Thirty-eight.

As much as I do, my friends want to know what's wrong with me.

I'm standing outside my former apartment on the Lower East Side and I feel like a failure. Ten years have passed since I lived on Orchard Street, and what do I have to show for it? I could fault the economy, the politicians, the weather, anything—but I'm also a New Yorker, if almost fifteen years a New Yorker makes, and I know I have my fair share of blame to shoulder as well.

Often, and with reference to my breakup with Henry, my fourth boyfriend, my friends ask me why it has been so difficult for me to move on. In their estimation, I seem unwell. I seem to be dwelling upon the past, and my wounds this time around aren't healing as quickly as they did when I left my other relationships prior. This breakup, they say, maintains a lingering presence, a malignant tumor attached to my psyche. I know it's not their intention to do so, but I hate being treated like damaged goods. Fragile.

I'm not fucking fragile—I'm angry. I'm angry and sad and, worst of all, disappointed. Certain events took place and romantic interests mistreated me in specific ways, and the end result is that I feel vindicated by my disillusionment in people, but it's a hollow victory. There's no prize that I've won. I stand, with my accumulated angst in front of my former apartment complex, confronted by and confronting the person I used to be, left with nothing but my disappointment.

My friends worry about me. Some are even bored of my malaise. It's been years after the fact, and I've gone through at least two other breakups since the one in question, so why does this one have my attention? I've moved on from love before, so what's slowing me down this time? I've retreated back into myself, I'm not putting myself as out there as I did before. Plainly, I'm being anti-social.

There's a quote that circulates quite widely online attributed to Richard Siken, author of Crush, from his 2005 interview with James Hall. Richard said,

Things happen, one after another, world without end. Just because you're self-aware doesn't mean you can change what's happening. Eventually someone is going to break your heart. Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it—you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.

This interview was titled "The Poetry of Hostile Witness" and published by Gulf Coast for their Winter/Spring 2006 issue. The two writers were speaking shortly after the release of Crush, an electrifyingly direct collection of poetry that included works such as "Saying Your Names." It exemplified what Richard explained to be the problem of "limited and inflexible pronouns" when writing about a he and another he, years before the 2007 publication of André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name. The absolutism of named definition is "the desire to point to what's gone, temporarily or permanently," filtering away the "murkiness," as Richard describes. Crush hits with all the immediacy of Jim Grimsley's 1995 novel Dream Boy.

I don't know what true love is, and I don't know if I've ever experienced it. What I can say is that I've experienced the thrill of two people sublimating into mutual subsumption. When two stars collide, anything up to and including a black hole can be the result.

Michael Gray Bulla, another poet, once shared a poem titled "I THINK LOVE IS SOMETHING / THAT HAPPENS TO OTHER PEOPLE" from which the below is excerpted.

You know that love? That falling-to-your-knees love?
That where'd-the-water-go love? That
hold-me-close-I'll-never-leave-I-know-your-favorite-
coffee-creamer love? That what-we-talk-about-when-we-
talk-about-love love? You ever felt that? I mean,
really felt any of that? / Yeah, tell me again
how you feel it. Yeah, tell me again. / how it fills
the chest, fills the head, fills the
lungs. Tell me
again
what it means to find God in your sock drawers. Tell me
again.

Love-starved. I think I'm love-starved. My body misses, my mind misses, I miss the companionship that I thought I had. It is less about the actual person (Henry, in this case) than it is about the role in my life he fulfilled. I had grand plans for the two of us as we ventured out into the world, carving out a space for us with our combined gravities, and all of that collapsed in on itself when his presence suddenly became a void. I was liable to fall to the floor crying at any moment, as if narrated by Richard Siken himself, and even as I did it I knew I looked ridiculous to any observer and I cried harder still. As much as identity is relational, I was unavoidably shattered by this breakup more than any other because I had come to define myself by it. This was a period of my life when I had just begun to develop my answers to the questions of a lifetime—Who am I? Why am I?—and Henry's absence crashed my house of cards. I was forced to undergo an ego death, as another ex-boyfriend would term it, that I had wanted to avoid because I was comfortable.

Disappointment has its patterns. I stopped putting myself out there because I withdrew into myself. I no longer felt presentable to the world while I was busy spending time with my emotional self, to figure out how I've been feeling and why. I'd resolved long ago to never fall into the trap of not being self-aware, to avoid self-sabotaging for reasons that would be plainly evident if I invested in actually confronting my issues, but each breakup sent me back to the drawing board with newer and more complex puzzles to solve. Things happened to and scarred me, but I'm fine, I'm alive, it’s okay, I’m okay, and it no longer affects my executive functioning or daily life. However, it manifests whenever I'm let down because, simply put and speaking as a gay man, men fucking suck. It isn't that I haven't moved on—it's that I'm perennially disappointed, that I always have hope as a hopeless romantic that the next one won't cause me as much dismay, but instead he inevitably visits worse havoc upon me than any man before him. That is the source of my ennui.

I don't want to come across as unhinged. I don't think I am. I'm merely straightforwardly blunt about the events that occurred and how they've affected me and why I now react to certain things in particular ways, such as not being wanted in the way that I want, in the way that I want to be wanted. My largest piece of emotional baggage is that I never want to undergo the same level of trauma ever again. I try to be optimistic about the suitors that do make it past my pearly gates because I think that I can see their potential, but potential isn't current reality. My friends exhorted me to figure out my cyclical behavior, as if I haven't already been trying, and my answer is that I keep finding myself in this position with men who I wanted to need me when they really needed someone else: Henry needed a therapist, Jim needed an owner, and Beau needed someone who was ready and patient—and I wasn't, no matter how hard I tried to be.

The elephant in the room is that I'm the common denominator of all my failures, which begs the question: What could I be doing differently? Loss may be a fact of life, but I want to no longer feel so bereft. I think I have high standards to which I also do my very best to hold myself—nobody can fault me for being a hypocrite if I don't exhibit hypocrisy—but the love I allow myself to accept isn't the love I should accept. It is the material difference between the partner I need versus the one for whom I keep falling because it is easy.

I think I'm too much, I think I'm too intense. I don't think I'm too fragile.

I come in like a tempest.