The Boy's Nervy
He was at the point where he was going to kill himself. Everything leading up to his thesis but he hadn't done any of it. He went to the art school downtown. Across the building lay apartments without blinds. People often walked around naked and always Dean looked away. Rolls of film—Moses got them for him—he didn't use. He was supposed to use a 16mm camera for his thesis but that never materialized. Instead he did very peculiar things.
One was especially good, which was to take his little pen knife and pick at the flesh on his arm. Different shapes or amounts of trickling against skin he'd hardly loved until these days. The blood would patter different depending on where it hit the sink. It felt good. He felt nervy, his neurons afire—blaze ran up his spine everytime he went too deep. Pain was one thing but it was that blaze he liked. It was inches away from the type of burn that came when he came; Moses hadn't fucked him for months.
Moses didn't come here anymore. Dean lived in this apartment where floors below, homeless men pissed on the sidewalks and rendered it very difficult to discern between rain puddle or worse. He was either insulted by the men or hit on; speed made it hard for them to see he wasn't a woman. He didn't sleep very well either. The cars were never loud at night but his brain sang the songs of long ago, big band music playing in loops until his retina flashed into vision from how hard he squeezed his eyes. Depression was just another thing in a list of many; he knew the school would let him go one day.
The earth they built the apartment on was raw, he dreamt of the hyphae and how it reached into the soil. From his window he often saw the ships leave the dock—to get a job as a longshoreman was to win the lottery, they said. Sometimes he went downstairs and had a bagel from one of the fucked up gentrified coffee shops in Gastown. The taste crossed between stale and paste. One of the coffee shops was whitewashed inside, the floor had old planks that creaked too loud so he'd never ordered coffee and had gone home.
Few blocks away was Chinatown and East Hastings. The hot food section of T&T sold roasted duck; sometimes he took a container home and ate until the oil dripped off his fingers. The skin was particularly good. Other times he went and struggled to walk by anyone at all, hard to hear anyone at all. He heard them speak Cantonese and some Mandarin. He would think of his mother, then. Mandarin was her language.
He would stand in the bakery section until he couldn't remember anyone at all. The bread with its seaweed and pork floss; the flowery buns with slices of hot dog. Never any egg tarts because he wasn't sure how the worker would take his Mandarin. When he bought eggs he never bought a carton, always he'd buy a small tray of tea eggs. Self-checkout was the solution to never speaking up.
The community here didn't like him. He went to one or two gatherings then faded gently; into the social suicide of dating a cis man. This was up-and-down and only more bearable because he too was an artistic freak. Then came the issues of them being both Chinese, one who was more in touch with it than the other. Dean could speak Mandarin. He could read some, too. Moses could do neither. He did not know if he and Moses were together anymore.
He could count the things he loved on one hand. He saw an academic advisor once and a therapist twice. His mother had the same illness; only she'd gotten over it, he hadn't. He was raised to be like his mother, he was raised to live the expected life. He did not know anyone else who was treated like he would be. And either way, the school he went to with its downtown campus wasn't worth it anymore.
The Boy's Nervy by me
Head On by Cai Guo –Qiang