I want to tell you about the time I told him, about the time I bridged the silence between my father and me. I want to tell you about how that sandwich shop sang notes of baking sourdough, how the car ride there was tense as overworked, aching shoulders. I told him that I was in love with a man in March or April, the words contained in that sandwich shop. 

 

You see—

my father and I wear the same cologne, 

an act of closeness where there has always been distance 

and silence: cloudy quiet tinting childhoods. 

 

He always slept down the hall from me,

but I hardly knew him; 

my child eyes only knew the imaginary monsters

that crept in the master bedroom; 

I swear I could see them flash their shadows

in the little sun that 

night-lights dark rooms. 

I made him into a mummy,

wrapped him up with gauzy recollections, faded memories

of a son. 

Unraveled, I’d see myself:

small stature, sharp bones, coils for hair, blurry sight, 

and it’s in me that I find irascible jaws the shape 

of him. 

 

I try to print poems on his bandages

so he might feel the pain I write; 

he didn’t.

 

But he told me that he’s glad I’ve found someone to love, someone to love me. He had eerie ease as he filled his mouth with barbeque glazed brisket. I didn’t tell him about how we met, when we kissed, how we fell apart to reassemble each other. I didn’t tell him that he loves how I smell, loves that my neck and collarbones smell like drifting sea water, mint, rosemary. He likes that I smell sharp, clean, masculine. 

 

And what does masculine mean to a boy so small and weak? My father finds his masculinity in the gecko and dragon tattooed on his chest and back, the fullness of his golf swing, the growl of an engine. I find mine in the bedroom, tangled in white sheets. I fathom submission and dominance because it makes me someone else, places me far away. It’s like this: 

 

He lifts me with a green glare,

throws me on a queen-sized mattress 

rips the buttons on my shirt off with his teeth; 

He wants me to moan, wants me to slip 

out of my Levi’s 

so he can get a good look 

at me.

So I do

and he kisses me from navel to neck, 

lingers there on my heartbeat then 

swarms to my ear where he breathes heavily into my caverns—

a windswept night.

I get lost in the tan dunes of his torso, 

folding as I knead him

with palms, knees, lips. 

 

I like to hook my hands along his cheekbones and up behind his ears; 

his skull throbs

as he thinks a little too much about what I want, 

but his carnal jaw clenches. 

 

He is much larger than me, 

and his long legs almost reach the end of the bed; 

I am small and weightless: 

a white feather set atop a sculpture. 

 

I know myself best in these moments. I think I must begin to smell like him as we annihilate each other. And so the cool waters of my father’s cologne boil, evaporate from my skin and we are further apart than ever before. He drove me back to my dorm after the sandwich shop and I was thinking of when I told my mother about myself. When I told her, I avoided her gaze because I couldn’t predict what her face would look like. I bent my neck backward as far as it could go and focused on the popcorn ceiling of my childhood bedroom. I’ll love you no matter what she said even though she was crying; when I finally brought my eyes to hers, I knew she meant it despite the tears. I was out in the open, finally absolved from some kind of darkness that I had been wearing my whole life. 

 

In that car with my father, I still felt heavy. I wasn’t a son, I was still a stranger. And I wouldn’t be close like I desired ever. 

 

As I tell you this, my father sits in the other room, just back from the hospital after two surgeries to replace seven spinal vertebrae with metal. He wears a neck brace and his neck is sliced open like a halved apricot. The surgeons say that this condition is largely hereditary. It means there’s a chance I might have to undergo the same surgery in the future. And I resent the things I’ve inherited from him: arthritis crawling up the spine like hungry insects tiptoeing towards prey, the irascibility hissing like a threatened animal, the skinniness making knives out of my shoulders and knees. I sit next to him in his bed under low orange lights from the tiffany lamp on the other side of the room. What does he think of the surgery he asks me about my partner, surprisingly, and I answer he hopes I don’t get what you have. He nods, or rather bobs, his head slowly, glances towards me, says but you two are good? I’d love to come to your place and cook for you guys when I get better. 

 

I drive home that night and the streets look slick, not from rain but from the tears blurring my vision. It’s been two years since that sandwich shop and I still don’t know him like I want to. But I think he sees me as a man now, even if it’s not what he sees in the mirror. I know withering is so often hereditary, unexplainable, open to interpretation; so is the aching process of growing up. 

 

Today, 

my father wakes up 

wishing 

his body was a different place; 

I wake up 

knowing 

our pain is threaded together

in a burst of 

frustrated 

cobwebs—

a spider and his victim 

both close and distant. 

 

What you need to know is that,

just as I do every morning,

I spritz Cool Water cologne 

on my collar and clavicles,

just to hear a scream 

where there has always been silence—

I don’t quite smell the same,

but it’s close enough. 

That’s all you need to know.