Swimming in the Dark

“I adored this book more than you knew,” it read there in your stocky, right-leaning script. “I wanted to keep it . . . but it’s yours. Bring it back one day if you can. I’ll be here. J.”

Because you were right when you said that people can’t always give us what we want from them; that you can’t ask them to love you the way you want.

“Waiting for nothing, queuing for a possibility, that’s what we’re all doing now,”

I had found my place on your sandstone body—between your thighs and the mounds of your nipples, in the cave of your armpits. The geography of you was suddenly as clear as that of the city, skin warmed like the bricks of the tenement houses, the lines of your body like the straight and unbroken lines of the avenues, of the tram tracks and the stiff metal barriers that threw crisscrossed shadows onto the streets.

It struck me how little my name meant to me, how absurd it was in its attempt to contain me.

Some things cannot be erased through silence.

gray-blue eyes the same color as the Baltic Sea in winter.

we had no manual, no one to show us the way. Not one example of a happy couple made up of boys. How were we supposed to know what to do? Did we even believe that we deserved to get away with happiness?

And I cried, despite myself. All this time I’d meant to ask you whether you loved her. It was the one thing that I regretted not asking. I realize now that it never mattered. Because you were right when you said that people can’t always give us what we want from them; that you can’t ask them to love you the way you want.

You two walked off, arm in arm, and I watched you, the burning cigarette still in my hand, the last thing you’d ever given me.