I Want to Hold Your Hand Sam Heaps

We are beginning the quarantine and I worry. A friend let it slip — I thought you would like to know. Cancer. A tumor? Is there a name for cancers like this? He doesn’t know the name, the friend says. There must be a name. When you tell me about the surgery you use the word leaking. You say, I was still leaking. Without the g, or the g so soft as to walk away from the word and it makes it all the more grotesque. Leakin’. But the surgery is not enough. You say you will know more in a week.

I feel I must use the pronoun you here. You are so wounded and fragile. You here is for gentleness, a slight removal. You is not for questions. I have no more desire to interrogate. Like you say, it was more than a decade ago and it is all in the past. This is partially true. But I know you are slow to forgive—others, yourself. You hold low-volume grudges in your fist, opening your hand years later to see they have withered and you hardly remember what they were. Your pretty, white fingers with the fine black hair along the knuckles. Wrinkled. Your feet long too.

After a beach trip you are bedridden with sun poisoning, covered in third degree burns. I tend to you. I feel your body like it is my body and I am ill with you.

I lie with my dog this morning, and it is like this. Without schedules there is no need to make concessions to the alarm, so we spend a slow morning in the sun not knowing the time with her nose tucked beneath my chin. Massaging her neck, long pets on her back and ears. And doing this I feel my own stiff legs and jaw soften. My hip creases.

It is like this when I am with you. It is like our bodies are the same body.

Fucking everywhere. In my bathroom mornings before I drive you to school. In the car. In parks. In fields. Playgrounds. In your basement most often. You get little marks of my cum on your t- shirt because we never have time to undress. I wear small skirts. Like bunnies. Or, like teenagers more. Eight, nine times an afternoon. I take your virginity in a cemetery. Sitting on your lap in our coats.

You say you are glad I reached out. You like to call now in the mornings before your radiation. The first time you ask me if you can call. My heart. It turns me to putty with grief that this softness was always there beneath the surface. The pain of you now forced to the point of overripe — vulnerable. How alone we both turned out to be. Does a love so young matter? I have friends who idealize these affairs and say they have never after experienced anything so intense. If only I were so lucky. It matters I think. I think we matter. Formative is the word here. You are maybe my last try at playing the game. The last partner I want deeply to be an accessory to, a wife to. I fantasize about working. Going to law school and coming home to you. Stocking feet on plush carpet while you sit on the couch with a guitar and a child. I am imagining your mother’s home I realize in this old fantasy. You’ve cooked dinner and smile and are sweet. I recognize now the fantasy is you. You and your wife — when I thought I had lost this want so many years before. And I query here my intentions. If I cannot have this thing, if I am not good enough to have this thing, may I at least be its approximate?

Please, not asking the cost.

Yes the softness must have always been there but disguised as sadness which you were drenched in. Beneath the angry humor. The handsome smile. Deep, unabating sadness that maybe was always just this love — undernourished like the rest of you.

Even after you leave me we never stop fucking. How can we? How can we deprive our bodies of their own halves? I crawl naked into your bed on my twenty-first birthday after drinking three quarters of a bottle of Pear Absolut Vodka. Never mind my girlfriend. When I attend your shows I beckon, and you come. We fuck when we are both so thin I can wrap my hands around our waists. Seventeen in your dorm room. Twenty-four and you allow me to take your photo after. Twenty, Four Lokos and jumping on the bed. It doesn’t feel like cheating. It just feels like our bodies being.

You did shatter me though. Christ you did.

How do I explain the sound in your voice when I called? Weak. Vulnerable and low like a grieving animal. A little like a growl. When it had been almost seven years. And I would still sometimes hope.

How do I explain the very mundane and normal history of us that makes it so tragic to hear from you now? After radiation you go to the beer distributor to work, even with the world upside down.

How do I express how afraid I am for you, already malnourished and isolated, and now a breeze would take you out. Certainly the virus will. Could. I correct myself. Could.

Maybe I am afraid to write this one because I don’t want to write it again in a month. To add an addendum or tempt something.

What matters? The book of CDs I still have of American Football and Bikini Kill and Weezer and the way I would irritate you by playing the same song over and over. But if you love something you want it again and again ad infinitum.

It does not matter how we would take classes together just to sit beside one another. And you would, mischievously, put one ear bud in my ear and leave one in yours and play a song. Usually The Beatles, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” How normal you made me, how solid the footing so I could be anything I chose. What I chose, what I wanted, was to be was yours.

Does it matter that you left me? The manner? The reasons? Does it matter how much it hurt or that I never recovered my faith in all of this. I ask you just last night. Why did you leave me? The pain of it still lodged somewhere deep where I cannot shake it loose. My forehead against the cold tile of the bathroom, bloody nose, unable to stand just with the weeping after having seen you with her.

I ask. Will you disappear again? I don’t know. Five minutes. I don’t think so. Ten minutes. No. I promise I won’t.

The times you weren’t there don’t matter. The porn you watched that I reviled doesn’t matter. The essays I wrote for your English classes. My jealous possession. Listening to you fuck my ex- girlfriend in the room above me. Sick and alone and you brought me oranges. The simple songs you wrote that see me too clear. Because it is you, you’ll pull through.

The way I needed so badly for you to be everything for me and the way you were still a boy and so could not.

The way you say, said always, stop letting them treat you like meat. I don’t like how you let them treat you.

I wish you wellness. I hope this document can sit here and bring you wellness.

When I am hospitalized for appendicitis you are the one who stays by my bed. You sit by my bed for days and read Ender's Game. I love the look of the thick stacks of paper in your hands. The dark cover against the pale flesh. I love your hands. I love you. So different. Quieter. I wish I could have taken care of it all. I wish you would have let me.

Sam Heaps (she/they/he) has been published in Entropy's WOVEN Series, Communion Arts Journal, A) Glimpse) Of), Taco Bell Quarterly, Giallo Lit, and others This essay is part of Heaps' debut collection, forthcoming from CLASH Books in 2022. Heaps holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Heaps’s favorite bird is a Snow Goose.