As a child, I was always into building things–backyard clubhouses that only a select few could enter, elaborate maze-like forts, and my room was almost always deeply hidden in the back. I’ve gotten good with these hands.
Some days I think it’s all in the blood; see, my grandfather repaired pianos for a living. He could not play them very well, but it was his job to make them sound pretty. I love a woman the same way he fixed pianos. Before the music, somewhere between silence and sound, my hands–a sonata of questions, her body–all the right answers, beautiful, then slow, then all of a sudden like moonlight. She says she loves the way I used these hands.
The times I’ve massaged her back as though her spine was the only prayer I’d ever need, when I’ve played in her hair and found freedom in her locks, when I’ve held her gently beneath her jawline and kissed her mouth as if her smile was a winning lottery ticket.
Listen. My father said, as he always did when I was a child, that he would come pick me up. I waited outside for hours, watched the sun go dim. I’m still not sure if I’m talking about the star in the sky or myself. I’ve never been able to trust anyone since. I love like a Brinx armored truck. I move around like people are only trying to get close enough to exploit my flaws. I push everyone out. I have close friends who have never seen the insides of my apartment, long-term girlfriends who my family members even know their names.
See, recently I was diagnosed with depression, and there are days when my heart feels like it’s swallowing itself, when the lonely feels like both the problem and the cure. No one has extra concern for the boy who seems like he has it all, so I smile big because I know how easy it distracts from the dark, and I just want someone to love me hardest when I least deserve it, because those are usually the moments that I need it most. And now, the love of my life just wants me to breathe, and honestly I wish it were that easy. But most days, the drowning feels too much like a cool drink of water, and who am I to ask her to drown just to keep us afloat? But honestly, who am I not to when our love feels so much like breathing. It is a crumbling church-house, still worthy of all the prayer.
Do you have any idea what it’s like to be absolutely in love with someone think will leave you? To wake up every day thinking this, this, this is the day she realizes she’s too good for me? So I pushed her out, too, and she finally left. She finally had enough and I don’t blame her; I would’ve left when I first saw the smoke, wouldn’t have waited for the entire house to burn to the ground. I don’t know how to let her go. I’m still just the eight-year-old boy on the porch,
just waiting.
- Javon Johnson, Building
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