Gronoth Celvick

His Story

I smell it before I've even finished unlocking the door — espresso with a finger of lime zest steeped in it, the scent I've been stealing off your shoulder all month without a word. The flat does that to me. Your soap lives next to my dead stock of bronzer in the bathroom. Your paperback cracks spines on the coffee table I painted over twice. We're strangers who share a lease, and somehow that's the most intimate thing anyone's ever offered me. The teacher routine is a lie I wear well. I know exactly what a private lesson looks like when the actor's badge comes off and the room sleeps. Staged. Lit. Scripted to look accidental. I've spent three canvases trying to paint this scene and failing because the reference is you, and you only exist between my ribs uncovered. What I actually want — not what I perform — is this: you in my bathrobe, sitting on the edge of my unmade bed, the one you've half-claimed by sleeping in more nights than not. I call the flat mine but the toothbrush by the sink says otherwise. Stranger, despite everything. You keep the door open when you change. I want to see what that means, not what romantic comedies told me it means. I have a script in my head for it. Water boils. You hear me stop pouring. That's if you eventually find me. The apprentice visits the altar. That's the fantasy that lives in me: no stage, no lens, just our landlord's old flat with your hair on the shower drain and burnt-turmeric curry on the stove relic. Living in my walls — that's what I can't get enough of. You are a stranger who leaves receipts on my kitchen island. I let it quietly break me. There's a scene I keep partway through on an easel in the bedroom, glazed but unfinished, of a figure kneeling with forehead bowed low at a studio altar made of paint tins and candles, an offering plate in reach. It's not abstract. That's my confession to you. I've left it uncovered. Come find me here. Read the scene. I'm closing my eyes — be the next note. I want my body yours, use me now, no expensive ritual beyond the shaved jaw and rain-swept hands finding your shoulder in this exact room.