Ponyboy

by Eliot Duncan

I move freer in their company, in the comfort and simultaneous ache of knowing someone so well for so long. More and more, they show me I could exist, that I could live. They allow the light of me to come forth, giving grace to even the shame of me. My truth able to arise, unmuffled and frank. It’s not your shame, they’d say, it doesn’t belong to you. Never has.

There’s no space for me. I drink fast, fast and then faster. I want to melt all over the room. I want to not be a body anymore. I want to slick warm and affectionately away from the self I was taught to be, sliding over their conversation and out the window, into mother evening.

What was I for Halloween? Yourself, Toni said with a laugh, and no one recognized you.

What can I do with all this desire except go forward with it in my palms?

Most of the time, the future felt like an obscure projection I was afraid to want because there wasn’t evidence of future me anywhere, in life or in fiction.

She’d always insist that she wasn’t straight, which left me shrugging: Neither am I. Which left her asking, Then what? Then everything, I’d think, then none and each. Then I’m a sky close to ocean, an ocean close to sky.

Where I could exist at full volume, where the fact of me wasn’t a disruption but an unquestioned, integrated fact of my being.

The whole of gender is this: subjects socialized to behave, to identify, to believe in an ontological separation based on anatomy. But look, like time, it doesn’t hold in all frames of reference. Gender is an ambition. It’s a human fallacy, really. To white knuckle one measurement, building two antithetical ways of being when there are multi-fold, simultaneous dimensions of being within gender, within time.

God is nothing but transcendence of body, maybe sex is an act of God.

When I was boy I knew what I would be. Just something big. Something where you stand tall and smile and think and run and sweat. But then the world got smaller. Details got bigger. Hems and eyelashes and shoes. What happened was they all said I was girl. I tried to believe them.

The hot photographer’s version of masculinity is likely an unexamined, compulsory affect. I fight for mine.

You drink like me, he whispers. Lighting a cigarette and lifting his head. How do you drink? Like my life depends on it, he says, laughing in one light exhale.

I was made enormous in unavoidable, terrifying love.

What an idiotic luxury, for the world to think of you as a person with things to say.

Too bad you’re charming, Mom says. People will always love you, no matter what you put them through.

Brandon, I’ve felt it too. The explosive rejection of the expanse you’ve been caged in. The Midwest. Unnamable sky. Oceans of corn, of soybeans. We liked the expanse, I know. We liked the quiet, wide roads. But we had to learn that there’s punishment here. There’s a tingling anxiety, the consequence of our chosen breath.