do boys ever cry?

that's the worst part about anything. it always lingers

The boy on the floor of my bedroom is more a whirlpool than anything else. I asked him if he had the childhood he thought he wanted. I watch him skirt around the real answer. I keep thinking about how there’s something romantic in drunk calling. He says something sly about needing a drink to talk about it, and his words are slanted. I ask him how much he’s drank. I wouldn’t even know what to do if I had a second chance, he tells me. Would I really do things differently? Be a better person? There’s the light hum of the lightbulb.

I keep staring at the ceiling. I used to want to get my hands around his shoulder blades. I wanted to untie the knot and watch it come undone. I saw the lightning at his core and wanted to let the overflow pour a little into me if it meant he would be less of a fire burning through my floorboards.

He pushes first, then pulls, then says something about steady weight and needing to be somewhere at six a.m. There’s still all those things that can’t be explained. He looks like he has a broken rib, and like he only ever exists in action, and then he slips and tells me that he saw this happening differently in his head.

Whatever you’re going to touch before you leave, I say, don’t. And he listens. And then I never see him again.

The first time I saw hesitation in a boy, we were talking in between trembling margins. I splayed my fingers a little bit, made way for the gaps, and destroyed things too quickly. I extended my hand like a kid at a petting zoo and thought about all the discomfort. How can I be more assertive? More loving? Less naive? I try to dumb down the being and nothingness and magnitude of my own discomfort.

I look at boys sometimes and see paper-thin light somewhere between the slant of skin and bone. The ones I meet all come with bruises. They look like mine, but they’re more thinly distributed. They have this condition of suspension. They start a sentence but never finish it.

I keep asking about their selfhood. Eventually, though, the veil seems to crumble. They find out that they cannot hide it forever. I don’t know how to make them drop the weight, so I just keep asking them to join me at the table. Are you hurt? Are you broken? Yes and yes. The silence falls over the table again. I keep trying to coax for answers, but no one knows what they mean, so I suppose it's useless. But I see it – the hole in the middle of their chest. The signature of silence is like a birthmark.

The boy who used to take up the floor of my bedroom used to sprawl out on my bed. There would be the basic setting of a setting sun and we’d lock eyes and he’d turn a little less into a person the less the sun shined. When we would go to sleep, I would try to keep certain things to myself. Like how I notice he doesn’t know how to contain himself, or how he talks with a mouthful of regret. Or how sometimes, he seems to be twisting into a set of teeth, deeply dissatisfied, and a little more empty.

One night he tells me that when he was younger he used to be a deep sleeper, but now he can’t ever seem to close his eyes. Something about paranoia and the intersection between silence and savoring. If I said all the things I thought of, would I transform into an ill-tempered child blocking the produce aisle in a tantrum?

I don’t think you're having a tantrum, I tell him, but it seems like I only ever know how to say the wrong thing. He always looked away a little emptier and a bit more horrified.

I think we are all humiliated by love. I understand why some people can’t swallow it; why they hoard a name in their mouth for months.

A boy I knew got cheated on and he remained calm in the face of his own annihilation. The disconnect was unraveling. I was suddenly horrified. I struggled to find a way to look away from the constrained, ugly, mess of silence, but I couldn’t avoid it. He wore a false grin and one night I saw it break for the first time and it felt like a cord was cut somewhere. How did the music not stop? I was watching a horror movie play out, the scene right before the possession, and I felt like no one saw it but me.

There were all his feelings of confusion and destruction alike. Everything remained cramped inside, like there wasn’t enough room but he still tried to keep it locked away. He is nerves, muscle and gaining strength, and sometimes, he leaves his house forgetting to say goodbye. Some days, he thinks today might be the day he leaves and never comes back.

A few months later, I’m watching a movie about a dream you barely remember and he says something about feeling skinless and raw. I need to eat something. I’m hungry. So we go out to the pier and I watch him overwhelm himself with anxiety and I see the split before it happens. Shouldn’t we know by now that others can tell when we bury themselves? I lost my appetite.

He sang a song once about how love is happiness and how sometimes he thinks he’s good and loved. All my relationships were good mistakes. There’s still all that baggage that he only ever communicates through gaps and maybe if I read into them enough I might form a sentence.

Why don’t you ever say the other thing? I ask, and he’s confused. The thing about how you loved someone and failed at it. The room is not warm anymore. Something becomes frantic. We walk around street corners and I feel something bruise inside of my skin and he keeps asking me not to break his heart. That’s what people say before they do though, because they know they’ll probably be the one to do it first.

What do you do when you’re left all alone with your body and you can’t find your footing and you want to leave before it leaves you? He’s back on my floor, talking to the air. Why am I even here? I can’t pretend to understand what he won’t explain. My mouth is growing thick with questions, but he keeps on slinging the weight over his shoulders and only sparsely leaving remnants of a life that’s been lived.

His sister said that she knows when he’s drunk because he starts saying I love you and you almost feel like he means it. His eyes are wet and his clothes are ruined and he’s throwing up in the yard and he keeps talking about needing better reasons to fall in love. It can’t just be this infinite – this dark, this lonely. I’m on borrowed time. What if I tried again? What if I said sorry?

He pours me a cup of coffee one morning and gets serious. He says, when you know you should’ve apologized and you don’t, it lingers for your whole life. That’s the worst part about anything. It always lingers.

Do boys ever cry? I asked him on the third night he spent in my room.

He never answers, but maybe that is the answer.

I think they do, but you just can’t hear it. And sometimes, it’s so quiet, they can’t even hear it themselves.