#3 – “The Male Heart” – April, 2024

I was in the 6th grade. She was in 7th. I had made my move. Now it was her turn.

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I was in the 6^th grade. She was in 7^th.

We were in the basement of her house in a rec room with 1970’s faux-wood panelling. We sat on a carpeted floor across from each other with our legs criss-cross under a glass coffee table.

We had only met that day. Our parents were friends of friends. I was visiting for a single afternoon. We would never see each other again.

She brought out a pack of leftover Valentine’s candy hearts, the ones that come in the small boxes with the dusty cellophane windows. She poured them onto the table like board game pieces. We turned them face up to reveal the red BE MINE messages engraved into the candy’s pastel chalk.

There was a flirty excitement in the room. She didn’t know anyone I knew, and I didn’t know anyone she knew. We never would. We didn’t go to the same schools. We were blank slates for each other. There was no burden of our histories on our futures.

Our parents conversed in a far-off upstairs world laughing at parent things. There were no siblings to show up unexpectedly. When we were quiet the parents couldn’t – wouldn’t, you might say – hear us. There were the two of us in a room filling up with a warm, invisible honey.

At first we joked and played with the Valentine candy messages in a general way, circling each other from a distance. The messages becoming a game. They represented the boy-girl things Other Boys and Other Girls said to each other. We played in the elementary school theater of Somebody Else.

I found a specific candy heart message, a timeless message. I flipped its message face down before she could read it. With the tip of my index finger I slid it towards her across the width of the glass coffee table. I moved it with the confidence required to slide an entire pile of roulette chips towards the dealer or glide an obscured bishop into position to take the opponent’s queen.

I had audacity for a 6^th grader, particularly with an older girl. I will go further. I flashed a spark of masculine bravery. I focused and made specific. I moved the two of us towards the excited longing hidden below the whispering and the laughter. I risked the let’s make this real thing, the boy thing.

I turned the knob on a door to the secret room that neither of us had ever seen, but anybody who overheard our laughter would know we both longed to enter. An accidental eavesdropper would have stopped at the top of the basement steps and smiled, embarrassed to find himself listening for more.

*

I had made my move. It was her turn.

She smiled because she knew immediately the candy message was something she wanted to read, needed to read. It had been put in play for her. It was rightfully hers.

Now if I had pulled the candy back, within moments she would have circled the table, laughed with delighted outrage, her mouth open, her eyes sparkling. She would have tried to wrestle the heart from my fingers, demanded that it be surrendered to her.

She would have pressed into me to get at it, tangling our bodies together over our battle of the hidden words, struggling together into the basement sofa, laughing loudly enough to stop a conversation in the living room, wrestling playfully to learn what it was that I had been about to ask — to give — to her. There are rules. If you start to say something, then you must say it.

Our flushed faces would have been right next to each other, our smooth arms pressed together, our eyes close enough to take in each other’s every blink, our breath warm. We would edge closer and closer to the precipice of…

Then almost by accident – and without even trying – we might have rolled into that sweet, accidental abyss, tangled together. We would have entered the secret room one only enters by falling backwards.

But I did not pull the candy back. I held my ground, and I waited, and I watched her, and she picked it up, and she read it.

KISS ME

She turned me over in her fingers, thinking about it, thinking about me. Thinking. Thinking. Thinking. Deciding. Hanging in the balance, I felt my knees begin to knock beneath the table. Something vital drained away from me. The tides of power shifted towards unseen shores at the opposite end of the world.

When she returned from that faraway world, she had made her decision. She had put on her that’s-so-sweet mask and her I-had-no-idea gown.

She said this will only hurt for a moment, and into the brittle chalk of my exposed male heart she carved a single word in bright red ink.

Even now, years later, if you look very closely when the tide is out – and I mean really, really out – you can still read what she wrote there.

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#4 – "The Gondolier" – May, 2024 (Part I)