Tinnitus

It is not often that I'm left speechless. I've got words for just about everything. They say certain Inuit tribes have over one hundred and fifty words for snow. The Swahili language has no word for boredom. And, according to various websites and books, there are a variety of languages that don't have a direct translation for love. Which makes me wonder if they're inundated with thousands of words to describe manipulative, lying ex-boyfriends. If not, they can borrow a few of mine.

Thanks to an internet stalker friend, I started a profile on what is, essentially, fagspace. Even the coding is similar to Myspace. So, instantly, I hated it. When I, further, discovered that they have old school AOL-style chatrooms, I contemplated deleting my account all together. And then I started talking with a cute guy, who was Interesting and Interested, and that was all fine, well, and good.

Later, while I was putting up some pictures, I got an IM from someone familiar looking. Maybe someone from the poetry scene, or the comic book store. A passing acquaintance. One that I had possibly imagined naked.

We were small talking about Boston, and why he hates it, and why I love it, when I asked him why he left.

"I'm more of a small town guy." He said. "Too many people in the city know me, or think they know me, and things get really awkward."

I decided not tell him "You do look kind of familiar." Damn it, fingers, don't type without consulting my brain.

He sighed. (We were chatting via webcam, so I could see him. {Don't judge me! I have three hundred and fortyteen words for fuck off.}) "You probably know me from the clubs. I used to be a gogo dancer."

No. "I don't go to clubs. I must have just seen you around."

And we small talked, and he asked me if I minded if he friended me. Of course, I didn't. So when the invitation came, I clicked on his profile, and...and then I knew.

I can't imagine there are too many inoffensive ways to say "On my bookshelf, I have four DVDs of you getting fucked. Including a birthday orgy scene, where you were, by the way, amazing."

So, I'm speechless, because, believe it or not, porn stars intimidate me. Not because of their huge cocks, or perfect asses (I have ninety-twelve hundred words for those...some of them overlap with the words for ex-boyfriends); I am intimidated because I know that they've had better looking, better endowed, paid professionals in their ass. And knowing things like that is much different than imagining things like that, suspecting things like that, or being told things like that. I know exactly what frequency he moans in when he means it. And, if the whole derivation of porn names is true, I know the name of his first pet, and what street he lived on as a kid. And I want to move to that street. I want to find thirtyleven words for the way his bare feet scraped against the cracked pavement, twenty-twodred ways to describe the way the air smelled the first time he noticed his neighbor's cleft chin, surely the trees in his neighborhood have an infinite amount of terms for the way he peeled back their bark with his fingers.

Understand, I don't have very many words for love, and none of them describe the way I feel for this guy who's real name I just learned, at all. How (fill in one of the thirtillion words for desperately naive stupidity brought about by the confusions of lust and love here) do you think I am?

The word for the way I feel is a lust I am all too not unfamiliar with. And I am acquainted with more variations of the feeling of lust than heterosexual male teenagers have words for breasts.

Recently, my lust was called into question by Sora, who never did get a grip on the way I felt about him, so he let me slip between his fingers. As though love and lust were like binary. There is only 0 and 1, there is no 3.14etc. Square roots are right out!

And since his language had no direct equivalent for my feelings, he could never hear them quite right. All my explanations were babble and gobbledy-greek.

They say that when your ears ring, you are hearing that frequency for the last time in your life. It's the sound of a frayed nerve ending giving out. From that point on, every middle G sharp will sound just a little bit flatter to you. You will probably never notice this.

There are fifteen foursand things I would have liked to express each time Sora and I have said goodbye. They all mean something like fuck you and please don't leave. What they boil down to is "I'm sorry that you were never able to be honest with me, though really, I shouldn't be the one apologizing since that isn't my fault; and fault isn't exactly the right word there, but language is weak and cowardly sort of like packing up all your belongings and moving while I was out of state; or the way you only really talked with me when you were drunk; and precisely the way a goodbye e-mail feels the day after you left with my come on your ass and a smile on your lips like nothing was wrong anymore." I don't want to name that feeling after him. He has already infected too much of my vocabulary. His name already too reggaeton.

The last thing I said to him, not knowing anything was wrong, was "I love you."

May those words ring in his ears until he can never hear them again.