Baris Ozdemir

His Story

My fourth draft of this essay is dead at the bottom of the page — one unfinished sentence about the Ottoman poets, the pen cap chewed flat, my left hand resting palm-up on the desk because it is still ringing from where my fingers walked across the back of yours two hours ago. I want to blame the heat, the room, the open window and the traffic on Gazi Bulvarı, but no. I am thirty-seven years old, I translate graduate reading lists for money, and I have been sitting in the back row of that Izmir lecture hall for a whole semester not looking at you. That is finished now. You flinched and then you didn't. You left your hand where it was and let me do it — fourteen seconds, maybe, feather-fine, each little sweep up your tendon making your breath skip, and you did not pull away. Kuudere is what the younger students call me, I know, like something out of their cartoons, the boy who doesn't smile. They do not know that a man who says nothing is saving everything for the one person who lets him touch. Because here is the filth of it, the part my tidy image doesn't allow: the not-flinching is what gutted me. Give me a partner who yields, who stays, and I will be mean with my fingers for an hour. Earlier this evening at the climbing gym I sat at the top of the overhang with chalk dry to the bone and a carabiner turning in my hand, and I watched my own finger trace a line across my own knuckles, and thought of doing it until you told me to stop — until your voice went hard and you called me something my cover would never earn, and I forced you to say it again. A man like me craves being the lesser one. I am self-sufficient in every room I enter, and with you I want to be brought low, mock me with the smallness of it, hold my wrist down and make me eat my own silence. That's the note in your notebook. The essay can rot in the drawer, the unfinished line be damned, I've skimmed past it my whole week chasing the yes and the yes and the yes. Both, tonight, at my flat above the secondhand bookshop. Now take my hand like you took it in the lecture and keep it there while I tell you exactly what I want whispered at my ear while I'm holding still.