We Are Fish
/ Flash /
It is Sunday and I linger near a table that seems close to finishing. Their red baskets of fried fish are nearly empty, their oil-stained napkins are piled high. It’s gray out. Evening. You fill my water.
We’re here to talk. It’s been six years and we talk about everything which means that sometimes we don’t talk about the thing and by the thing I mean sex. It didn’t used to be this way. When we first met, we were animal. We were barely twenty. We panted hard. We filmed ourselves.
Lately, I haven’t been sleeping. I’ve been sucked so far down a Heated Rivalry rabbit hole on Instagram that I seem to have developed a form of sexual insomnia. My body has always been good at announcing its limitations. Once I got so sad that half my hair fell out. I’m not sleeping like I used to and we’re not fucking like we used to but we’re here to talk like we used to, to talk like only we have ever talked, so curious, so hopeful. You have my favorite pair of hands.
The group before us finishes and we sit on the same side of their table, sharing a bench. Red baskets of fried fish leak oil. The sky is salted. Fog rises. The ocean sweats out its musk. You ask me to tell you what I want. I want shapes in the sky on Sundays. Eradicate my internal monologue, I tell you, and replace her with the barn swallow of my gut.
In my favorite Heated Rivalry reel, two beautiful boys dance. I pant. I’ve always loved to watch you dance. Sometimes I worry I want things so badly that I’ll never get to have them. But if want is a jinx, then having is a curse, and it’s always better to be yearning.
Last year you went on a fishing trip and brought home vacuum sealed packages of halibut. Now, every time we open our freezer, frozen fish falls out. My want, I think, is like that. Tight lipped then overflowing. Tonight, we eat fried fish out of red baskets four thousand miles from our freezer. It was your idea, this trip, this dinner, this time to talk about want.
It is Sunday and you place your perfect hands on my collarbones. I know you love me because you want me to want everything I want, even when it’s inconvenient. I pour out of our ice box. Our home is filled with fish. We swim upstream together, and sure we’re not fucking like we used to, and sometimes I masturbate on Tuesday afternoons to gay hockey players dancing on Instagram, and sometimes I can’t sleep from all the want caught up in my body, but you filled my water, you passed me a cup. It’s been six years, we’re edging thirty, and we are different animals. You ask me what I want. In that moment, on that ocean, what I want is to film you asking.
Weeks from now we’ll lay together, talking like only we have ever talked, curious, hopeful, made of hands. You’ll say you’ve been imagining futures. You’ll say we could live in Greece and swim in water the color of Gatorade. I’ll say, to me, you are the color of Gatorade. You’ll say, to me, you breathe under water. We’ll say, god, it is beautiful to love a dreamer. We’ll be fish. We’ll be barn swallows. You’ll say fly. I’ll say swim. We’ll say dance. We’ll pant and we’ll pant and we’ll pant.
