october 16th 2024

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ansin after hours reminds me of visiting the audio annex during a shift. there’s a new trans girl working there—i caught a glimpse of her old boss training them on the reservation software last week as i veered past the window into the 7th floor bathroom, where i go sometimes after class to scare myself. editing suites are on the 8th floor so that’s where i am today, recalling how i brought her an emergency sweater (brown stripes with a little yellow stain) when she got cold but couldn’t leave the annex because her boss would see, and then i’d lean across the window ledge to hear her perform passages from harper and aldous’ story or summarize what she read in binkley’s class, but today i’m crouched over an LED keyboard in the pit center of a padded black box, looping sample footage for an assembly cut that was due last week, wary of a headache’s arrival. 

i think back to the beginning of sophomore year when she thought she might transfer, and she told me over dinner in a downstairs booth and i wouldn’t let her go until i talked her out of it. emerson is the only school she applied to. sunys offered in-state writing programs, city schools would’ve given her scholarships. she’d never been to boston before. a shot in the dark, a premonition, maybe. god likes to whisper in her sleep. what’s it like to leave this behind? connall from my hometown graduated from the acting bfa and now he’s in the touring cast of paw patrol live. i’m applying for positions like “independent film unpaid development intern” in a city certain to swallow me. she’s in her parents’ brownstone writing songs about blood and rain. 

i like east boston because i can see some of the stars. international flights depart from the airport runway behind my house and at night the walls shiver with their sound. she went to ireland in may and i never knew. empty is so loud: i want to go to spirit halloween by downtown crossing and comb the aisles cracking bits about the disguised fetish costumes, i want to buy plastic jewelry and a talking skeleton doll and window stickers for her suite, i want a halloween with her because we never had one, except sophomore year, when she practiced skull makeup and promised she’d be harrow (but she never finished the early chapters of gideon because it was dense and too slow). she loved me so much she would ruin our lives just to get me to look her in the eye, to feel the featherweight of my hand on the small of her back, when i allowed myself indulgence, when i conquered shame for a moment to embrace her, in a doorway, over a song, to bathe naked in her eyes. when she looked at me—and she was honest—time and space were undone like old fraying edges and for a moment i didn’t have to think at all. words are syrup in my mind: i know what love is because i learned it from you. i can’t cross the river.