there have been people who enter my household with a sense of entitlement, greedy fingers stroking the sleepy surfaces of appliances, heirlooms, archaic picture frames. i will spare their actions a fleeting and reproachful glare, and then i have lost a certain kind of respect for them which cannot be regained. it is silly to hold lifelong grudges, but i believe several behaviours are intrinsic components of a human being’s core. if a thirty year old walks into my house, a whistle escaping puckered asshole lips and incriminating oily fingerprints amalgamating upon the shallower fruits of my labour, i understand something important about him. by such an age, surely he has been in enough peoples’ homes to intuitively comprehend it is rude and pretentious to drop excess skin cells across various household appliances. he knows what he is doing is inconsiderate, and he continues. even if he becomes the politest man in the world, i have already learned the nature of his repressed instincts.

people do not change. they accommodate, but they do not change. i am the same man i was twenty-nine years ago, submerged in embryonic fluid with a parasitic heartbeat. my tastes have evolved, but i am the same.

when kieran entered my home for the first time, i had already spent countless nights in his apartment collecting his skin beneath my fingernails. i knew his body flawlessly, from the depths of the dimples of his back (the left was deeper) to his asymmetrical collarbones. we were not friends, only lovers. we did not call each other to discuss any number of mundane topics, and the lack of companionship between us made our unusual tryst enticingly intimate.

this young, twenty-one year old man walked around my townhouse with an air of self-confidence, running his slender and eggshell-white fingertips across the countertops, leaving streaks i would have to gather the resolve to scrub away. his assurance in the continuity of my positive receptions was startlingly romantic, and i found myself wishing he would carelessly drop a dish rather than coldly roam the hallways barefoot like i requested of my guests. when he did not disappoint (sometimes i was sure he could read my thoughts through his fingers; he would place them on my temples while i thrust inside him and i felt him extracting memories like strands of spaghetti,) i was infatuated.

the general populous has a strange idea of intimacy. intercourse is placed upon a cracked brass pedestal representing the utmost in human closeness, but there are many things that are far more endearing. i can position myself atop any number of human beings, but i will not be able to press my nose against the neck of anyone while they prepare me breakfast at two in the afternoon. i cannot hold anyone and lay quietly in bed, saying nothing because we do not feel an unquenchable social thirst to fill silences with warm red clay. i cannot kiss anyone and delight in feeling the puppy-tummy fur on the back of their neck rise against my lips. i cannot watch anyone handle my belongings as if they are their own, but i crave kieran to shamelessly manhandle my things with an almost sexual urgency.

that is a privilege i have never granted any of my friends, lovers, houseguests. breaking that barrier with kieran makes me love him more than the girlfriends i’ve whispered sweet-nothings to a thousand-million times while laying flaccid inside of them. in a way, he has taken one of my many virginities.

kieran did not touch my things out of shameless and selfish abandon; he touched my things because he loaned his body to my sticky hands on a weekly basis and knew he was entitled to such simple pleasures, and even if i insisted he could not rub his elbows against my dusty fine china in order to admire his distorted reflection, god-be-damned if he wouldn’t reap the benefits he had rightfully earned.

i am in love with kieran, and i can never pursue my emotions because the very things i love about him will surge somewhere above us like steam alongside the discarded mysteries of our relationship.