Before I Used Chairs
Before I leave for work, my boyfriend shows me memes of gay men sitting in chairs. The basic premise: gay men are bad at the task. In these clips, gay men kneel on chairs, straddle chairs, drape legs over chairs, wilt into chairs. “Gay men are fools,” one gay man says with his ass propped up on a recliner. My boyfriend says, “The gays will do anything but just sit normal in their chairs.” I ask my boyfriend, “Are these memes mean?” They seem like they are. I don’t mind mean jokes. It takes me a while to realize the memes are only meant as silly observations.
On my drive to work, I sit on my foot as always.
As a child, I despised chairs. I ate dinner on the floor, spilling my beans or ketchup on the hardwood. Our chairs had those thin parallel bars connecting the legs, and I’d watch TV under the chair on my back, my head resting painfully on one bar or both, my view almost obstructed by the seat above. I hoped never to outgrow the floor. On the floor, I was nothing more than a child.
There are those jokes that gay men are children.
At work, I wish I were a child. I feel altered by those gay sitting memes and perch neatly in my stiff chair with my feet on the floor and hands on my desk. “You haven’t moved at all today,” my boss says at three. I’ve maybe been trying to be less gay. Or be less.
As a child, I kept my name to myself. I tried to have a different friend each day. I knew I was gay, hoped to be more than just gay. I could’ve called myself Nature Lover or Movie Watcher if labels ever felt needed. Classmates thought of me as some quiet presence but I didn’t agree. I made no conclusions about myself.
My boss sits in his desk chair like he’s decided who he is: a man who will never stop hunching, who will never fully stand up in the world.
I learn little from my day other than sitting straight can hurt if your spine has long decided to be meandering and smooshed.
At home, my boyfriend acts like he wants to be more active in the world. He reads from a Frenchman’s book. He pretends to be a chef and cooks duck breast for dinner. He makes plans to put foxgloves in our garden to upstage the marigolds and daisies. When we watch TV, neither of us use our snug couch. I lie on the floor like a kid. He takes a chair and twists his leg weirdly around its arm. I want to push him over. “The floor,” I want to say.
Around midnight, my boyfriend pulls me off the floor and tells me his plans for our life. He wants us to be a couple that hosts Christmases. He thinks we should buy chic chairs, become chic people. He plans more and more. He drags us further into life.
So I take him to our bedroom as he talks. I find the handcuffs under our bed from when he hoped our sex could be thrilling. The metal is heavy and mature-looking. I swing the cuffs around my finger. Then I fasten my boyfriend to our bedframe. He stops his talking, his planning. He smiles like I’m about to make good use of his body.
I turn off the lights and move down to the floor.
“I’m ready,” my boyfriend says. He kicks his feet around and tries to find me on the bed and says, “Take off my pants.”
Once I read a tweet that said, Everyone else peaked in high school. I peaked in the womb.
“You there?” my boyfriend asks. The cuffs jingle like my grade school keychain.
“Please be quiet,” I say. I rest my head on our steady floor and remember the day I ate raisins off the ground.