Bruce june 15th
Bruce has been sleeping at my house for a month. He’s dark skinned and quiet and wakes up early, he paces around in silence complaining in total silence and never says anything but I can always sense he’s upset. I make two cups of coffee and leave one outside for him. I can smell him smoking, I hear him knocking a ball against the side of the house. I can hear him catch it between drags, banging it against the windows. I hear him open and close the bathroom door. He always runs the faucet when he takes a bath. I can hear the sink and the bathtub filling at the same time. I imagine it’s because he’s trying to hide the sounds he might make, so I can never be too sure of what he’s doing. Is he taking a shit? or just sitting on the floor. I don’t know, I don’t ask I’ve never seen what happens. He’s in there for two hours, at most and then all the water is off and the house is quiet again. I see his wet foot prints on the black floor. After his bath he orders escorts from tryst.link. They usually visit when I’m out. The last girl I ran into you while she was leaving was named Leila Ray. She was half asian, or latina or a mix of both. She tells me she used to model and lists the magazines she’s been in. I act impressed and say I hope she has a good day, I’ll never see her again. I only see the girls as they’re leaving. I don’t know where he fucks them. I lock my door, I close the studio. I have very little furniture apart from a small low blue couch. But the pillows are always exactly as I left them. I don’t know what they do when I’m out. I don’t know what Bruce is feeling, apart from the constant unease he carries with him from inside to outside, up and down the stairs from the porch to the lower level that separates the houses. He sits down there, most of the day in total silence for hours.
Bruce has an old face but he’s young because he sleeps three hours a night. I don’t know how to handle him, so I don’t engage him directly. I let him do whatever he needs to do, because this is what I promised his mother. Cynthia has been coming over a lot lately, and I’m lost in spending time with her. Bruce never looks at her directly, but Cynthia can’t stop staring at him. She asks me when he’s leaving, and I never have an answer. She asks if he’s an artist, I say I don’t know. Bruce and I have a lot in common. He can’t self regulate, he waits for the birds to sing or the light to be right, nothing ever goes his way because he doesn’t know what he wants from any particular moment. His eyes are full of unrest and complaint and he stares straight ahead into nothing. Cynthia likes this about him. She is always mentioning girlfriends she wants to introduce him to, that maybe that would make him happy. I say she should ask him, but she never does. Trying to talk to Bruce directly is like talking directly into the sun, you feel it but you get nothing back in words. Cynthia likes to measure voices and faces, looking for ways in or out. She overshares but only after she’s given it a very long thought - of what’s too much, and what she needs. I like to look at her, but I feel constantly restless. I am a lot like Bruce. Maybe this is why I promised his mom I’d look after him. She knew I was always confused from the inside of my life, and so was he. Maybe we’d find some way across together.
Early this morning I woke up, smelling his cigarettes burning from outside my bedroom window. I never close my bedroom windows, and I don’t own shades. The sun hits them by 6:30AM and I struggle through the thoughts I had before falling asleep, while processing the new ones coming in. I try to self regulate. I wash my face and admire it. I make the coffee. I stand there, in the same body I had the day before. Still knowing that every day I am losing more weight. I wonder if you can lose light in the same way, like body mass. I wonder if the lights in your eyes have weights on them and if there’s a way to keep track of this. I wonder if Cynthia notices. My stomach makes a noise telling me I’m hungry, but I ignore it. Grapefruits are falling out of the tree and rolling down the concrete space that separates the houses. They hit the little gate at the bottom and I hear them do this every morning. I get dressed to collect the fruit before it rots in the sun. Outside as I was gathering the fruit Bruce looked directly at me for a very long time. I stared back at him, but we didn’t say anything for a long time. He offered me a cigarette and I took it joining him on the ground to sit.
“Where’s Cynthia?” he asked.
“I don’t know” I said.
He didn’t say anything else, he lit a cigarette and leaned his back against the brown fence. We were both sitting on the ground on the concrete floor that separates the houses.
“What are you going to do today?” I ask him shifting the focus away from me.
Bruce kept looking straight ahead, but he answered.
“Do you think she loves you?”
“What’s the difference?” I reply.
“no difference,” Bruce says.
“There’s just the measure, and soft skin and her smile held together by that shit we’ll never really understand because we’re damaged guys.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I liked it.
It felt good to talk.