Coexistence, p.3
Coexistence, page 3
After something else fixes the group’s attention, Will leans over and kisses me on the lips, longer than I expect given the relatives around us. I’m anxious at first, then I surrender to the gesture, relaxing, for the first time, into the publicness of our queer Cree joy.
On the drive back to the city, I think about how in the years since coming out I mistook lust for something grander. Before Will, men treated me like a museum artifact to pick up, then put back down or walk away from. I’d been as engrossing as humidity and hadn’t noticed. Now I didn’t want to long and ache for nothing. Something inside me, it seems, is opening like a door, and maybe Will is already wherever that door leads to. That’s what love is—someone else’s spirit moving through you. When someone moves through you they leave behind a small trace of human life. It’s how we know we’re still alive.
“Tell me about your mom,” I say as we round a bend and the city comes into view like a sudden moon.
“She believes in kindness and the afterlife, in redemption,” Will says.
“Is she spiritual?”
“I think it has more to do with her upbringing, how much loss she went through. She lost her dad at a young age, and then my dad died when I was young.”
I rest my hand on his thigh. Somehow it hadn’t come up before.
“He was attacked in the city one summer, while running an errand. My mom pleaded to the cops that it was racially motivated but they didn’t listen to her. They said it was because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Fuck.”
“We’re still being hunted,” he says. It’s a remark we both have trouble doing anything with. It’s too honest. Being Indigenous in the twenty-first century means that a single hour can be governed simultaneously by joy and sadness. If sadness could fill up a truck we’d be drowning right now, but that’s only part of the story. We still believe in the future, so we keep surviving to live in it.
“What was he like—your dad?”
“Sweet, super loving, not a toxic bone in him. He taught me so much simply by being gentle to others,” Will says. “My mom talks to him every night. I do sometimes too. I’ve drawn him dozens of times. I suppose that’s my particular spiritual practice. I really do believe that to draw someone is to reach out to them.”
Then it’s November, a time for self-reflection.
It takes all my restraint not to fixate on an eventual uncoupling, even though Will’s desire for me hasn’t waned. I scan his Twitter and Instagram profiles for some hidden truth, but all I learn is that he too is a person in the world. It’s so easy to invent the conditions of one’s demise, just like a forest does when winter encroaches. I love the trees, but I decide I don’t want to be like them. Why does anyone stay with anyone else? Routine, fate, senselessness, true love. These seem like the only options.
After a long day of class and studio work, Will comes over, and I wilt a little when he pulls me into his chest.
“What’s wrong?” Will asks.
“Maybe it’s because I’m broke as fuck and have tons of looming deadlines, but my mind’s been racing today. I can’t sit still or concentrate on anything,” I say.
“Same, I’m going to have to hustle to be ready for the thesis exhibit. I thought about pulling an all-nighter at the studio tonight, to be honest. I wanted to be with you, though,” he says. “Now, when I picture my day I picture you in it.”
I want to sob, but I don’t want to add to my air of psychic instability. Instead I say, “That’s literally the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
After midnight, we decide to have a bath. My tub is shallow and narrow, but we manage to fit both our bodies in it. Candles flicker on flat surfaces around us, throwing small shadows everywhere. Two mostly empty shampoo bottles teeter in a corner. We don’t need to say anything; we are tired and in love. I want to spend the whole night this way, but that would be impractical, as so much about love is. To be in a bathtub with another man feels like more than I deserve. I feel satisfied with the scale of my living, the small contours of my existence.
Will’s thesis exhibit falls on a cold December day. I haven’t seen him much over the last few days, as he’s been working nonstop. I managed to hold off some of my separation anxiety, concentrating on coursework, but by the day of his show my solitude feels rotten. I promised I would meet him at the gallery before the doors opened. Before leaving, I douche, not because I know we’ll have sex later tonight but just in case the opportunity arises. Doing so makes me horny, so I finger myself quickly in front of the bathroom mirror. After I ejaculate I feel calmer, less burdened by existential ailments.
When I approach the gallery, I hear the buzz of conversation behind the doors. Will has to let me in, and I can feel people looking at me and then just as quickly looking away. I’m wearing a jean jacket with a pin that says “LAND BACK” on it and a patch that says “GAY 4 PAY JK ABOLISH WORK.”
I scan the room for the four other BFA students featured tonight. Jules is a fabric artist who builds yarn sculptures of women stepping on men. She’s in the corner with Simon, a performance artist who I hear may or may not strip naked later. Something about the tyranny of subjectivity, which is exactly what a straight undergrad would make art about. Roger, another queer, has hung up a neon sign that says LIVED EXPERIENCE—it’s quite clever. Sue, the coolest person in the room, stands at the bar with a seltzer in their hand, eyeing the portraits they’ve installed on a movable wall. The portraits depict them as a child, appearing ungendered.
Will leads me by the hand to his paintings, a series called REZ KIDS that portrays various absurdist scenes from his reserve. One shows a cop car melting into the ground while kids run around it, laughing. Another depicts dozens of kids walking out of a lake rather than into it. I recognize the lake from my time up there, but shoes are strewn about the rocky shore in Will’s painting. The facial expressions are grievous, as though some horror has just unfolded. I had no idea he was working on these paintings, each so haunting and elegantly crafted that I’m truly in awe.
“Will, my god, these are stunning,” I say.
“You sure? I literally only finished them this afternoon. I can’t be objective at this point.”
“Trust me, the depth of thought and emotion is so present. People will love them.”
As I’m speaking, a stream of people enters the gallery, and Will is shepherded away by one of his professors. He winks and says something, but the crowd is already boisterous enough to drown him out. I recognize the faces of several acquaintances, former classmates, but no one I’m close enough with to want to drum up conversation.
People drink beer and look at the art. I look at people looking at the art. Everyone is very serious about it. Will comes in and out of my field of vision. The spectacle of his importance here opens up a new kind of distance between us. For a moment I feel thinly mournful, as though I have less of a claim over him.
Someone I don’t know asks if I’m related to Will and I sigh. As far as I can tell, we’re the only natives in the room. It makes me feel like an object of curiosity, an art piece in my own right.
The attendees are then called to order. A man’s voice booms forth from behind me, in the center of the gallery. The man looks familiar, but I can’t place him.
“Welcome, everyone!” he says. “It’s our pleasure to host the university’s graduating class’s annual thesis exhibition. This year it’s called Asymmetries, an examination of how we’re sometimes at odds with the world. I’d like to begin by acknowledging we’re on the traditional territories of many Indigenous nations who have stewarded the land for centuries, and we thank them.”
I glance over at Will and roll my eyes. He smirks.
“My name’s Grant, and I’m the executive director here,” he continues.
Recognition floods me. The hair, the glasses, but most obviously the name. My knees almost give out, as though I’d just been delivered terrible news. In a way, I have. Will looks at me and raises an eyebrow. I smile, shake my head to indicate there’s nothing to worry about. I repeat this in my head, nothing, nothing, nothing.
“Tonight, we’re showing the works of five emerging artists. Sue, Simon, Roger, Jules, Will, please join me for a moment, will you?”
The group surrounds him. Grant puts an arm around Will’s shoulders, which Will wears ambivalently. Each student-artist shares what they hope people will take from their work, most of which I can’t grasp. Then Grant permits the attendees to chatter once more, and Will and the others disperse to their de facto stations. They are nervous, but mostly they are proud.
I need to collect myself, to catch my breath, to get some air, but I don’t want Will to see me step outside. I can recover and pretend nothing’s wrong. I just need a second. The evening can still be spared. Will doesn’t have to know anything. Maybe we’ll laugh about it one day.
I walk toward the back entrance, which is where I find Grant’s office. The door is open, and I peer in out of self-degrading curiosity. It’s tidy, with beautiful paintings on the walls. To Grant I was something akin to a beautiful painting. So often beauty precedes an act of subjugation. When Grant reached for me in his car, he ruined me a little. The thought solidifies inside me like a weather system.
I step outside. When the door closes behind me I realize I don’t want to go back in. The cold air smacks me and my chest tightens. It’s all too much. I don’t know what to do or where to go, so I stand in the semi-dark, eyes closed. Everything I am is cold.
I’m in bed with my laptop on my chest. I should be in history class, but instead I’m working on a term paper on forgiveness. It’s about how the government uses phrases like “sad chapter” to describe the colonial past, as though we could put it behind us like a page in a book. Most books I read stay with me, linger in my mind, changing the architecture of my thoughts. Colonial governance is a problem of interpretation, then, I intend to argue. The past is read so as to be annihilated. That is my thesis statement. For whom is violence sad, and for whom is it a brutal inheritance? I write.
I decided to miss class, the last one of the term, because I haven’t talked to Will since the exhibition two days ago. Two days isn’t very long, but for us, two young men for whom love is proof of how alive we are or aren’t, it’s forty-eight hours of questions, anxiety. After I arrived home that night, I sent Will a text saying I fell suddenly ill and didn’t want to risk getting him sick as well. He wrote back immediately with concern, offers to deliver medication, fluids. I told him I’d see him soon enough, and he responded with a string of heart emojis.
I want to be a normal man with a normal desire to be devoted to another man. Sometimes all my being, my personhood, rails against this desire, its innocence. I feel like a man for whom innocence is a mythos from some other land. The sight of Grant at the gallery, his large arm around Will, disturbed me; it knocked my material reality askew. I realized my sexual experiences with men like Grant, men I contorted myself for, stemmed from an original wound—the wound of self-estrangement. I don’t want to turn Will into a catastrophe by proximity. He checks in on me, brief texts of care, but I can’t bring myself to respond.
Still, I think about how every time I kiss Will it feels as though I’m saying, “I’m here.” Here in an abstract sense as well as a physical one, an exercise in devotion, in shared presence. Here, not over there, not elsewhere. Without Will, I feel less pinned to the world. That’s one way to define loneliness. But I don’t want to be the kind of person who’s always finding new ways to define loneliness.
What if he’s an antidote to my loneliness, which seems so all-encompassing? How do I alter my inner world to make that possibility feel more real?
The Indigenous relationships in my family and on my rez, relationships that span decades, are full of both turbulence and happiness, sometimes in equal measure. When faced with trouble, the possibility of repair is implicit. My friends and I joke that Indigenous love is the most chaotic force in the world. We have to desire one another in opposition to the way the white gaze makes us into objects of disdain. It’s possible to injure oneself by inadequately loving someone else. I don’t want this to be my fate. I want to be ready to love and not self-explode.
We’ve been dating for just under four months. No time at all, really. But I’m in my early twenties, and in every day is a chance to bring my future into clearer focus. I decide to head to campus, where I feel less unhinged. I get dressed.
The train station is a short walk from my apartment. I’m glad to be out of the cold and standing on the heated underground platform. When the southbound train arrives, all the cars are already full. I squeeze into one and grab on to a pole, trying not to think of its germy excess. The train jolts to a stop as it reaches the middle of the bridge that connects downtown, where I live, to the south side of the city, where the university is located. It stops at this specific point often, to allow for adjustments to be made by other trains. From here, I can see the ice’s westward sprawl spanning miles. I think about an elder who told me that the river is still the most efficient way to traverse the city, even after all the geographical violence of colonialism. To traverse the water would connect me to my ancestors, but instead I’m on a train, suspended above it, suspended in a kind of disembodied space with people who won’t look at each other.
It occurs to me that one also has to love despite the geographical violence of colonialism. I want to love in a way that has geographical consequences. Can love undermine a settler state? It’s likely that my happiness depends on it.
At the university, I wander through various pedways until I decide to study in the English department. As soon as I enter the building, I see Will seated at a cubicle, reading. I step back, but then stop. He looks so damn handsome, and he’s wearing my hoodie. The scene reminds me that I can feel human emotion and not succumb to it.
“Tom!” He calls out when he finally notices me. He runs over. We embrace.
“Are you feeling better? I missed you in History earlier,” he says, pulling back to look at me in my totality. My throat feels narrow.
“Hey, hey, what’s up?” Will adds.
“Can we talk outside?” I ask.
“Totally, let me grab my things.”
We huddle near a group of smokers, our breath visible, dancing on our shoulders like tiny ghosts. I decide I don’t have to divulge the whole truth of my minor breakdown, which had very little to do with him. I can spare him and in so doing spare myself.
“I’ve been a mess the last couple days. I’m doing better now. I’m happy to see you.”
I kiss him, and one of the smokers coughs. We laugh.
“I’m sorry I left the show so soon. Your work was transcendent.”
“Thank you.” At first his look is judicious, then it softens. “You don’t have to explain anything.”
His sympathy feels unearned, so I have to turn away from it. I look off toward a cluster of old houses.
“Want to go back to your place?”
I nod.
We walk quickly in the cold, but the sun is still bright, and it envelops us. It feels like a second chance. We walk along the bridge with the suicide barriers. Shortly after they were built, an artist installed sculptures of people traversing them. The work, its depiction of human determination and the failure of social policy, haunted me. I saw them still—those bodies, their ghostly shape—even though they had been taken down weeks ago.
It’s after midnight. Will snores softly. Two used condoms lie a few feet away, and I get up to throw them in the trash. It feels surprisingly sentimental. When I return I examine Will’s body, its idiom of beauty, which is perhaps now our shared idiom, something specific to us. I let the act of observation nourish me.
He stirs, opens his eyes.
“Are you watching me?”
“Possibly.”
He reaches for his phone, turns it on.
“Oh fuck,” he says.
“What?”
“Whoa.”
“Will!”
He continues looking at his phone. I notice his body tense up. His mouth hangs open, but I can’t tell if he’s actually breathing. I inventory all the types of tragedy that could befall him, and I feel ethically compromised for doing so. He scrolls through a document, zooming in and out. I wait for him to say something. I reach for a pair of underwear and slowly drag them up my legs as noiselessly as possible.
“I . . . I got into an MFA program.”
“That’s amazing!” I say, relieved it wasn’t something worse.
“It’s in Vancouver.”
“Oh.” I feel my body and mind settling into a familiar frenzied state again. It suddenly feels nonsensical to be almost-naked. I look down at my body and shudder. “Are you going to go?”
“I, uh, I’m not sure.”
Silence. I sit on the edge of the mattress, facing the wall, deciding whether to cry.
“If I went, would you come with me?” A pause. “Wait, you don’t have to answer right now. Think about it. I want you to come with me. You don’t have any other plans,” he adds playfully.
I ground myself in the room again, feel the current between our bodies, acknowledge its potency.
“Come here,” he says.
I nestle into him, under the blanket. The apartment is dark save for the glimmer of a few streetlights.
“Let’s fall asleep like this, OK?” He squeezes me, pulls me closer.
“OK,” I say, even though we’ll be sore in the morning.
As he begins snoring again, I realize I know with total certainty that I love him. How? I will change my life for him, I will go wherever he goes.
