I Have Never Disappeared for Even a Single Instant
A lyric essay by David Gorin
after Alexis Almeida & Édouard Levé
I have never held a stranger’s hand. I have never fallen from a tree. I have never broken glass in an emergency. I have no tattoos, maybe their absence marks a fear of irreversible decisions. The only things I follow through on easily begin as jokes. When a letter from a friend arrives, I hoard it for a while. I have been mistaken for a different person. Sometimes I go looking for an object I am holding. I have never touched a soldier’s chest.
I find it hard to write until just after a long depression. I have never climbed a mountain by myself. In kindergarten, I brought home a large, elaborate Cray-Pas and watercolour portrait of a fish that my classmate had abandoned – a girl named Kate, to whom I’d never said a word – and presented this to my parents as if it were my work. It hung above our fireplace for the duration of my childhood.
When someone asks me why I love them I can’t answer. I suspect some people do things chiefly to tell a story later. I have heard a writer repeat a fact as if he’d known it all his life. I have forgotten all the details. I have taken a book from a shelf and talked with a friend through the hole it made. It’s easy to give my full attention to someone I barely know.
*
I have difficulty crying without music. I think of movie scenes without a score as honest. My body wakes me on its own when there is something I need to do in the morning, like today. I find two dozen baby spiders crawling on the ceiling. Small and clear, their bodies disappear against the paint, but their shadows flag them.
Have I ever waited with all my might? I am not a monster, cowboy, or paramedic. Once, I felt so lonely living with a partner that I became attached to someone who sat near me at the library, whom I once passed while jogging in a public park, whose Facebook profile I visited each day, a stranger with whom I had never shared a word.
I have seen my supervisor drop his pants when we were in his office and alone. In tighty-whities, he instructed me to wrap around his waist a thermo-active belt of cloth that was supposed to soothe his back pain. It didn’t do much harm, I liked having a story. I went to my first Take Back the Night rally at fourteen. The experience was heartrending – in part because of the third rail in the voices of the women telling stories, in part because the women who terrified and thrilled me seemed inside of something I could never fully know.
*
I don’t like how I look in photographs. My left eye wanders from the lens. I like when parties are large enough for intimacy bubbles. I like falling asleep with one arm raised above my head. I like chocolate but choose away from chocolate-flavored things. I’ve lost the desire to snoop in a lover’s private writings. I don’t want to live with someone’s momentary thinking burned into my mind forever.
A woman I loved gave a speech to her high school English class about being raped by a stranger. It happened near the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. She was thirteen. People left the room in tears. Later, we were in a basement watching Good Will Hunting. We started making out, then she was a little earthquake in my arms. It was like there had been someone in the room with us. Someone who could walk through my body as easily as if it were a door.
I have never felt riddled with alien fibers. I have never cut myself on purpose. Unable to locate a source of pain, I have used my imagination. I’m not a flag or bandage, a briefcase full of money or a haircut. I love movies where it’s just two people talking. I have twisted with jealousy over a lover’s ex and learned, years later, she had made him up. I remember she got nervous when she had to play piano in front of other people, and what he said and did to calm her down.
*
I crane my neck to look at large windows when I pass them on the street. I like being able to see inside of someone else’s building while also looking at myself, and that others can’t tell which of these you’re doing. I am embarrassed to be seen looking in a mirror.
I have never searched a person, never broken into anybody’s phone. I grow suspicious of writers who seem proud of sex they’ve had. Sometimes in the shower, or reading a book, or walking without purpose through the house, I become so enraged at an imaginary interlocutor that I become ashamed, and these two emotions cancel out neatly enough that I might appear to be just taking a shower or reading a book or staring off into space. When I am angry at an actual person, I grow quiet, cool.
Once, I was faithful because I was a coward and too proud; later, because I learned I could grow bored of anybody if I wasn’t careful. I have failed to answer a letter in which the typewriter punched a hole in all the periods; when I held the letter in the air, they glowed. I have never disappeared for even a single instant. When a train is passing on a sunny day, I feel the urge to wave.
*
Sometimes when my parents call, I feel suddenly angry and don’t answer. Something in me needs to make them wait. Sontag wrote the answer is to be the one to make the call. I wish I weren’t proud of having female heroes. I have wanted to be innocent. I think it was the reason for an ambient numbness I used to blame on post-modernity. It’s like keeping a bed made for shame in the basement. My friend said of his mother, ‘she’s taking all the blame, and thereby all the credit’. The child I almost had turns ten this year. And then I think the bed of shame is always an unmade bed.
I have never seen love between equals, and only rarely a love that makes equals. When giving or receiving gifts, I look away. It seems perverse that people with a lot of money can put it in a house and take it out again, whereas for others the house is a river. I have been lost for hours at a time imagining my future. It wasn’t that I thought I would become a star, it was that I could, that it was still a possibility. The possibility gave me a line of credit I could spend on anything.
I remember little of what happened in my childhood home. There was an emotional anaesthetic in the air that neutralised whatever part of me was capable of a memoir. I fled into a book or screen. I walked around a kitchen table, fantasying. In my imaginary life, all the characters I’d ever loved in books and films and video games appeared. We travelled the imaginary world in a giant wireless computer mouse, with windows where the buttons were. In the schoolyard, I spun around as fast as possible and fell down on the grass. Trees ran their fingers over me.
*
My hands have never tied a bowline. My eyes have never been the same. I have not been or thought of going blonde. I have never sailed across an ocean. I don’t know the difference it would have made. When asked for a ‘personal statement’, I have described in detail who I could have been if my grandfather, a navy man, had lived to see me turn thirteen.
A person I lived with for four years told me she looked forward to when I would go away so she could drink all day in private. I have had coffee with a Hasidic man who said he used to fantasise about being thrown in jail so he could play video games all day until he died. I have spoken over the phone to a man in South Dakota who had missed two weeks of work – at a call centre for technical support – because he was at home playing Call of Duty. We checked in every Tuesday for a while.
I have watched a woman demonstrate a nail buffer at a kiosk in her bedroom. I have watched a bald Australian run his fingers back and forth along a microfibre coat hanger. I take pleasure in watching a tailor take the measure of a man. I give my full attention to a person demonstrating how to buckle a seatbelt, find a path to emergency exits, attach a mask to an imaginary child.
*
I have stood in the snow outside a neo-Gothic school. My friend was beside me, the air ribbed with cold steam. I leapt into the air and found I could keep going upwards if I mashed the A button on a game controller in my mind. We drifted a little as we fell back down to earth.
I have walked with a friend to the top of a mountain. I have thrown flowers into an imaginary ocean. I have passed through the doorway of a broken branch. I have lain down on the grass, closed my eyes, and realized I was underwater. I was quiet for a long time, and stepped on my sunglasses when I got up.
I have pretended to like coffee. I have truly liked it. I have pressed my legs into the crevices of the radiator beneath a window in a dining room, watching a half-dozen boys play football in a field of snow across the street. I have touched a penis that felt like an eraser on a pencil. Once, near his parents’ second home, I made a friend I haven’t seen in twenty years kick a pack of Parliaments into the sea.
*
Some of my love for great men and women came from my hope that I too might become one. And later, when it occurred to me that I was likely to remain among the unremarkable – I wish I could say my love was purified. When Audre Lorde says that we (meaning women) have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, I am filled with envy. Once, I thought the envy was for those whose cravings, once released, can be trusted to be good, but no one is like that. The envy is for people who are free.
I arrange my books so that their spines are flush with one another. I feel relieved when a friend is slightly late for our engagement. I am wearing a T-shirt I was wearing twenty years ago. I smile at all grand gestures I’ve ever managed, though now so many seem self-interested and even desperate. These days I prefer the smaller gestures, the ones that don’t make for good stories, that disappear like a well-cooked meal.
I hate ‘dances’ but love dancing, especially at house parties and gay bars. I feel safer dancing at gay bars and on gay nights. I feel freer to try on versions of myself, which is what dancing is for me: you cycle through versions of yourself so fast the body strobes. People are often surprised to see me dance, surprised I have it in me; I guess I come off as too cerebral or uptight. But it makes sense a person living in an uptight space should have it in him.
*
The people I have loved have cut themselves. They have starved themselves. They have been punched in the face so hard they needed surgery. They have had sex with people they didn’t want, they have been asked where they were really from. They hid their drinking from me, they broke into my phone while I was in the shower, they have been terrorised by parts of me they could not see, my desire for intimacy with other people, my failure to be present, my distances. They fantasised about other people when they were with me, cheated on the people they were with before me, left a lover who was dying of a rare disease. They told me that they loved my mind. They married other people.
We drove for hours to an apartment of burgundy velvet and expensive cats, we stayed up all night in a hospital waiting room, we slept in a bed among the wires of machines that monitor the heart, we made out in the middle of a lake and when I got out of the water I had fishhooks hanging from my shin and foot, at a gas station two thousand miles from home we found a bird’s nest built under the hood, against the engine.
We ran around the spiral of a mountain, we saw our dissertation advisor smoking a cigarette on the steps of a liquor store, we went to couples therapy, we walked through a graveyard and talked about the pregnancy, we fought about who should pay the car insurance, we fought about the number of birds in a tree, we fought about the expression on my face, we fought about the time spent in the company of clouds, we fought around the rim of an empty pool, we went to a meeting in the basement of a church, we never got a cartridge for the soda water bottle, we never had a child, we didn’t paint the walls a different colour, we never read the instruction manual or moved to Nicaragua, we didn’t agree on what the cloud resembled, we fell asleep in our clothes with the lights on.
*
The supervisor who dropped his pants in front of me died last night. I have thought about him reading this, have wondered if he would resent me for speaking of the incident at all, or if he would be pleased that I had shielded him with anonymity. I still desire to please him. His hand always stayed a little too long on my shoulder.
This afternoon, I met with a student to talk about her writer’s block. I asked whether she had any obsessions. She shook her head, embarrassed. I asked what she was afraid of, but she couldn’t say. I suggested that she write a series of sentences in a notebook that begin ‘If I’m being honest: .’ When she saw that sentence written on the page, she had to fight back tears, the blank was overflowing. I remember those DOS computers from the 90s where if you put the right command into the prompt the screen would scroll with code as fast as rain on a windshield.
DAVID GORIN is the author of To a Distant Country, selected by Jennifer Chang for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship and forthcoming in 2025. In recent years, he has taught poetry and literature at the Pratt Institute, Eastern Correctional Facility (via the Bard Prison Initiative), and Yale University.
An excerpt of this lyric essay was first published in the winter 2023 print issue (no. 96) of Oxford Poetry. Another excerpt previously appeared in Gulf Coast. Artwork (top) in the public domain: “Moonlight, Strandgade 30” by Vilhelm Hammershøi, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
