THE NEW HOUSE

We've been in the new house three weeks. Still unpacking. Every belonging let out to breathe deepens the reality it's our home now. I loved our last place, a duplex in a walkable neighborhood. Friends in every direction. We lived there a couple months shy of 16 years. Josh and I got married there. And before that, we lived in an identical building next door to it. Somewhere in my bones I hoped I'd grow old there, even though I knew I wouldn't. We had four different landlords over the years. Now, we're our own landlords. Or really, the bank is our landlord. The city, too. Ownership comes in droplets like water from a hamster bottle.

Shawn's sick today, so I keep an ear open for when he might need help. I watch a downy woodpecker try to find bugs in the spaces between bricks on one of our front porch columns. I access fears I've never had before. Are there bugs in those bricks? Is the whole place infested? Did we make a mistake? Shawn texts a request for ice water. I climb the stairs to his attic room and notice how much more space we have now for the cat to shed hair. I made a critical error last night and said at dinner how lucky Shawn's been. That even though moving had been stressful, he hadn't gotten sick. Well. Don't get cocky, kid.

Josh texts from work to see how Shawn's doing. I tell him it started with stress dreams, and now he can't sleep at all from the nausea. He dreamed of spiders. I had spider dreams last night, too. The difference is my body doesn't care today and Shawn's does. People sometimes confuse us for each other at a distance, but we couldn't be more different.

Friends have asked what we've done to the house so far. A list: curtains, rugs, bar stools, bookshelves, a fridge, a washer and dryer, lamps, cleaning, arranging, and ignoring. We ignore what we can't fix yet, like the chicken coop the seller left in the backyard. He told us he intended to burn it before he left, but he didn't have time. "Hey! You can burn it now!" he said, like it might be something the three of us would enjoy doing together. And maybe we will. It looks like an outhouse with one end higher off the ground than the other, possibly so the eggs would roll downhill into a basket. Who knows.

There are squirrels in the walls. Don't worry, I have a humane plan to get them out and keep them out. I've always been ambivalent about them. No longer. Every squirrel is an enemy. Even the one Travis Kelce fed a piece of bread in college.

I love this house, though. I love the kitchen. I love that one of the spare bedrooms is my art studio now. I love that the cat had to learn to climb stairs for the first time in his life. I love the front porch. I love the walk-in shower. I love that when the Chiefs win a game, the fireworks are louder here because we're closer to the stadium. I love that there's so much work ahead of us. I love that Shawn's been tending the yard little by little. I love that he found a rug rolled up and buried in the back yesterday. I love that he's waiting for me to buy a shovel so he can excavate it fully. I love that we have no idea if something terrible is wrapped up in that rug. I love that soon we will.

IF ANYTHING

A praying mantis lives on the ivy outside my bathroom window. Sorry, my landlord's bathroom window. Josh and I have lived here 15 years. Shawn has lived here with us for the past 7. We've had 4 different landlords. More upstairs neighbors than I can remember. Now, it's empty up there. The newest landlord wants to turn the whole building into his own house. So, we're looking for a house, too. The praying mantis looks for bugs to eat. They're attracted to the light from the bathroom window. I stand there and brush my teeth and try to find the mantis among the ivy, both the same Key lime green. There it is, staring back at me. I wonder how much of me it can see if anything.

The summer has been gross and sometimes heartbreaking yet kind. My allergies have laid me out. The air feels the sort of green that's closer to brown most days. Swamp weather. Maybe the endpoint of climate change is we all become amphibious again. My sinuses won't know relief until I adapt gills to vent the pressure. Shawn and I went to the campground in Kansas where you can be naked. We hiked down to the lake. It was covered in duckweed. Since we're not frogs yet, we didn't swim. We sat by the water's edge and let the breeze be a blessing.

I have a few jobs. One of them is transcribing interviews for a UFO journalist. Another is baking pies for a local restaurant. Sometimes, I draw, and people pay for it. Other times, I write, and people pay for it. There are weeks where all my jobs need my time. Then there are weeks where I have nothing to do. This week, I had time to have a migraine. I had time to crochet granny squares in different shades of turquoise. I had time to scroll Zillow hoping the right house would appear. I tweeted even though no one's there anymore. I do it like the owl in my neighborhood does every night, calling out just to have it on the record. I've assumed the owl is looking for a mate. Maybe it's just telling a joke. Over and over again the same joke about a different topic. "Look how stupid this is." Every night until someone laughs. I try to hoot in response. I sound like nothing so much as a dove.

Lately, I sit on the porch at night and smoke a joint with Shawn while Josh rides the exercise bike inside. We did it once. Now, it's a habit. I realize it's because I don't know if our next house will have a porch. We live at an intersection. I've seen so many people come and go. Soon, I'll go and won't come back. It's not beautiful to me yet, how my life will change. I hold on to things. I become comfortable, and I became comfortable here.

A good friend told me to visualize my new house. Bring it into being. I close my eyes and try. I fall asleep imagining I move into a seashell. That's not what she meant. She meant to picture all the things I want in a house. I dream about everything but a house. I dream I meet a football player I find beautiful. I dream I win the lottery. I dream a celebrity recognizes me in a restaurant. I dream I open my closet and find every toy I lost as a child. I wake up and search for the praying mantis outside my bathroom window.

It's gone.

SUPERSTITIONS

There's a building behind us that long ago housed an electrical substation and streetcar garage. When Josh and I moved in, it was occupied by an advertising agency that made commercials for Sonic. When they left, it sat empty until late last year when mysterious construction began. Men in neon green and orange shirts throw chunks of drywall from a balcony into a gigantic dumpster below. Most of the men have beards. The ones who don't, try. I stare at them from the kitchen window while I reheat my lunch. Sometimes, under cover of night, we throw things in the dumpster, too.

I ask Shawn if he knows what they're doing inside the building. I say it must be completely hollow by now. He says he asked them once, and they told him they were turning it into artist studios. That can't be right. Men in suits walk through sometimes. They could be 35 or 55 and have the cherubically fillered faces of NFL team owners. They remember art once a year when they write a check to the museum. I tell Shawn it can't have anything to do with art. He shrugs his shoulders and opens the kitchen door to yell at the construction guys for pelting snowballs at cars. They stop and throw snowballs at each other instead.

We won the Super Bowl. By "we," I mean the football group chat with my in-laws. We screamed at each other all season with emojis, and then on Super Bowl Sunday, we screamed together in real life. At one point, Shawn was afraid Josh's mom was going to punch the TV, not from rage, but from joy. I told him I hadn't noticed because at that same moment I was mashing out a text to Paul Rudd that simply read, "FUUUCK." The pandemic took something from us that, for better or worse, football returned. I feared trimming my own beard because I hadn't done so since before the playoffs. To do it before the Super Bowl would have been to fail an entire city. We would have lost. My superstitions grew from stray thoughts to absolute certainties in the blink of an eye. We were down at the half when suddenly my mother-in-law realized she'd left her lucky charm in the car. I'm convinced her retrieval of it won us the game.

There was a parade. I watched from home. The newscasters kept an eye out for wildness. Players left their busses and drank with fans. A spectator climbed a tree and tried to dance in it. With it? A police officer told a man on horseback he could proceed no further. Travis Kelce led a call and response with the crowd using Master P lyrics. One of the newscasters tried to imitate him after, and another stopped him quick. "Don't you try it." The party was over, but the players stayed onstage recording stories for Instagram.

My family in Kentucky sent texts to congratulate me like I would also receive a championship ring. It's funny to think about wearing something that heavy with jewels, something that captures all the light in a room but doesn't keep it.

BETWEEN THE HOLIDAYS

There's no such thing as the holidays for a baker, so I take my breaks between other holidays. Christmas ended in Kansas City. All the pies had been picked up. I baked three more and drove them to my family in Kentucky with Josh and Shawn. We'd never been on a road trip like that just the three of us. We had a few days to spare before I had to bake again for New Year's Eve. Josh took off work. Shawn's been unemployed since he quit serving at a restaurant that ended up closing two months later. The cards fell as if we'd cheated. We'd talked about driving to my hometown in the summer, but we couldn't say no to the time we had. Everyone's getting older. I hadn't been home for Christmas since 2018. This would have to do.

Shawn warned us he'd get carsick, and he did, just once, on the same country road where I'd first learned to drive decades prior. You know about Kentucky and horses, but all we saw were cows. I thought about what it would look like to move back there. All that green space. It's a lot like where I live now, but no offense, prettier. We drove by houses older than most of the buildings in Kansas City. And people still live in them.

We stayed in a short-term rental across from the courthouse in my hometown. The building was old. So old that if it had any ghosts, they were too tired to play. Shawn says he saw something pass down the hallway, but it was beyond shape, having forgotten who it ever was and why it haunted this place at all. I slept with earplugs in and could still hear, as if underwater, a huge truck roar up and down Main Street. Shawn saw it shoot flames from its exhaust and couldn't believe it. Well, I could. The next morning, Josh went to a coffee shop across the street for breakfast and brought back the rest of a very good avocado toast to share with me. A place changes and stays the same at almost the same rate. I could believe the demonic truck, but I couldn't believe the avocado toast.

Shawn took a nap one afternoon while Josh and I visited the Bluegrass Heritage Museum. It's a great place run by one of my former teachers. She was in that day. We hadn't seen each other since the late 90s. We talked for probably an hour. I introduced her to Josh, and she told him this was the most she'd ever heard me speak. She disappeared into an office and came back with a yearbook. "You should be in this one," she said, and I was.

We spent just enough time with my family to leave us excited for the next visit. My mom cooked all the favorite winter foods and something extra for Josh—chocolate Coca-Cola cake. He never liked dessert before we met. My dad took us out to eat at the restaurant where his gall bladder failed him a few years prior. "Not because of the food," he said. The other diners stared at us when we walked in because Shawn wore a genuine raccoon skin cap I bought him from the Peddler's Mall. Everywhere we go, people look at Shawn, but he would complain if they didn't.

On the way out of town, we stopped by my grandmother's house. We visited for not long enough. When she stood up to hug me goodbye, she said she'd done so too fast and become lightheaded. She asked me to hug her just a while longer until she was steady. In the car, Shawn said, "You know she wasn't dizzy, right? She just didn't want to let you go." I knew that, of course, just like I know there's never enough time anywhere but on the road, where it seems like no matter how fast you go, there's all the time in the world.

BACK FOR A SEASON

December has been grey and wet so far, like we're trapped in a bad mood. Reed, from a Twitter group chat I belong to, came to visit last weekend. The bad mood lifted. He stayed at Katie's beautiful house up the street. She's also in the group chat, the voice of compassion and intelligence. People treat her like a mother and a search engine. She was on Jeopardy. We watched soccer during the day, hung out on sofas at night, ate pie I made, and tried to convince Reed to move here. What could we offer except that he would never be lonely? All mid-sized cities rush to the same middle. You'd like it here, we promise, because here is just like anywhere else.

Josh bought us a good used car at the end of September, but there's nowhere to go right now. It's my busy season. I made 40 pies during Thanksgiving week. I'm making 25 more for Christmas. I can't stop my hands from moving. My friends are having babies, so I've been knitting again. And I look for more excuses to knit. A couple weeks ago, I knit a sweater to my own measurements. It fit perfectly, but I knew it wasn't meant for me. I gave it to Shawn. He hasn't taken it off since. All my interests are pinned to a slowly moving wheel. I'm driving again, I buy toys with my spare cash, and I knit like there's a gun to my head. The person I was 20 years ago is back for a season.

Maybe all this sounds like I'm sad. I'm not. I'm comfortable. Winter is supposed to be like this. I can't see beyond the borders of the snow globe because I keep shaking it. There's an unfinished Godzilla puzzle on the dining room table. Josh, Shawn, and I started it a few weeks ago. We're waiting on a snow day to finish it, except all we've had is rain. We push the pieces to the end of the table so we can eat dinner together.

I'm drawing, too. Still drawing. Always drawing. I try to give my thoughts a place to live that isn't the forefront of my mind. Then I get on social media and beg people to take them from me. And they do! They share how they've framed them and where they hang in their houses. I see how far I've traveled even when I've gone nowhere at all. Shawn asked if I ever get cold in my studio, which is a closet attached to my bedroom. The answer is no. It's the opposite. The cold can’t touch me there.

KENTUCKY

Kansas City is home, but I grew up in Kentucky. My cousin married her high school sweetheart last week. I rented a car and drove back to our hometown to see it. There was a pandemic, and before that there was a job, and so, I hadn’t been to Kentucky since Christmas 2018.  And I hadn’t driven there since 2012. Ten years with no car. I’ve kept up my license. Cars have changed. But driving was like it always was for me. I loved it.

My dad taught me to drive on country roads against my mom’s wishes. For that reason, the interstate remains my least favorite way to get anywhere. There are miles of construction that doesn’t look like anything is happening. Nearly every wild animal you see is already dead. I saw more roadkill armadillos than I’ve ever seen living ones. In fact, I’ve never seen an armadillo alive, but I did pass an antique mall the size of a megachurch. It was called The Brass Armadillo.

The country roads stay a zoo. I saw a white horse in a field. I saw a young buck. I saw a lone chicken peck the grass on the shoulder of the road. I saw a box turtle survive its crossing. I saw a crow peel up something pink and flatter than the sticker on a banana. I saw a sign for a town called Oddville.

The trip was a mantra of, “I’m really doing this. I can do this.” I don’t remember having that anxiety the last time I drove. My prayer back then was for my car to stay together. It did for longer than it should have. And then, right after that last trip in 2012, in a grocery store parking lot, it didn’t. I’ve walked nearly everywhere since.

In Kentucky, I hiked up a steep trail with my mom. The trail ended on top of a sandstone arch called Natural Bridge. Before the final rough-hewn staircase, there was a landing area. Mom wanted to take my picture there. She told me about an old picture she has of her mom in the same spot. She’s not alone in the picture. You can see a lizard just to her right, sunning on a rock. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” I said, “if we saw a lizard right now, too.” And then there one was, bobbing with aggression on the face of a rock wall. Sometimes, you wave at the past, and it waves right back at you.

The country came back to my voice a little. Maybe it’s the gay mockingbird thing. Like I don’t have my own vocalizations. I just pattern myself after others around me to survive. The voice in my head doesn’t sound like anything so much as someone narrating an audiobook.

On my last day, I drove an hour north of my hometown and went to a clothing-optional gay campground. I took my shorts off by the pool and laid naked under the sun for the entire afternoon. An older man, a nearby farmer who discovered this campground had opened in his own backyard, came over to me, leaned against the deck railing, and lit a cigarette. He told me he’d been married to a woman, now divorced. He had children, long grown. He said, “Maybe if this place had been here back then…well, it’s here now.” He flattered me with a compliment about my body, then he left.

I told the campground’s caretakers the same thing I told my family, that I’d try to come back next summer.

“We’ll be here,” one of them said, “unless we up and blow away.”

REMIND ME TO TELL YOU

Something happened on Christmas Eve. I'll tell you when I see you because I promised not to post it on social media. OK, fine, I made pies for someone famous. Yes, you'll know who it is. Remind me.

The cat had surgery then had surgery again. Urethral obstructions. He's recovering now. I leave my studio to get a drink of water, and I see him on the green upholstered bench we have in the living room. He's set square as a loaf of bread on a kitchen counter. His eyes are open and closed at once. He's in the drugged-out space beyond both pain and comfort. I look forward to meeting his usual self in two to three weeks. I'm just glad he's alive. The vet said the obstructions are often caused by stress. I can't imagine a more stress-free home. "What could you be stressed about?" I ask the cat. He looks back at me like he's never been bothered a day in his life. To drown this potential stress once and for all, I bought him a little fountain that's also a water dish. He doesn't understand it's his, that he can drink from it. He's polite to the point of stupidity.

I've been drawing and then drawing some more, and then when those drawings sell, I do more drawings. You've seen them. I've also applied for grants and fellowships and residencies and awards. I was a finalist for a local art award a few years ago. I reapply every year. No luck again this time. Not even close. Onto the next thing. Waiting and waiting. Drawing and drawing. I feel like I could do these forever. Only lately do I understand a little of why I do them. First, because I think they're neat. Second, because someone's always watching. It's important to give them something to look at.

Ten years ago, I got rid of my car. Now, I'm back to wanting one. I need to increase my range. I'm afraid if I don't get a car, I'll start running again, and I hate running. Plus, if I get back to driving, I can deliver pies. I'll truly become the Pie King I tell people I already am. My crown is being fitted as we speak. You'd never know how heavy it is from the way I wear it, like I'm wearing nothing at all.

THE OWL

Josh and I take walks in the dark. Two miles every night for at least the ten years since I junked my car for $500 because the engine died. It was my first car and maybe my last car. I love to drive, but night walking suits us. It's quiet. We don't see much. But sometimes, we're surprised. We're in a different part of the neighborhood every time we see the owl.

It swoops down by us. Maybe it confuses Josh's curly hair for a meal. Then it flies back up and lands on a street sign, a telephone pole, a branch. All of it near noiseless. Owl wings have evolved to be silent. One night, I heard the simple scratch of talons gouging bark as the owl launched from a tree and came down within inches of us, wings spread wider than seemed possible. I understand how we made the Mothman now. People in West Virginia saw an owl in the dark. That's all.

I've been missing you and other people lately. But I'm not special. We all miss each other, even if we've started hanging out again. I can already feel how I've changed these past two years. Good and bad. I barely know how to talk anymore. I'm compelled to cross the street when anyone comes my direction. Last night, I went to a movie with the boys and a couple close friends. We were the only people in the theater. It was like watching a movie after the end of the world. I hate to say I loved it.

A friend I hadn't seen since before the pandemic reappeared suddenly. We talked about football, a sport I wouldn't have had words for the last time we saw each other almost three years ago. He was surprised, but then so am I. I have a couple Chiefs shirts. One with Travis Kelce's face printed all over it. He made our only touchdown of the game on Sunday. The part of me that makes a wish whenever the clock reads 12:34 believes he made that touchdown because I wore that shirt. There's a feeling when we win a game. Right there in that sentence, actually. "When we win a game." "We." I only watch, but I still feel responsible, like they couldn't have done it without me. I think there's a power in focusing deeply with thousands of other people, even if it's just on a football game. I think I was supposed to feel that for God and the church when I was a Christian teenager. I never did.

I feel it for the owl, though. Every night, I hope and fear to see its wings. We can't hear it fly, but sometimes Josh and I hear it call. I repeat the sound into my cupped hands. The owl calls back. There it is. That feeling, like I'm almost part of the world again. Like I walk in the dark, but I don't walk alone.

THE HIDDEN AND THE SEEN

Last weekend, Josh was in a fashion show with clothes designed locally and jewelry/accessories made by his best friend, Evie. Josh turns 40 in a couple weeks. He's grown his hair out over the pandemic. It's long, wavey, and curly at once. He's beautiful. His plan was to cut it after the fashion show, but his mother begged him to reconsider. Being a good Cancer who listens to his mother, I imagine he'll never cut it again.

Shawn's job at the liquor store is going well enough. He likes working on our street again. In addition to being a clerk and stocker, he's become a bouncer. Alcohol turns good people weird, so he's had to force people out of the store. A guy with a machete came in and accused another guy of stealing his umbrella. They proceeded to fight, machete against umbrella, until Shawn stepped in, kicked them both off the property, and confiscated the umbrella because the guy had started beating a car with it. The umbrella is now in our front entryway, safe from violence. And still, this job is less emotionally demanding for Shawn than being a server. The lines of acceptable and unacceptable behavior are clearer. He's not dependent on his customers supplementing his paycheck with tips anymore. But he longs for it. I made two pies today, and he said he missed selling them to people.

After I got the vaccine, my pandemic stress all but disappeared. I've been able to draw again and consistently. The new series I'm working on is a further exploration of what I think of as the voyeurism of acceptance. For at least half my life, gay intimacy meant secrecy. We hid that world for our own safety, but it was also hidden from us to keep us from embracing it. Now, people are more accepting and curious. As gay men, we use social media to perform for those who want to see us, even as we ourselves want to be seen. For me, there's a tension between what I continue to keep private and what I share openly to help normalize gay desire, sex, and love. I see it in my drawings. There's often a simple scene of male intimacy that exists both in the world of the image and outside of it. The men in these scenes hide nothing from each other and are unaware they're being watched, usually by supernatural forces like ghosts and UFOs. I'm after what I consider the most important project of adulthood—the validation of the self. Representation is a legitimate aim, but corporate entertainment, while financially powerful, lacks true potency. Disney will not help you love yourself or help you decide the life you desire is indeed worthwhile. That power is yours alone. You are the point of creation. They will watch you and steal from you and sometimes even employ you to help them do it. But please, I beg you, don't ever wait on them to tell you your own story.

On a walk the other night, an animal larger than the usual cats and rabbits ran across the street in front of Josh and me. It stopped in a yard and stared back at us like we should follow. It was a fox. I don't see a lot of foxes, and never in our neighborhood. Of course, we knew better than to follow it into the dark. Appreciate beauty when you see it. Never trust it.

NEW NOTHING

What's new is nothing, except:

The restaurant where I baked pies closed for good in October.

I watch football every Sunday after a lifetime of disinterest.

People buy my pies directly from me now. I place them in a red pie safe on my porch, and when I check again, they're gone. Let me brag a second. Some people say my pies are among the best in Kansas City.

Josh and Shawn's hair is longer and wilder. Hair ties are found in every room. Josh can pull his hair back himself. Shawn always asks if I can do it for him. I cut off all my hair in the summer. It's back to a length that just looks normal to me. When I'm right out of the shower and see my reflection, I'm fooled into thinking it's any other year.

None of us has gotten sick yet because none of us has traveled because where would we go? How would we begin to escape this? I've tried to escape it by buying toys that remind me of when I had fun 25 years ago and my bedroom alone contained the borders of the world. Mostly, I buy Transformers because they're toys but also puzzles. They're as addictive as cigarettes. And like cigarettes, they soothe fidgeting.

When I watch football, the stadiums are empty. Maybe that's why I can watch now. There's space for me where there wasn't before. I told a friend it's been like learning a new language, except I've known the words my whole life. I just didn't know what they meant. I was surrounded by people who used them. Now, I can use them, too. Go Chiefs.

Every night, I spend a couple hours in Shawn's room. I smoke from a weed pen and get just high enough to laugh again. It's the most important ritual of my day. If I don't do it, I can't sleep.

Josh and Shawn and I read the news separately and then talk about it when we eat. "Did you see?" We all saw. The other night at 3 AM, someone in the neighborhood shot off a couple rounds. The story that formed in my half-asleep mind was that they were going house to house and killing everyone inside. How horrifying is it that instead of keeping me awake until morning, I accepted the thought and fell back to sleep?

We're all fine here in that we're all fucked up and successfully pushing off the reckoning of it. We have each other, at least. I cried one night a couple weeks ago, a sadness whose threads led back to a million sources. Those sources are bigger than I can do anything about, so I cleaned out a closet that's been needing it. I told myself it was a world I could control. I took what I hated about it, put it in black garbage bags, threw it outside, and I let it go.

THE LEFT HAND AND THE RIGHT HAND

Tables at the restaurant where Shawn works can sense he was raised on something other than Jesus. Last night it was a married couple and their best friend who pressed the issue. They'd been talking about religion and decided to ask Shawn if he had any beliefs. They told him they were Catholic, and he told them he was brought up in Santeria, which is technically part-Catholic. The orishas have corresponding saints. This news was occult enough for them to ask if he read tarot. He does. But he didn't have his cards on him, so they wondered if he could read palms. He can. He warned them what would happen next. His readings are intense.

"You'll cry," he said. "They always cry."

That only makes people want it more. Dessert is nice, but a great server can deliver someone's doom to them and still receive an excellent tip.

They held their left palms out, the palm of this life, and he read them from a distance. It's not a power in the palms or the cards themselves; it's something in Shawn, in his ability to see the invisible connections that link us and then spit out a story before he's thought better of it. People have a worse time than you want to imagine. Sickness, sadness, and exhaustion in work and marriage. Death. Couples always want to know about kids. When they'll have them. Why they haven't had them yet.

Shawn read the table their woes, and they took turns crying. He was right, too right, about everything. One woman had had five miscarriages, which Shawn knew to the number. Another had been agonizing about leaving her job, the stress of which was literally killing her. As soon as Shawn dragged these chunks of their lives to the surface, they burst into tears. When he came home later, he told us it was even worse than he let them know.

"You can't tell the guy whose wife is worried they'll never have kids that she's right, but that when she dies, he'll remarry and have a son with someone else. This is why I won't even look at your hands for too long," he said to Josh and me. "I don't want to know."

I don't want to know either, which is why I stopped yanking on the shroud of the future a long time ago. But Shawn can't say no to these people, all of them strangers. I sometimes wonder if he imagines himself as a nurse and his tables as his patients.

Later in the night I take it back. I do want to know. Only a little, though. Shawn says he won't read my current life, but if I give him my right hand, he'll read my next life. My love line is deep and cross-hatched.

"A braid," he says, "of lovers that never end."

SWEET

I'm doing laundry today. My husband, Josh, hates shopping for clothes more than anything in the world, so I line dry the stuff we'd rather not ruin in the dryer, the t-shirts and underwear from places like H&M that usually unravel quicker than couples who get married right out of high school. We've been able to extend the life of some of these cheap clothes for going on ten years. Only now is the wear starting to show under the arms and at the hems. We don't have curtains, but on days like today, we have clothes hanging where curtains could be. Most everything was dirty, now drying, so I stand there in the window completing the chore in my worst underwear. No one sees me but the cat who has taken to sitting in Josh's office chair, the one parked at the head of the dining room table since the pandemic began. Shawn, our boyfriend, is taking a nap.

Josh goes into the office once a week. All other days he works from home. The cat sits in his lap for hours at a time then. He's a distraught little animal from having to wear a cone around his neck. His head pokes out barely sometimes, like the inside of a sunflower that has suddenly gained the sweetest face you've ever seen. In those moments, I want to remove his cone and feed it to a fire. He has to wear it because he licked a spot on his body too much and caused a horrible sore. It's almost healed. Some wounds haven't. The loss of our dog three years ago still hurts enough for Shawn to have fully believed the cat was next. I don't know how to console someone when they're like that, when they're sobbing over something that hasn't happened yet and isn't likely to happen anytime soon. The best I came up with was to help keep the cat alive by inventing new ways to trick him into eating his antibiotics.

Because this year is a knife that stays twisting, Shawn discovered last night that he's developed a shellfish allergy. He grew up in the Dominican and later in Florida, so he's lived not far from fresh seafood all his life. When we first started dating him, he made us impressive seafood dinners, and we would talk about how good the oysters were in places not in the middle of the country. Now, he can't eat a single shrimp without his lips going numb. How else can time rob him? He already suffers from a chronic digestive illness. With the restaurant reopened in a small, limited way again, his livelihood as a server has been chopped into bits tiny enough to taste but not to fill. I think we're all starving to have a closer world again.

A lot of people on our street believe that world is already here. So much so the news did a report on all the maskless jerks who hang in crowds outside the bars in our neighborhood. Josh and I take walks into the dark and silent residential areas at night. We don't encounter anyone but rabbits and fireflies. Still, just in case, we wear our masks.

Sugar is a way to distract at least a full two minutes out of the little daily horrors. I made a banana upside-down cake last night. This morning, I stood nude in the kitchen and ate a piece. God, it was so good and sweet, like candy.

THE WELL

I've kept to the house in a way that makes me think I could weather space travel without losing my mind. I stare out the window like a cat, with the cat. There are so many squirrels. I saw five on one tree yesterday, moving almost as liquid around the trunk, crawling all over each other. Lucky squirrels. Or maybe not. I've seen more hawks, too.

Before this, I baked a lot for the restaurant. Numbers were up. People noticed us and came back. Sometimes, they came just for pie. And then…

The restaurant's still open the only way it can be right now. Carryout. There's not enough money moving through for me to bake there the way I was. Now, I only eat sugar on special occasions. I baked a pie for myself on my birthday last month. A couple days ago, I made cookies for our anniversary because Josh asked for them. There's a belief if you fall out of your practice, you have to learn it all over again. Not true. The well is either empty or full, but it's made of stone. It doesn't go anywhere.

If I'm not eating sugar, and I'm not drinking, where do I pick up a good feeling? I read before bed. All of it fantasy. I bought six pounds of popcorn kernels, and I pop them on the stove half a cup at a time. I watch true crime documentaries and then read online all the information the documentarians left out. I push back the flight I booked for Seattle for May to visit my mom and brother. I hope for September, even though I know I'll have to push it back again. I work out every day and see the results in the mirror, and through the camera, and in the way the sleeves of a shirt don't fit the same anymore. I play a video game while the cat sleeps next to me, and then I sleep, too. When I wake up, I polish a silver ring then wear it while I ride the exercise bike.

I stay up past the middle of the night. Everyone in the house is asleep except for the small white ghost I confuse again and again for the cat. It passes from the kitchen to the living room. Sometimes, visible. Often, just a sound on the hardwood floor.

NEVER GUESS

Josh and Shawn and I went out to dinner at the restaurant where I bake. All my desserts sold out while we ate. I stayed up until two in the morning to make more. I'd gotten half-drunk at dinner because the holiday was ending, Josh was about to go back to work after a long vacation, the seriousness of a New Year had started to dig itself in, and I wanted to fight back. I've joked I can make these pies in my sleep. Here, I made them while awake but distant. The pilot of my mind trusted the vehicle of my body. I floated over the kitchen and made no mistakes. The holidays are over. Josh is back at work. The New Year crashed through the wall like that car did through the liquor store down the street last week. There's a riverlike fault in the brick now that looks like it's always been there.

Soon, it'll be six months I've been baking for work. Pleasure, too, in that people tell me how much they love my food, or Shawn tells me how people tell him how much they love my food. Every few years of my life I'm surprised what I'm doing with it. This time last year, I'd given up sugar. Now, I buy sugar 10-pound bags at a time. As fixed as some parts of me are—I'm a homebody; I love snakes and spiders; I walk everywhere—there are parts of me I would never have guessed. I've stopped guessing.

For a while, I stopped writing, too. But then last summer I had an idea for a story. It was published in Gay Magazine on Christmas Eve. The illustration that accompanies the story is also mine. Some of you have hoped I'd write more. Read the story and see if it's all you hoped for or if you still hope for more.

The three of us went to New York in November. We were grateful to meet and stay with Debbie Millman just weeks after she and our good friend, Roxane Gay, got engaged. We walked fast and everywhere. I visited a jewelry store and held one of the rings I've coveted since I first saw it online. Another thing I never guess about myself but always seems to rise every several years anyway is my love of rings. When I was a child, it was a mood ring from Walmart that rounded out my Dracula Halloween costume. Then it was a class ring I was too embarrassed to wear in high school. Now, it's rings out of my league. The clerk took the ring out of its case and insisted I feel the weight of the gold in my palm. After that, everything else we did was amplified by getting to hold that ring. We ate at every bakery we could manage, spent all day at the Met, saw Little Shop of Horrors in an old church. We wondered what it would be like to live in such a place while also being ready to go home when the trip was done. Josh listed his hopes to see what we missed whenever we go back. Shawn had a hard time on the plane. I'm lucky I never do.

PIE

I taught myself to make pie eight or nine years ago. The first unweighted crust shrank down the sides of the plate and became a disk. I was furious at my failure, so I threw the disk away and started over. Our friend, Abbi, stayed with us that summer. She saw the crust in the trash. She, too, became furious. Not furious at my failure, but furious because we still could have eaten it. To her, the crust hadn't been rendered inedible, only impossible to fill. To me, it was dead. Deader than dead. It was a ghost. A ghost tries, but it can only ever be a ghost.

I made the pie for my wedding. I make the pie for Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. I make the pie why? I make the pie because I watched Pushing Daisies and thought Lee Pace looked good doing it. Basic. It's never not because of hot guys. Every story I write is about hot guys. Every drawing I draw, too. This year, I became the hot guy I've always wanted to be. You've seen the pictures because I post one almost every night on Instagram after I work out. I try, too, but I'm not a ghost yet, so I succeed.

The other day I burned a pie crust and threw it away. Again, furious. Things change only a little at a time. I make the pies for a restaurant in my neighborhood now. Shawn's a manager there. My pies sell so well I should open my own shop someday. People ask why I haven't already. I either don't know the answer or refuse to explore the question. It's probably the same reason I haven't written a novel yet—because I don't want to. Maybe one day I will.

Neither of my books is in print anymore. I don't know what to do about it. What I've settled on for now is to just ignore it and write more stories. If you've wanted to ask if I still write, there's your answer. Yes.

What's happened this summer other than pies? I had art in a show. My favorite piece sold. One of the ghost drawings. There's a fireplace. A man looks into the fire but doesn't see the ghost on the other side of it. The ghost sees the man, though. In my drawings, the men never see the ghosts. In our house, Shawn and I always see the ghosts. There's one who keeps pretending to be our cat. Shawn sees another one. It's tall and covered in hair. He says he was cooking late one night after work and it grabbed his shoulder. When he turned to see if it was me or Josh, he saw it leave the kitchen like Sasquatch in that grainy video from the 60s.

Josh has never seen a ghost I haven't drawn. He's asleep when they're busy. When I'm still up making pie.

FIVE NEEDLELIKE TEETH

You ask what I've been up to. No answer satisfies. I can only go to LA and see Beyoncé in concert once every few years. I could tell you I had a dream where I went out on my porch to take a picture of a badger sitting on a motorcycle. I could tell you all was going well until a possum leapt from the shadows and bit my hand so hard it left behind five needlelike teeth. I've never seen a possum leap in real life. Just like I'd never seen a spider drag a possum along the floor of a rainforest until last week when that video went around online. That's what I've been up to, if anything—seeing things I've never seen before.

Of course, I've also been drawing. Every few months, the two hands shake, buyer and seller. I started a new series of voyeuristic ghosts in December (caseyhannan.bigcartel.com). People liked them and bought them, some the same day I drew them. You know all this, though. It's hard to tell you something you don't know. Maybe you don't know I'm the man in all my drawings, and you're the ghosts.

Something else you already know, because you're the ghosts, is I've been working out. The me in my head still hasn't caught up with the me of my body. I take pictures every day to try to reconcile it, to make those hands shake, too. I gave up sugar and alcohol five months ago. I lift weights and do planks and pushups, ride the exercise bike and watch TV. I do it all in the middle of the night. The cat sometimes watches me, sometimes sleeps. I don't see myself joining a real gym, but then again, I didn't see myself doing any of this. A few months ago, I bought Pokémon cards in a fit of nostalgia. I didn't see myself doing that either. Maybe you think you know yourself, but you're still the worst prophet of your own life.

Four years ago, I thought I was a writer. Now, I think I'm an artist. I've tried for a local art grant twice and gotten close enough to winning each time to make me feel like I'm doing something right. Everything I wrote was a fantasy that's since come true. Maybe that scares me. I wrote a novella about three men who fell in love, and here the three of us are in this house making something we've never seen before. I don't doubt magic is real. We do it without thinking.

Shawn says he's seen a ghost in our house that looks like it came from one of my drawings. The ghost doesn't have eyes, he says, but he can tell where the eyes should be. Like all the ghosts we've seen here, it's shapeless and curious, following us from room to room like a pet. We live at an intersection. So much passes through.

SIX EYES

Coming back to Kansas City after visiting Los Angeles is to come back to a small town. The airport's a long way off from our house, out past every place to buy cars and TVs. There's a field by the exit to the airport where I've seen both deer and wild turkey. Shawn tells us he's relieved when the road matches a curve in the river and he can first see the heights of the Kansas City skyline. He says he feels like he's back home.

We went to Los Angeles at the end of September to see our friends and also Beyoncé. Shawn was born there but hadn't been as an adult. This was maybe my sixth time going. Josh's third. Our first trip all three of us together anywhere. Josh swam in the ocean for the first time. I cried to see it, but we were all in the water, so no one could tell. He swam in his underwear because he forgot his swim shorts. No one cared.

We walked as much as we could. Miles and miles every day, and the city never got smaller. A friend of Josh's mother invited us to stay in his guesthouse years ago. We took him up on it this time. From the porch, we could stare into the mountains. There was a foil tray of homegrown pomegranates in the kitchen. Dogs in the yard sometimes. One night, a skunk. Shawn saw it and froze. They're larger than you imagine they'll be. On the same porch, we met an actress we'd wanted to meet for a long time. She emerged from the cold dark carrying a lantern. I won't tell you more about it here, but the next time we see each other in person, sure.

I've always wanted to see a rattlesnake in the wild. Whatever evolutionary benefit there is to fearing snakes and spiders, I lack it. Like the time I was a child trying to trap a spider in a jar to move it from the back door to the yard. It fell onto the deck and tried to run from me. I picked it up in my hands without fear. I like to think I wouldn't do the same with a rattlesnake. I wouldn't pick it up. But I'd want to get a good look, and that would be my undoing. The only rattlesnake I've ever seen in California was ground up into a sausage I ate near Venice Beach.

There was turbulence on the plane but nowhere else. We ate everywhere there was to eat. We saw Joan Crawford's false eyelashes behind glass. We watched a play. We visited a friend's beautiful new home. A tree in her backyard demanded you look at it. Like the city at night, it was covered in lights, best seen from a distance, but even then, it was impossible to take it all in with only two eyes.

We had six, and it still wasn't enough.

Pulling the Tail

Was I bullied, or wasn't I? Did I suffer or not? That it seems so long ago as to make no difference tells me all I need to know. It either wasn't that bad, or it was worse than I allow myself to remember. To look back for even one detail is dangerous. To glimpse the tail of my history is to pull that tail all the way to the mouth that first bit me, to the time where I was confused but was expected by everyone else to be surer about this one part of my desire than they'd ever been about anything in their life. All this not from a safe distance but pinned down in their judgement, their teeth in me trying to taste what made me different, and I hoped that instead of trying to stomach me, they would just spit me out and let me go. 

And in my case, they always let me go. Distaste has an evolutionary power greater than hunger.

When I got that one thing I hoped for, to be released, I had freedom for the other thing: the near-naked men on the underwear packages at Wal-Mart, the guy who dated my best girlfriend and who would change his voice and hit me with pillows when she left the room, the memory I had of someone beautiful at a urinal at the mall, the neighbor who took my cousin out on his jet ski at the family reunion to be part of the search party for a boy who'd drowned. Always my attraction was tangled into secret spaces where no one else thought they'd find me. I was the snake under the rock, my tail the only hint to where I hid. And they, unlike me, would never grab that tail, would never suffer the resulting bite. I get it now, maybe too late, maybe just in time, that looking back, the tail of that history, the tail I grab for is, of course, my own. The tails of my bullies fell off a long time ago and never grew back. Their teeth as well. They bite me now but softly, like when I used to feed the carp by hand from paper bags of cat food at the lake. The same lake where that boy drowned. 

If I can say anything for survival, I can say this—at least I wasn't that boy, and even if it felt like it at the time, my bullies were not that lake.

Sometimes people think I'm younger than I am. I'm tempted to take it as it comes. What I like to think it means is that I look younger than I am, that I'm "well-preserved." The white in my beard betrays me but not enough. Because I know what it means when they're surprised I'm older than I look. For a lot of queer people, life is lived backwards. We remember when we were really born, and we know what it's like to be an adult as a child, to parent ourselves to a free space to be kids again. What I'm saying is if I seem young now, it's because I had to be old first.

Often, I think I'm over it, that it's buried deeper than I can find. But the dirt gives up both bones and treasures. Which are these? Bones or treasures? They are both. What I buried yields growth now. A lot of love. More love than my straight friends can imagine being able to handle. "I just couldn't do it," they say. 

But I can. 

I've done enough to know, I can do anything.
 

I Made That

I'm ruled now by images. It seems like the work of putting words together is less accessible to me. The reverse was true a few years ago. Josh and I used to complain that text was dying. "People" only cared about pictures and wouldn't stop to read anything. Of course, that wasn't true. It felt true, but it wasn't. We are all of us always reading. And back then, I was writing. Somewhere, the mood changed. Not irrevocably. I'm writing this now. Blah, blah, blah. Words, words, words. I wrote an essay about my epilepsy this spring. I wrote a short story about some men on an island who spend their free days and nights together. I've written artist statements, project proposals for inclusion in art shows, and applications for studio space. I have written this year, and I will write again, but not like I'm drawing.

Drawing is both immediate and patient magic. I have an idea, and I have my hand, and there's a strong, quick line between them. But not everything I imagine translates. In fact, I try to imagine the least and then build up to an image as I go along. Each drawing is a puzzle to which I throw away the answer of the box before I begin.

I'm working on larger paper. More room for meditation as I fill in the space with colored pencil. More time with the drawing, which is all I really want. More time to solve the puzzle, so I'm making larger puzzles.

People buy my work sometimes, but I still can't tell you what they like and don't like. I know what I like, and that's where I'm always headed. Boxes of work. Stacks of drawings. On and on. I want one gigantic wall where I can hang every single piece like they're the squares of a quilt. I haven't known how to articulate that when people ask why I make what I make. Art isn't always about making a point to other people. More often, it's about making a point to yourself.

The point: I made that.

Earlier this year, I was a finalist for a local artist award. During the panel visit, I had a hard time explaining my work, and the panel had a hard time accessing it because of that. People require permission to engage with something as personal as art, and I thought simply showing them my work would provide that permission. They asked me questions that were already answered by the work on display. When the panel left, I knew I wouldn't win the award, and I didn't.

So now I'm working on forming the two people necessary to be an artist—the maker and the explainer. We will see. I admire David Lynch's irritation at having to explain his movies after he's made them. "As soon as you finish a film, people want you to talk about it. And it's, um, the film is the talking." In the recording of this statement, he winces between the two sentences.

I wince with him.

But I'm trying. Instead of falling completely into the zone, I ask a part of myself to stay separate and hover above the work critically. Why are you doing this? Is it just to soothe you? What does the snake mean? The deer? The men? Why these colors? Why these materials? Some of these questions, I've been able to glimpse the answers. Some are still evasive. And some are none of my business. When you look at artwork, those questions become your responsibility, too.

Other things are happening here. Josh and Shawn and I are still living and loving together. We miss our dog and love/hate our cat. My snake continues to be a quiet presence in the corner of the bedroom. I need to feed her. I've been having dreams where she bites me and won't let go.

Let go, you stupid snake. Just let go.

Chorizo

There are bright, absurd moments hidden in the day, secondary to whatever else I'm doing but persistent.

"Where's the dog?"

I know where the dog isn't. The dog isn't in the kitchen. The dog isn't on the back of the couch, curled tight but eyes open and staring out the window. The dog isn't in my lap, the place he preferred, sighing every time I drum colored pencil dust off a drawing and onto the floor.

The dog is where dogs go when they die. Or the dog is still a memory of habit being overlapped each day by the habit of his absence. Or the dog is in the ground on a friend's farm. Or the dog isn't anywhere, a place and an answer I resist arriving at because it's too painful. After we took out the bathroom trash two weeks ago, trash that included the messy beach towel where Chorizo slept his last night, I went there. The truth and the painful place.

He's gone.

There was a woman at my childhood church who'd lost her young son. I sense a little now what I could only marvel at then when she would clip her fingernails into her open purse during the quietest moments of the service. Any little thing to drag your fork across the world's plate, a screech you now find comforting precisely because it grates.