His Feathered Grief
by Adam Swanson
Jen Fuller, Fleeting, 100 glass “paper” planes projection mapped with video of the moving sky, 11 x 9 x 20 feet, 2016. Temporary installation at Oregon Museum of Science for Portland Winter Light Festival.
His Feathered Grief
Adam Swanson | DEC 2021 | ISSUE 12
The first time I let a man hold my body was recent; a Florida-born man with a good job in New York City and a dead dad buried just a few months after mine. I could see the grief that lived beneath his face when we met, though it was a softer grief, a type I don’t think I’ve ever known. We were at a wedding the weekend before our bodies met, both groomsmen for a July bride as we stood next to each other in a robin’s egg blue church among other men we didn’t know. They were all lawyers for U.S. Supreme Court Justices and international airline companies and other questionable enterprises. We were the bride’s gay best friends, and it was obvious. At least to us.
Her aunt was an early drunk and making enough of a subtle scene over the course of the afternoon that I wondered if anyone would notice if I held his hand while we stood next to one another and observed a ceremony the priest called, “God’s holy matrimony.”
As I got to know him over the wedding weekend—over barroom billiards and suit changing and matching ties—I tried to make subtle space for him to grieve and never mentioned anything about burying my dad in the desert two months earlier. He made small comments about his father here and there. The years his dad spent in jail. Their distance. Pieces of a picture I didn’t need to know but welcomed.
The ceremony turned into the reception which turned into the after party. It was all dancing and laughing children or funky chicken grandparents, and we stayed close to one another, ready for whatever might come next from a new attraction—subtle grins from opposite corners of the room, choosing to share the back seat of the same car on the ride to the after party, a chair pulled out for me. Over those three days, we collected small gestures with a kind of hidden intimacy, clear and steady and mutual. “Can I get you something to drink?” We used his hotel room to change into our suits. He leaned in to straighten my purple tie before the wedding.
By the weekend’s end, we exchanged numbers and texts. Back home a few days later, the next Friday, he took the 6:00 p.m. train from New York to Washington. I took the day off work. I cooked and cleaned with rigor and care—my house and my body. My neck grew stiff with anticipation and my anxiety peaked with longing. Something intimate with someone kind, something I didn’t know how to handle. I ran out to buy him a gift, a book about “grief as a thing with feathers.” I’d just read it, a Max Porter novel with a title riffing on Emily Dickinson, and I thought, I hoped, that maybe it’d speak to him. His soft grief.
When he arrived at the gate of my apartment building, we kissed right there—on the steps next to Hosta plants and little weeds coming through the concrete. I was nervous, still too excited. What was a progression from a structured weekend with friends to an unstructured weekend with me?
He seemed calm.
Inside, we ate. We talked. We were alone and music played and my past and his past mostly stayed secrets from one another, and it felt good. He was kind. He was the type of kind that made me want to have feathers—to be read like the shape of words in a book.
In the bedroom, I watched him take in the space and longed for him to comment on the Baryshnikov photographs or the large ceramic raku vase that I bought in the desert to commemorate my dad’s death or the books or cleanliness or clean bedsheets, but he didn’t say anything about any of those things. Instead, he was quiet. Almost romantic, you could say. He sat at the edge of my bed, grabbed at my hips, and pulled me toward him. His hands touched me softly, and I didn’t know where to put my hands with a man so sweet. I tried to be sweet, too.
Then clothes left. Words left. Our mouths spoke, but only through tongues.
His skin was soft. My skin was soft, too, and his beard was coarser than mine. And then it happened—as it always happens, and as I knew it would probably happen. Fear in me creeps in like a bathtub pushing over the edge, overflowing. I become like an animal, scared and guarding its home. Past traumas, unprocessed and seemingly ever-present. As we lay there, the edges of my body began to tremble with quick increases of debilitating intensity. Too often, scattered memories of men molesting me and other men raping me flood my senses and defeat my attractions. Kinetic energy takes over my flesh, and suddenly his body turns too electric—almost painful against the layers of my protective skin working. At other times, I’d survived this sequence of events by exiting the edges of myself, knowingly leaving my carcass there, free to the other’s ambition, whatever that may be.
But he was kind—I didn’t want to disappear. So instead, I decided to clench his fingers in mine, ceasing their search, and through a quick breath, I asked him to stop.
I was sitting up, our legs still intertwined, and below me his eyes studied my face and chest, searching for something before he asked if everything was okay. He was still calm. No one had ever acknowledged or seen my feelings in this way, and with a desire to hide the fucked-up stories of my past, I made myself mumble through words and ambiguous excuses I don’t want to remember. Whatever I said, he listened, and he waited. Once the space went quiet again, he brought his hand to his chest, brushed a few small circles into his skin and said, “Why don’t you just lie here and let me hold you?” And as the letters of his question left his mouth, I was almost lost again. My lungs wanted to forget how to breathe. And slowly I did. I didn’t forget how to breathe, but I lay there. I lowered the weight of myself onto him and let his naked body hold mine. I allowed myself to feel an ease past the past.
The wrap of his arms took up the entire space of my back. His fingers clasped firm and quietly around the bottom of my neck. The exhales of my stomach worked to take on the shape of his inhales. It almost felt political. Like justice and revolution in the most personal of ways. Two men, naked, with dad issues. Two men working to be sweet. Two men creating moments of tender touch. Years of desire for connection occurred between two breathing bodies—his and mine. The past in the past, and a present that was naked and no longer trembling.
After a while, still breathing, he said something in the same voice one might use upon finding a fossilized rock in the desert—a voice of death’s past amazement. “With every breath you take,” he said, “I can feel your body relax a little bit more than the breath before.”
And for a while, I stayed. I stayed breathing in my body.
Adam Swanson’s writing has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Washington Post, Lambda Literary Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Writing by Writers, Lambda Literary, and the Creative Writing Program at Emerson College. Adam is the Senior Prevention Specialist at the Suicide Prevention Resource Center.
Portland-based installation artist Jen Fuller has been constructing ephemeral glass, steel, and light experiences around the United States for over 10 years. As a self-taught artist, Fuller found her passion rooted in the traditional techniques of kiln-formed glass, industrial welding, and digital lighting. Her art reflects the delicate vulnerability and intrinsic interconnectedness of nature and humanity. Fuller’s work has been commissioned by Metro Regional Government, Ovation TV, Lan Su Chinese Garden, OMSI, Olbrich Botanical Garden and private collectors around the world.