Friday, June 28, 2024

Michael Cunningham


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from Larry and Bobby Kissing

Were they glad about it? Was Larry glad the night he kissed me back to life? Was I? I’d been among the dead for so long. Sleep, gym, hustle, dinner, hustle, sleep, repeat.

I never kissed any of them. That was the line I drew. That was what kept me in my body, kept me from getting sucked into their vortexes.

Until Larry kissed me. It hadn’t been my idea.

I thought, at first, I wanted to be dead again, to go back to that endless smoky undream, but he kept kissing me, and I kept kissing him, and by now, I don’t think he’d let me go back to being dead, even if I asked him to. By now, I don’t think I’d want to go back.

That’s why I’m in love with him. That’s why I’m gladdened. That’s why I seem to wish, every now and then, when love gets into me like a fishhook and pulls me, gasping, out of myself — when I start to fear everything that might happen if I abandon me and enter him — that he’d disappear, so I could be dead again. 


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