There's something about Cox Town

I forget what year it was when we both found each other in that inconspicuous kitchen corner in Ejipura. I forget why I was visiting Bangalore/Bengaluru that night. My first job was shitty and barely paid me. So my only visits to Blore were when upper castes paid me to come tell them that upper castes are violent but the ones that paid for me to come to your city were not. Anyway, back to the kitchen corner. This time too, I had to pretend that I wasn't into you. Tiring, really. I was in a horrible relationship and was too afraid of being lonely. Took me years to realize that my loneliness had nothing to do with being lonely. And even more years to learn that I would rather be lonely alone than with a failed poet. Ok! Kitchen corner! I keep getting distracted. I was tired of my life, my job, my (then) boyfriend. You were with a boy who I think was in love with you? (Honestly, when are your lovers not!) Or atleast on his way to fall in love with you? Or maybe you were in love and he wasn't? Or maybe you both were in love and were too afraid to say it to each other. 

I came to the kitchen to refill my water bottle. Or maybe to see you. Your lover boi (or should I say your twink of the month) was drunk and passed out in the hall, and so was our friend in his room. You came into the kitchen after me, just casually chatting. I had always been a little afraid of that kitchen tbh...fiery scuttering cockroaches and fruit flies perpetually hovering over unwashed dishes in the sink and randomly finding their way into your ears and mouth (the flies, not the cockroaches lol). We both felt the darkness of that kitchen wrapping us. I filled my bottle but secretly wished to be filling your hole instead. I turned around. You were standing right behind me. I think we stared into each other's eyes for a good minute...every second heavy....with our heavy breaths...I swear to god my dick went harder and harder with every breath you took. Your eyes kept fluttering between my eyes and my lips. I moved closer to you and our lips found their way to each other. I think it took a few minutes for both of our brains to register that we were finally touching each other. That in those few minutes we were allowed to taste each other. And when that realization finally hit, I pushed you against the kitchen wall (you smiled) and buried my face into yours. I can't quite describe how that kiss felt or how it taste like but all I remember is that my body wanted to consume you. And that kiss wasn't enough. I took your hand and put it on my throbbing dick. When your hand touched my dick, we stopped kissing and looked at each other - this time I smiled - and you grabbed it - and then I turned you around and started rubbing my dick against your ass. Fucking HOT! 

Your lover boi/twink-of-the-month coughed and rushed to the bathroom. We heard him puking. Our moment ended. The cockroach witnessing our drama rushed to the bathroom to check up on the lover boi's dilemma. 

The night we held hands, Banglore (July 2022)

Our moments had always been painfully brief. Recently you shared our first picture together. From 2015 I think? Both of us young(er) in that photograph; me pretending to look uninterested, and I think you hiding behind your smile? When we met the last time...after years of not having talked, thousands of days of not responding to each other's texts....you showed me this photo. Casually scrolling through your phone gallery (I think the casual is your way of hiding from yourself) and took that picture out like you had been waiting to show it to me. Or to yourself in front of me? Perhaps to say the unsaid - that we both keep running away from each other and keep finding cruel ways to run into each other. 

I don't know you enough because I keep pretending that I shouldn't try getting to know you. I was telling a friend that I demand vulnerability from my relationships. All kinds of relationships, whether romantic, or sexual, or erotic. In fact, my latest demand of(for) vulnerability from my family towards me is creating irreparable distance between them and me, but that's a story for another time. Maybe it's egoistic of me to assume that you can't offer that vulnerability. The bare minimum you know? I have always hated how you never knew the right words to say! Every single time! I want you to say something....something....deep (for a lack of better word)....something utterly devastatingly painfully deep.....and yet you....don't. GAWDuh! You hide behind your silly jokes, your casual and I feel too alien to penetrate through. 

The last time I penetrated YOU was, once again, in a rushed moment. Where there's always someone around to never let us taste each other. Or do you always pick such moments where I can't have you all to myself? Our romance is as much about our friend and your twinks as it is about the two of us. 

I attached so many fantasies to you, and to us that in my selfish need to see only desire, I forgot to actually see the real human within you. That your life, not surprisingly, doesn't revolve around me. That you have troubles just like everyone else. That you are hurting like everyone else. I was selfish, I didn't care because your hurt wasn't about me. I think I was angry that you were perhaps one of the few men who didn't display trauma when I carefully strategized for you to reveal them. And then I felt disgusted with myself.

Let me tell you why I have always tried to stay away from you. Lol wow this is like my fantasy of sitting in a therapist's office and giving them a clear liner trajectory of my highly specific trauma. So, it all started when I was 12...well not really 12 but I think around the time I started forming strong friendships with cis women around me. Women who had constant attention from those who would never pay any attention to me. So much so that the only reason people who even cared to remember my name was to get my female friends' attention. I became only a nameless femme to make way for beautiful men towards beautiful women. A disposable gay. Coupled with no self-esteem, self-respect and a whole lot of puberty where I genuinely thought I was the 'only one' (lolz), I thought that I could never form meaningful friendships. Well cut to many years later - I thought I might be putting someone close to me in a similar situation. I thought I was dangerously becoming the same men who made me feel worthless. And I withdrew. And I think you did too? Please tell me that's why you withdrew? 

Our meetings would always leave me flustered. Frustratingly flustered. We would go from not sharing a word to me raw dogging you. We would share kisses hidden away in the corner of a kitchen, a random room, or our fingers touching for a millisecond on a random road in Frazer Town. But FUCK! It was so fucking HOT every. single. time. I would remember how my hands clawed onto your skin every time we touched. Because we knew we would not be able to touch again. I remember hungrily tracing my fingers around your scars because I knew I would not be able to kiss them. Time was never on our side. I was never able to hold you, or be held by you. Fuck you, yes. But never hold you. I desperately want to. 

We held hands for full 20 minutes the last time I saw you. We hadn't (once again) spoken to each other or thought about each other for years. There were 7 of us in that car. For one whole hour, our friend carefully curated the placements inside the car so that the situation between you and the twink-of-my-friend's-month (hehe) doesn't make you uncomfortable. Somehow, no really, somehow (I wasn't expecting this AT ALL) I ended up sitting on your lap. I still don't know how, or why, the second I sat on you, our hands just naturally found their way into each other. I felt every fingertip of yours. And you felt mine. I don't think either of us were planning to or intending to. We hid it from everyone around us. More importantly, we hid it from our friend. Both of us making casual conversations with everyone around us. Me hiding behind my jokes and you hiding behind yours. You would hold me closer to you with every bump the car took. It was raining heavily and all I kept thinking was how I could feel whole of YOU while only holding your hand.... and thumb.... and every crevice in your palm.... and every line on your palm..... and every vein on your hand.

That moment too, ended too soon. You never say 'proper' goodbyes. And I always pretend that I don't care for them. 

For all the words I have to say about you and all the things I can write about you and us...I still don't know how to tell my friend that I wouldn't love him any lesser if I fell in love with you.