Because - Soon Enough We’ll Die

He calls my name and, initially, I don’t hear him but I hear him the second time he says it. I’m sitting on the edge of the pool with my legs in the water listening to music and he sits beside me. He is adorable, like 7-week-old puppies when they roll around playfully on the floor “How was your day?”, he asks and I know he really cares about my answer So, I tell him. He makes me feel things I didn’t feel things and then I met him and he makes me feel things and I’m afraid I’ll miss an appropriate emotion or response because I don’t understand them (yet) he says he’ll work with me on that And I think I’m feeling love, but I don’t know what that means (exactly).

He reads (aloud) a poem of mine at our party with our friends it’s 8 of us and he smiles while he reads it though my words are sad he smiles because I make him happy and he tells me this I make him happy and I don’t exactly understand how my inadequacies fill the room like bad wallpaper and he doesn’t see them. He smiles at me from across the room and I think he must be magic a practitioner of the magical arts because I’ve been a sad boy for decades and I’m not sad right now and this is new to me and I don’t yet know how to process these new feelings.

The party ends and it’s just the two of us in the room and I become nervous his semi-muscular arms (because he occasionally goes to the gym and I absolutely do not), from behind, wrap around me and he’s not serpentine he’s trying to love me not kill me. He calls my name and I respond because it’s the most important thing I’ve done ever, in my life and his name escapes my lips (and I say his name lovingly as I understand love) and never have I meant something more.

Jimmy Broccoli, Atlanta, Georgia