It began with looking at them, as it often does, but what if they didn’t want that? There was

a stubbornness, an indiCerence to return anything, but perhaps I was staring intrusively,

not openly looking. And of course I had no idea what kind they ran with, I was new, or at

least new here. Relationships can start with terms, rules, measures, foundations, you

either know these from the outset, or get messy and figure them out on the pillow, time

after time.

 

So to speak, is the ruse. They spoke, running their mouth’s oC but not directly, through

something, this so to speak - tongues that are rooted down there, in the gut and intestine,

flat-screen and viscera. On the vine, or in the earth, they were cosmetic and air-bound, not

first-hand but filtered through drama held outstretched cold, all surfaces. I started this

relationship all wrong, this wasn’t really their concern after all, but more the relationship

they had with themselves - pillows and feathers, resting and unseen but cozying-on-up to

sleep and restlessness.

 

The quick read was full-frontal but that was another ruse to their askance, side-eyes. What

does their indiCerence to me even mean if what I was witnessing was a confession? It

started to slowly creep in, coded whispering that felt diCerent to all the times before, the

places where I was known, welcome, after all the work I’d done on myself. They’d done this

work and moved on, didn’t care much for it and this troubled me. All this work for nothing. I

shouldn’t be seeing this unfold in public, the flush of feeling in the wrong place at the wrong

time yet suspended, blown up and pointed out as the problem.

 

Then a shift - they needed to be seen by me for their surfaces and glances and tribes of

color, and all the other things I was relucent to accept at first. They needed to find places of

dwelling, belonging but from cobbled-together discarded costumes that didn’t care for all

the work I’d done on myself - so to speak. Needing not just to be seen but held with care, an

erotics of looking that lifted from the pillow in flight, across, through, within. They needed a

witness to their own forms of relation that were often invisible, subterranean or just late-

night viewing when most of us were closed-oC or shut-down.

 

My witnessing was a form of entanglement, I can’t not be wrapped up with legs and arms

all over them, no distance here. This is why they looked at me funny at first – I oCered

distance and suspicion when they needed skin, a suspension of doubt. No pillow talk

without trust and blind faith, it might unravel but by then you’re part of the story.

 

At some point I recall dancing, fluids in motion, reciprocal. Most of what they told me I

can’t quite remember, it was more the feeling of the memory than the memory itself. I felt

my lip curl and chest burn, full from alizarin, trophies and windows. The celebration was

that they came together and danced at all, in defiance of the work many of us have done, or

the stories we have told ourselves. Bearing witness, suspending judgement, feeling joy in

the warmth behind nape and eyelids, whilst being dislodged from the rootedness of the

where and how. Filtered images drifting upwards from tongues that disappear under

bedclothes, soil and sand. In the end, this is how they painted themselves, on the dark

pillow, to be held and not just seen.

 

Neal Rock

Charlottesville, Virginia. November 2025.