Pieces of the people we love

By GIAN LAO

To the girl I haven’t met yet: I love that summer dress flowing down your body like a waterfall in the sun. And when you curse in the morning before the coffee’s done brewing. The way you wear a hat in the store as if it were your own. I can only love women who look stunning in hats. I love your smile. How if your city held a pageant for its top five smiles, you’d be up there on stage, answering a question on how the world can come closer to not hating itself. To hell with “killer” smiles; I’ve always wondered why men don’t fall for smiles that can end wars. I can only love a woman who can launch a thousand ships back to their dark, stormy harbors. I love the way you photograph. If there is an afterlife, I’d like to spend it stranded in a photograph of yours, waiting in a coast, counting the barely visible stars. I can only love girls who spend eternity making the world stop, and thus, only girls who are eternal. I love that thing you do with your nose and keep wondering how you breathe when you do it. I wonder, too, how you calm yourself when you sleep, and how you are most beautiful in the mornings. I love that story you sent me and how it reminded me of the bananafish, and I love how you love the bananafish. I love that song on repeat in your room, somewhere behind the hundred doors of my body. The one that has no words, that makes me feel like I’m on a train headed for another train, and another. But most of all I love that song you keep whistling while your back’s turned, your hair tied in a bun, as you’re dealing with the latest morning of your life, frying eggs.

By ANONY-MESS

In this hurtle through space, there are many ways for paths to cross. Some are flashes in the night, some shift as they brush, some collide. For heavenly bodies, we all seem to move in such dark space. I have seen my share of near-misses, with various kinds of us.

I liken you to a comet. When you passed, some whispered of the end of the world, but all I thought of was how blinding it was to be so close to something so beautiful. Science says you’re made of less mystical stuff — ice and rock. I only found out after, but how fitting.

Did you know that everything starts with gas and dust, and they collect and collect, accrete into planets, ignite into stars, collapse into black holes. Everything comes into being. Everything finds its place. And then there is you, a loose, solitary fragment that follows me.

There are laws in this universe that people have named, and despite us being other things, you and I know that unnamed forces can also govern us. Momentum -— something almost like fear — propels me forward. And gravity — something I know is longing — keeps you close.

It’s in the nature of orbits that you return again and again. I wonder how something like the immensity of you could decide to encircle me. On quieter nights I wonder if I just caught a piece of you, a fragment from a previous collision of yours. Maybe the real you is an entire planet, inhabited and somewhere else. Maybe other things encircle you, the way this piece of you encircles me.

One day, maybe when new people live here, when the last person who saw you has died, and the world has been completely replaced, you will herald absolutely nothing else but the passage of time. Not even science. Just time. As I wait, there are places to go, and flashes at night, and close calls, and this piece of you follows.

By SASHA MARTINEZ

Here, his arrhythmic heart. Here, the quiet of his voice. Here, the line of his body a shrug. When his lips purse, it means that his mouth is signaling that his mind has come to a conclusion a beat before the rest of his body concedes. This, here, is that gentle disturbance fleeting around his lips right before he says, “You feel so good like this” — not a moment after you’ve allowed yourself to finish the months-long lean toward him and you can finally press your body against his, not a moment before his own body sighs into yours.

You have always been a studious girl, and you are never as proud of it as when you are committing him to the page, committing the you-when-you-are-with-him, committing the you-and-him. Page 82: My hand is only occupied when it is holding yours, he says. Page 27: He runs his fingers across one of your bared palms, gently, as though asking permission, and you keep your hand spread to say Yes, please, yes, and he slides his hand against yours, and there you both are with your hands clasped. The index: Two apartments, 17 restaurants, one stairwell, one car, one hotel, some 53 streets, innumerable train cabs, and, for three weeks, the tangle of wires between two continents. Here, the bewilderments of your beautiful boy. Here, your astonished self.

Page 2: He says your name, and your name is so very beautiful when he says it. And he says your name, and you will not look at him because your heart is growing so vast it is robbing you of breath, and he says your name and then he leans in and kisses your temple. And then he kisses your cheek, and then he kisses again your cheek. And then he pauses, and then he sighs, and then he kisses you at the very corner of your mouth. And as you turn your head you already know this to be the bravest gesture you could ever commit against yourself: Here it is, right into this first true kiss, the force of everything you are rising up to the surface of you.

There are two books in your shelves titled How to Be Alone, and you keep them as proof that you once thought yourself to be the kind of person that requires an education in solitude.

By PETRA MAGNO

I was about to confess. “You know,” I said to him, tottering across his room with my handle of vodka, “you were really only meant to be a one-night stand.” My boyfriend didn’t look hurt, just surprised. “Really?” he said, maybe amused. “Yeah,” I said, not following up with my secret fear: the sneaking suspicion that I fall in love (not with my heart but) because of the hollow between my legs. 

I’ve forsaken promises of forever; just rip me from dull consciousness for a few pure seconds with an orgasm or five. Do what I tell you to do, especially if it scares you. “Spit on me,” I whispered once while in bed to a then-boyfriend, and his expression of bemused fear was such a turn-off he might as well have sexted my sister in front of me. This new guy, on the other hand, reacted to my request — offered much more tentatively now that it had previously been rejected — with the one proper response: he spat on me. My heart, or whatever it is that fills my body with light, sat up and took notice.

People have different rules for treading the fine line between hooking up and catching feelings: “Get them off thrice and then get out of there,” cautioned a friend. Do three nights of sex count as only one sexual encounter if you haven’t left the apartment at all? “One week maximum,” said another well-meaning buddy, “and don’t add them on Facebook.”

It was too late for my boyfriend and I. We had been sexing each other up for approximately two months and counting. We even did Normal Couple Stuff such as going to shows and having dinner at nice places and complaining about work. I may or may not have posted a photo of a cute animal on his Facebook wall. We’re mindblowing in bed, and it’s confusing to realize we’re great out in public as well. I wave cordially to his roommates as I leave his apartment for work on Monday mornings. He holds my hand while we’re on the train. I am constantly pinching myself to check that I’m not just in a sex dream that begins like porn: all the basic hanging out before the boning begins. For once I don’t want to skip ahead to the sex scenes; I’m enjoying the newness of a one-night stand that looks like it’s made to last a little longer. 

Art by Jel Suarez