The boy I had been, the boy I had wanted, and the boy I lost somewhere along the way
by Spencer Robert Young
To my younger self, and after Ross Gay
Because I love you. And because Mountain Dew never tastes
as good as it did that one weekend in 2008, when Mom let you
buy a pack from Hy-Vee and, hour after hour, seven times
in one night, you wandered out to the fridge in the garage
and grabbed a fresh can, still dripping with condensation
as they did in the magazine ads, with the boys and the girls
wearing kneepads and denim at the skatepark, hair glassy
with gel or bound up in pink pigtails, drinking it like
the radio-green elixir you knew it to be, champions
of the half-pipe, 720 spin with a drink in one hand,
and like them, you downed each can in just two minutes,
crushed its shape into a weightless dumbbell in your fist,
and gnawed to bits each aluminum tab with your front teeth,
their eroded enamel and grainy bite the only meager evidence
I still have from those days I cannot remember—
my missing boyhood, bordering the gloss and shine
of the magazine page—that I was someone before
all this desire consumed me, that I was someone like you,
and though I can tell you this, and you may nod your head
and smile in reassurance, I know that you have not yet met
the boy from Algebra, the one who sat at the table next
to mine, laughing at my bad jokes with his mousey nose,
and his perfect teeth, and his soccer fit, and his mess
of freckles, and his ballcap hair, dirty blonde: I need to tell you
how I lost myself for him, and if the way I self-correct
in the mirror (suck in my belly, flex my calves, align my spine,
and tussle my hair) is any indication, then I am still lost
(even though I have not seen this boy in years),
and even though I am long past my need for him,
I need to tell you this story because it becomes
your story, too: you, who I see on the edges of my teeth,
tab on your tongue, shame serrating your desire like a pair
of scissors stripping a flat ribbon to curl; that shame,
which bloomed so bleak in my body I knew it would kill me
if I could not find a new logic that relaxed the taut rope
in my throat I could wrap every thought around,
that I could not stop watching him chew on that pencil,
leaving bitemarks in the wood, while I picked at my lips,
ate flesh, and licked blood welling in the wound:
that first wave of awkward, sexual hunger, which led
to a kind of craving I could chase but never satisfy—
that I wanted to rid myself of goodness, that I wanted
what felt warm and what felt empty to switch places,
so we cut out the Mountain Dew, threw our last bottle
in the trash, half-full, and cut out late-night snacks,
no popcorn, just a cup of crushed ice and sugar-free
flavoring to convince our body it was full when,
of course, it never was, because breakfast became a
bowl of raisin bran in almond milk, and lunch became a bigger
bowl of raisin bran in almond milk, unless I was at school,
where I ate a sandwich with one serving of peanut butter,
a banana, and a baggie of roasted almonds, shutting myself
into my body, which I knew to be the best way to keep myself
busy with a kind of hunger I could understand, and it worked,
my magic trick rhetoric: in three months I transformed
into the shape of the boy from Algebra, solving, I thought,
the mystery of my desire for a body I was not supposed
to want, but it didn’t change a thing, as I still dreamt
of the boy with the pencil in his mouth, and when
I found myself behind him, climbing up the stairwell,
I loved to watch his legs clench and soften with every step,
and he noticed, as did everyone at school that year,
the way I ate myself with a smile on my face,
and to be honest, some days, I want to believe in it all,
that it happened for a reason—that this story taught me
how much I can withstand without breaking like a sentence
midway through—that I can push myself past safety
because I know what it feels like on the other side
of extremity—the twirl of it, the way each choice
became a calculation, each desire a deliberation—
but then, I run my tongue along the front ridge
of my teeth, their ground-out plateau of useful bone,
and I remember you: the boy who loved
Mountain Dew and Sum 41; cargo shorts
and quoting Jim Gaffigan inside the pillow fort
you made for yourself; your pet crawfish, King,
who never nipped at your fingers; dancing
to Silverstein in your bedroom alone; freeze pops
after gym class and watermelon mouthwash; reading
The Hunger Games before it was cool; marathons
of Whose Line Is It Anyway? or Smash Bros. tourneys
with Neil from next door; melting fruit snacks
in the microwave, their aluminum wrappers setting
small fires we put out with a wet cloth or an ice cube.