Missed Connections

01
I remember you everywhere. You crying on the fifth floor terrace one sticky day during finals, me trying to comfort you. You sitting next to me, the electric awareness of your presence that made it impossible to focus. We laughed too much. Seeing you come in each day, wondering when you would. The bright lobby lights casting rectangles on the sidewalk where we stood, drunk outside the main doors well after dark, not wanting to say goodnight.

02
A Catalogue of Favorite Ex-Flings
[2004—2006] The water pipe in our unfinished basement; PVC
[2005—2019] The stair rail; cherry oak
[2006—2009] The rope suspending the tire swing; pro-manila polypropylene fiber
[2007—2020] The left arm of a Crate & Barrel chair; terra brown top-grain leather
[2008—2012] My BB&B panel bedframe; cherry oak veneer on MDF substrate
[2008—2010] The ogee edge of the kitchen countertop; black marble

03
I have a thing for operating rooms. Maybe it is the exclusivity, the fact that even if you are conscious, the memory will fade with drugs. Maybe it is because my mom is a doctor and definitely brought work home, asking me to remove her stitches or maintaining a general lack of boundaries around my bodily autonomy. Maybe it is because I watched too much Grey’s Anatomy as a teenager, skipping forward to the surgery scenes (and the sex scenes in my pubescent sexual awakening). Maybe it is my collection of vintage dental tools and Soviet kidney pans. I want to be operated on; I want to operate on the flesh myself. I want the bright lights, the oozing, squeezing, sewing, lacerating, puncturing, grafting, draining. Materially, I fetishize the tiles, the stainless steel, the heavy machinery, even the assurance of complete sanitation.

Seeking a medical student to sneak me into an OR, and use me as they please. Let’s play.

04
There I was, in my situationship’s apartment, trying to get some work done, a white-wall, white-light rented apartment. No reds, no yellows, no warmth, no joy. How does this man get anything done?

I ran to the nearest store and bought the cheapest coloured plastic bags money could buy, overriding my moral instinct not to buy plastic, for what I considered a white-light-crime, then covered every bulb in his apartment.

Turns out, my situationship, my headache, and a plastic bag were in a three-way negotiation. Safe to say, the plastic bag lasted the longest.

In retrospect, his depression may have been architectural. ;)