I woke up in the stale air of an apartment sans AC. In the kitchen somewhere, Maggie was mixing the solution in a Tupperware bowl interchangeably used for cereal, keys, and hair bleach. In the place we shared our sophomore year, cold rays of morning light streamed from the only windows soldiering through the frosty January air. I stumble into the living room, because, without my glasses, the world reduces itself to exclusively shapes and colors. I knew Jon by his shape and by his color, by the smell of his warm skin and the grooves in his fingers and the feeling of his breath on my neck.
Stop, I thought, he’s the one who got you into this mess.
Suddenly Jon was in my life again, brought back this time by what must have been the scent of desperation; touch-starved boy. This time, it was Jon, pixelated and in technicolor and naked in the reflection of a dirty mirror, frozen in place by the flash of his phone camera. I might’ve seen a foot, his boyfriend’s, bare and in the corner of the mirror, if I had looked close enough. He didn’t bother with the small talk this time; he hadn’t bothered since the moment he knew he had me.
But I was the kind of person who didn’t look closely, not even when he knew he should, the kind who was often swept away in the urgency of Jon’s erection, high off another man’s desire.
Before that, I woke up in his bed—their bed—and the evidence of our tryst was already fading, splotches of red and purple under gooseflesh, stains on the sheets that I knew John’s boyfriend would clean. That’s when I got caught.
Before that, he called me from his dorm room, the one he shares with his boyfriend, where the beds are pushed together and the closets are interchangeable, where he moaned and panted and grunted into the phone as I described the way in which I would extract an orgasm from him, given the chance, if he ended things with he-knows-who.
Before that, he sent me a message, one line: I miss you. Then: He’s out of town.
Before that, we became “friends,” but only on the app that his boyfriend doesn’t monitor, and it’s then I should’ve known, and maybe I did know, that I was making a mistake, but how could I not pick the forbidden fruit that hung so low and appeared so ripe? It had been four years since the Branson hotel room and my still-blooming sexuality, since the first time Jon and I collided, since I turned him away and into someone else’s arms.
Before that, I ran into him—literally—in the cafeteria, flocked by his boyfriend and other jazz majors, their brass knobs and horns still slick with spit. It was physical, like it always is with him, two bodies colliding for a third time, this time with an audience, this time not naked, this time with his boyfriend and that looming title.
Enter Maggie, who knew I was gay even when I swore to our Freshman choir class that I liked her, like-liked her, and despite that lie she became my best friend anyways. I have fallen in love with a woman twice, and both times it was Maggie: once in high school because she was my only friend, and again in the first months of college because she was the only friend worth keeping. We were bound together by painful homecoming dances, by nights spent retching boxed red wine into the toilet of our first shared apartment, by joints rolled tight enough to make us forget our personal traumas. She knew Jon, and his boyfriend; in high school, they shared the same circle of friends (choir girls). Maggie was my moral compass, an unwavering force of nature, the girl who made me promise if I texted him again, there would be consequences.
“Are you ready?” she said, the bleach now sufficiently mixed, nothing left to stall us.
Sitting in the wooden kitchen chair that makes my ass stiff, I let my anxious hands fiddle with my phone, opening and closing the same four apps in an empty attempt to occupy my mind. Maggie places a hand on my shoulder, and I began a silent goodbye to the tangles of dark hair on my head, and then to him.
Bleach oxidizes all of the molecules in your hair, each midnight-black follicle scrubbed down, wiped clean, made good again. It burns the scalp, chemically, a particular sort of burn that is scarier than others, maybe because you did it to yourself—this is what you wanted, isn’t it? To change yourself irreparably, to finally change. I didn’t want Jon. I didn’t crave whatever cold comfort he might supply; even if we were together, really together, biblically, I would only be satisfied that he wasn’t with anyone else. It was envy, not desire. Deeply rooted within me was a strange and hungry compulsion to want what Jon and his boyfriend had, and to ruin it if I could not have it.
Maggie combed the poison through my hair carefully, meticulously, and I thought of those little ducklings in the dish soap commercials, drenched in blue, being scrubbed down by pretty volunteers in white shirts after one oil leak or another had left them dripping in pitch. After the spill, a thick, onyx-black muck had clung to their feathers, nearly killing them; the same black dread hung on me, a desire to have what others have in the elemental-sense—what Jon’s boyfriend believed he had. I never wanted to be blond, but the raven-haired boy in the mirror was one who still wore Crocs, still felt butterflies, still pined after Jon’s body and his boyfriend’s broken heart; I was irrefutably no longer him, I couldn’t be.
Finally, a tingle in my scalp came, a burn, the bleach setting in, and I thought:
Good, burn him away. He is not the person I want to be.
Harrison Geosits is a peddler of creative nonfiction, and an all-around decent guy. His work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine,Wildness, and The North Texas Review, and is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review. He is the editorial assistant for the American Literary Review, and prefers wine from a box. You can follow him on Twitter at @HGeosits.
