details

When I’m with someone or I’m sitting at my desk, hours (days, weeks, months) after the fact, I try to think of that person’s focal point, the single detail on them that provides a jumping off cliff into a lengthy rumination on romance and intrigue. If I can’t find one, that’s usually a warning sign. They hadn’t been interesting enough. I was hasty. I made a bad decision. People like Rasmus and his vanity, Dane and his wheedling, George and his lack of respect: proof that I don’t always think clearly. It happens from time to time—means I haven’t learned my lesson yet. 

The more details I can find, the more fruitful my writing is. For Karen, I don’t know where to start: the dark gray fedora on her curly hair, her tiny brown eyes, that thin, snapping mouth, her richly textured voice. Others, I find to be more easily definable—Ben and his age, etched into his laugh lines and the effortless way he held me; Trey and the glasses I slipped off his face as he took my virginity; Catarina and her wide, splitting grin, validating half a decade’s worth of self-doubt about my feelings for women

.

There are some I can’t contain to a single point at all. Zul and the city of Singapore, that week of freedom and exploration, that entire summer, the days and nights and afternoons and mornings and meals and hours spent in my hostel room together—all of that is him. To talk about one would only lead to the other and then the next, until I’m writing another essay again. But would it be about him, or the experience of having had him as a summer fling? Two years after we happened, and it’s still impossible to separate the two. 

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I ramble about all of this to reach an uneventful conclusion. That was what I’d been looking for during my evening with him: something, anything, to draw my attention and latch onto. I found it soon enough in the green music notes on his arms, big and eye-catching (the former, not the latter), and that was (is) enough for me. I like them. They make him more memorable, more interesting. I kept touching them when we were in bed, slowly rubbing each note as if they’d somehow rise from his skin to turn a small tune. He probably noticed.