RED
Last summer I had a brief but intense relationship during the month of August. It ended kind of abruptly, but on a positive note. We both realized we valued different things. And I thought, look at us, how mature we must be to separate so amicably and cleanly. Even so. All of August was stamped with our shared world and time of two.
August is my favorite month for simple enough reasons. It’s like the Sunday of the year. Soft melancholy. Relaxed finale. The time of rest and culmination before the Monday of September starts. Nothing eventful in my life ever happened in August, to be fair. That’s almost the point. Or at least a point in its favor. In August, summer begins its subtle dissolve. Not goodbye, but almost goodbye, that winding down sound of farewell. Ice cream nights. A spider dangling from the rearview mirror. I remember one evening in August this big firework show my father took me to near a field stuffed with thousands of fireflies. I didn’t care much for the fireworks. But huddled safely in my father’s hairy thighs, that soft field amid a sea of flickering insects, it became a core memory. Not necessarily any special significance. It just was.
I’m digressing.
The heart of the matter is this: I met Sebastian last summer, around late July, at a film festival in the Lower East Side. A cute retro theater that played cult films called Metrograph. The weekend festival’s theme was all about the color red. We weren’t seated next to one other during the Almodóvar film playing that night. But I noticed him: a stranger arriving. I took my quick glance. What a cutie. I didn’t ascribe anything to it. The film was one I’d long loved but never thought about to analyze too deeply. Listen, I’m not a dolt. I knew color matters in this director’s films quite a lot. His visual surfaces are mind-blowing. But I didn’t need to go beyond a casual observation of the pattern, beyond the mere enjoyment of the thing being happily, if emptily, itself.
Seb overheard a comment I made to a friend in front of the popcorn stand after the screening. I was musing aloud about how the use of red in the film felt wonderfully simple, almost light-handed. Atmospheric. My friend went to the bathroom. Seb stepped forward softly yet firmly and told me I was dead wrong. No excuse me. No hey can I chime in? No weirdness that we were total strangers. Here was some artsy boy interrupting my polite universe with his cocky hot take.
He had my full attention.
A week later on our third date, we were still arguing about that initial dispute. The suddenness of our meeting felt dreamy. He was so confident yet gentle. He had barged into my tidy world and took a seat. It was hot. At dinner I maintained that color in a highly artistic film should be natural, embodied, without heavy motives. He argued—with great vehemence—that I was being willfully ignorant. Films are expensive. Every detail, especially something like, say, that pale fox shade of red, that almost-orange tone you see in a film like Her—required millions of dollars in casting, set design, editing, costuming. It wasn’t just symbolism. It was a matter of economics. Nothing in a film “just happens.” It’s deliberate choices all the way down.
I sighed and turned my head away with a muted chuckle. I hated the idea that art had to be translated into something else to be appreciated. His narrowing eyes never failed to charm me. Especially during his cerebral rants. I love a dork.
Okay. Yes. I fell a little in love with Seb and his speeches. His hyper-articulate, critical, agile mind. Was I intimidated maybe? Sure. Don’t get it wrong, I enjoyed when sometimes we made love, sometimes just fucked. Seb loved to challenge me to be softer, slower, more “vulnerable.” Even so, the real heat of our connection was aesthetic debate. It animated me wildly. It was a major turn on.
Seb had studied logic and philosophy at a fancy college, had family ties to Portugal. He kept an ongoing Notes app diary of various artistic judgments. All recorded like iron-clad verdicts. I would tease him about the tone. Call him Young Moses. But I also told him he really should consider publishing his criticism somewhere. Not my thing, he claimed. I didn’t press it. I was the resident “writer.” Whatever that meant.
I want to pretend these things didn’t overly impress me. But they did. He was confident, realized, if still in process with how public to make his intellect. Insecure? I mean only adorably so. Small dog/loud bark adjacent. And though he was shorter than me (slightly), I always felt he seemed at least two inches taller. He was headstrong and upright. I loved his punchy moxie. God, he was such a fire sign (Sag). For someone not yet thirty he had authority. He had perspective.
My own insecurity? Well, that year I had started publishing queer erotica for the first time and was starting to get some money from it. More than I ever did from poetry. I was tired of literary posturing, even if I still saw it as “sacred.” Secretly it alone mattered, though I had moved on. I liked how the writing was designed to order: I would take a fragment or kernel of my own reality, then dress it up to get people aroused or jerk off, strangers from anywhere in the known universe. People cared about the work not because they studied it, but because their bodies reacted. “The body does not lie” my first poetry professor had told us once; now I was putting it into full practice. But for others.
In fact, Seb liked my old poems—poems that were abstract, impressionistic, weird. He didn’t care if he got them. He loved that they were ambitious. Lowkey brilliant, he said. I blushed and stuck my head back in a book of Grindr torsos with softboy captions.
Whenever I read him my newer work—slutty short form fiction—he only nodded. Smiled and peppered me with “That’s clever” or “Hot.” I felt a kind of chill descend between us. Not hurt. Just detachment. I stopped sharing my new writing. Meanwhile, he’d ask me now and then to text him an old poem of mine or someone else’s while he was at work. This all sounds so incredibly vain of me. I know. But our whole relationship was built on aesthetic argument. Hey, it’s easier to cut at something than be the one cut into. And we all have forks and knives. I wanted to please him with my words. I wanted to please him as much as the use of symbolic color in European cinema had pleased him.
Seb had slightly green eyes. A shade I now think of to myself as ‘Sebastian green.’ The final week of August, they had never looked so beautiful to me. He’d be making coffee near the window. Or turn from my writing desk to ask me to turn my junk pop music down. I’d pretend to be paying attention, but then I’d see them there. His eyes. Exposed by slanting afternoon light. He had such quiet beauty.
We hadn’t debated anything in days. One night we watched a film and both agreed: it was fine. OK. Not bad. Kind of interesting? We lay in his bed, made love, then each read our separate books before falling unconscious. We never needed to touch or hold each other while we slept. I loved that permission to exist alone in that way.
It was the last day of August. He was about to leave for a work trip then see family abroad. Nothing happened. But I knew. I knew it was over. He’d come back and we wouldn’t resume our bedroom coupledom. No particular reason. I had already decided that that was fine. I didn’t want to be in an ongoing story with anyone. I was pretty sure neither did he.
Before I left that night, I brought up our first interaction. The meaning of the color red. I needed to know. I asked with a laugh: Why had he been so goddamn adamant I was wrong?
He explained calmly.
Patterns always have intentional meaning. I said he was cheating himself the joy of accidental beauty. That coincidence and randomness could count for art as much as calculation. Aren’t surfaces sometimes, especially in art, more than enough? He kept nodding. And while he never rolled his eyes or shrugged at me, I felt like he was taking on the human shape of Whatever. It irritated me, but not too much. I remember thinking: We will never settle this, our great debate.
This is where the story should end. It doesn’t.
When Seb came back, we got coffee, admitted neither of us were looking for anything serious. Hugged kindly. He paid for breakfast. Then we parted on our merry ways. A very mutual and quite un-dramatic conclusion to a lovely summery chapter. No sharp cut-to-black; and no slow need for prolonged credits music either. That was that.
Fast forward to now months later, in the start of spring, when alone in my bed late at night I read a piece by someone named Jeremy (no last name) on the same exact queer erotica site I published in often. The article was called “Red.” It opened with: “That night I drained him dry three times.” Hot. This was the kind of writing this mag encouraged for 20 or 30-somethings, kind of “faggot diaries” meets imaginary tell all. Yet in “Red” sex was not the focus oddly. It was no more than a page.