarlet, painful to the eye, and to those who look at it from the outside it will appear deformed. Not to us, those who live inside have seldom fallen in love with the asymmetrical walls, windows turned away from the sun, doors too small to enter, some of the locked from the outside. Actually, all of them are locked from the outside except one which is in the attic so that if somebody wants to get out he or she will have to commit suicide, every time, several times during one’s lifetime. So we are very reluctant about going out. One morning I woke up with the feeling that we were the last two human beings on earth. No one yet ventured in these parts; the weeds have outgrown the adventurer.

the poetry of the long lasting fever

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

when the lines are broken and the words recall different meanings in the same situations, all one does is whine about the muteness of hands held together. what is there to understand than two hands tied with muteness. I suddenly want us to be silent, will my hand fuse on your belly. shall I melt away from the heat of your body. become one with your rough skin. because I can feel the pores and the sense of despair. all hope is lost or absent. come on, howl, I want to see drama, let that despair materialize, contrast with the secrecy of our hidden love. two bodies like this should not be together, not in this life. you know sometimes, when I’m asleep, I fear that a pair of black wings shall pierce through the skin of my back and push you away because my gods would offer me those wings just to push you away. so tie me with the sheets, let my ugly grin contrast with the nothingness you hold into your empty womb like a cursed mother. I’m afraid it is too late, you say. my gods have already denied this love. they said you shall crawl with a deserted womb until you repent.

so I write a letter, my gods, and ask them why this cut, and they say, because if you look ahead, little by little, the world shall commit suicide. we leave you with the empty wombs. and I wonder when this wrath of bones will stop growing. the fruitless womb grows bones but no flesh. we’ll have to use our own flesh to fill in the blanks. connect the dots and this love shall be complete.

I cross my palms over you belly and my hands seem displaced. and you are scared. what shall we do, you ask. shh, nothing, I say. keep this displacement silent. they need a life. we don’t. I won’t melt away from the heat of your body. black wings won’t grow from the blades of my back and push you away. love is not as inhumane as we think it is. shh, they need a life. we don’t.

Ode to fury

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

shatter, things fall apart. the hand held high in the inherited skyline. sign of fury, the eyes going out of their sockets. the bare feet running, the contracted chest as if the whole body is pushing against the heart. against the simplicity of God’s gesture like two forefingers kissing, and hissing the push came and the steps taken backwards with the back against the bottomless pit. the other hand hiding the shame of the pubis. gods are always a step ahead, they already have sheets covering the shame.

but the back of the other kid is too stiff, he can no longer reach the hand held high. it might be the blue suit he is wearing, or the tie, the uncomfortable and unfortunate costume of rules and ethics. while the other is falling from discomfort. it means that the decisions have been taken. prior the prior priorities, when the things were not yet divided. why do the two boys stand face to face, I ask. in the flow of evolution men have to be heading for the same direction.

falling apart means losing the innate sense of direction.

the other boy looks at the sky and sees the stiffness of the unfortunate costume. but the smile is much too powerful for the inherited skyline.

why not, I ask. and he says because they need to have their life. what about mine. whataboutmine. whataboutmine. and while falling I become a body of blur.