Tenor

Nine months from the breakup, Logan comes over to discuss his new tenor saxophone. It’s a beauty of an instrument, so precious he doesn't feel he's earned the right to play it. I ask him when he thinks he'll be ready. Ten thousand more hours of practice, he tells me. I smile. Nod at the number, which speaks to a kind of devotion our relationship never had. Easy math. Easy to digest. He asks about my father. There, fidgeting on the broken futon we once made out on, it’s hard to guess his motivation in coming here. If it’s sexual, he hasn’t let on. If it’s to absolve himself, he’s not doing a great job.

*

But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit.

*

I swiped right because I thought Logan would be good with his hands. That, and, less crass, the way he cradled his saxophone in the smoke onstage, almost in silhouette, was exciting. To date, a man who is passionate about anything, anything at all, is the sexiest thing in the world. Case in point, we fucked on the first date. The way he sipped beer and looked at me through his black-rimmed frames shook me more than I'd like to admit. If I was being poetic, I could say that I wanted to be the lens through which he saw the world. If I wanted to be literal: I just liked the way he looked at me. Like I was someone to admire, or someone serious. He asked my advice about a poem he could read at a cousin's wedding. A brother's? Brother's. He took the poem. Someone read it out at the service. Two months later, it was over. No more poems.

*

Attraction is an exercise in retrospect.

*

It has been six months since Logan and I last spoke and I don’t know why he’s here now, not really. I have ideas. My first book came out recently, that might have something to do with it. It talks about some of my exes quite candidly, and maybe he’s worried he made the cut. I can see the mental image of myself bent over the manuscript, writing withering verse about the intensely vanilla sex we had. I look crazed. I look like a person possessed. None of the poems are about him, but you try telling a man that and all they do is look at you as if you’ve confirmed their theories exactly in that one, singular denial. I would normally have patience for this type of behavior, but as it stands, Logan is the second ex of mine to contact me in the last 24 hours, and if I have to hear a man I liked once tell me he’s so proud of me again, I might lose what’s left of my marbles.

*

I’m fine. This is fine.

*

I should clarify that Logan was not the worst ex I had. Not even close. That honor belongs to a host of faceless college men who appear to me as caricatures in my therapy sessions: emotionally abusive, emotionally unavailable, misogynistic men, a man I genuinely loved who loved to slap me around as we fucked without asking if he could, told me he wanted to tie me to his bed and leave me there until I pissed myself. I was used to that. Expected it, even.

Logan never touched me when I didn’t want to be touched, made pizza for me, even, listened to me bitch about my myriad obligations and the people getting in my way, and tried to learn how to crochet. He started the band of a fuzzy white hat and asked to borrow my copy of Catch 22 so we could talk about it. All the hallmarks of a decent man, trying to make a decent go of a relationship. So in November, when we meet at the coffee shop down my street, when he tells me he doesn’t see me as anything serious and he can’t figure out why, that he’s talked about it to his therapist, it throws me a bit. A lot. It throws me a lot.

*

I’m used to people leaving me before they can tell me why. Maybe that’s what’s getting me the most, the closure of it. Not serious. Unserious. There’s a reason this time. And that’s what I have to deal with.

*

A lot of what I’ve written about has been based on my relationships, romantic, platonic, familial, all the ones in between. As a high schooler just getting into writing serious verse, I gravitated towards poets like Plath and Sexton and Lowell because they made their lives their art, made confessional poetry a serious form of artistic expression. You can imagine that to a person at that point in time, that vulnerable, terrifying time we decide to call adolescence, that freedom to make your interior landscape your art was revolutionary. I still remember the person I was in high school: undiagnosed, unmedicated, struggling with bipolar disorder and depression without realizing not everyone felt like that—I don’t like remembering that person. That person couldn’t see out of the long black tunnel they considered their life. No light. No music. Just a constant, unending string of anxieties and degrading thoughts.

When the boy I loved loved one of my best friends instead, my world shuddered on its axis, and when I went to college, got into my first relationship within two months, lost my virginity in two months, shaking off my high school self like a wet coat, my world continued to shift into a progressively more negative downward spiral. At the time, the rejection felt like a catalyst, the doorway into my love life clouded by this first boy’s shadow. Trying to prove that I am indeed lovable, trying to prove I am past this shadow and not desperate for affection, but tastefully desirable, is something I still struggle with today, openly, despite the feelings for this first love fading with time to a fond affection, a thankfulness for the lessons he inadvertently taught me about unrequited love.

*

When I told one of my high school friends I’d had my first kiss less than 24 hours on campus, she told me this: I always knew you’d be a whore.

*

Logan was, if we’re talking only the men I’ve dated, the best ex I had. He’s guilty of being absent after we’d stopped seeing each other, sending me messages and not responding to my answers, but that’s about the extent of it. I’ve been talking to my therapist about it, and we theorize that maybe I’m not okay with how we reentered each other’s lives because I equate sexuality with suffering, or my inherent bad-ness, or it reminds me of other men who also did not view me as serious. Serious. Even the word in my mouth feels like an insult. I joked to a friend after that it was very Legally Blonde of him because the alternative was to admit that I do not think I am deserving of good love, pure love, and so seek out men who traditionally deny it to me, using me instead as holes.

*

I’ve told my therapist I will stop referring to myself as a series of holes, but still, it happens. He doesn’t laugh, only watches me with a mixture of pity and trepidation as I bray at his video icon on the skype call. It’s not hurtful if you laugh at yourself. It’s not sad. Look at how I’m laughing. See how much fun I’m having, talking this way.

*

I’m still healing from the great love of my life. Logan was the second musician I dated. Luke was the first. He sang acapella, he was in the chamber chorus, he played seemingly every instrument with a dexterity I found insanely compelling. Tall and handsome, intelligent, airing this shy of pretentious, he was someone I loved with an intensity that I thought was beyond me. It was all encompassing, and the tension we’d built up over a number of years where one wasn’t available and the other was, vice versa, studying abroad right as he’d opened the relationship with his girlfriend. In hindsight, maybe that was my sign: us never being in sync with each other. But you try telling that to me at 19, who was flattered by this man’s constant, unerring attention. His tolerance of my rants, of my eccentricities. When I read poems I thought of him. Every love song was a song he sang into the curve of my ear. He touched me sparingly. We never had sex. He only kissed me a handful of times, coming to my door once with a sheepish grin covered in hickies from a freshman girl he’d picked up shortly after we’d become more than friends. I acted like I didn’t care.

And when he wanted out of the situationship we’d built, he got cruel. Mean wasn’t a flattering color on him, but it was what I was used to. Familiar territory. I tried to get him interested again, but could never get him on the phone. I grew used to the dial tone, the busy signal: the hallmarks of disinterest. When I began treating him like a casual acquaintance, he told me I was withholding, that he wanted more from me, wanted to know how I was really doing. But when I showed him my emotions, he didn’t want them. He was sick of my yearning, my bloody beating heart. Instead, he inquired about a man I’d started seeing, and behaved shocked when I told him that wasn’t something I would ever be comfortable discussing with him. Men, my mother said, shaking her head at me. She’d watched the whole saga of our confusing courtship with growing concern. No one should make you behave like this, she told me as she watched me bawl on our dilapidated couch when he’d missed another phone call, and then another. Our dog curled at my feet as I sobbed into the cushions. I thought I might die from the hurt.

I am choosing to believe he genuinely didn’t know how to communicate expectations with me instead of my other conclusion: that he was using me as a twisted sort of character development. I am choosing to live in ignorance because the alternative depresses me in that age old way: taking to my bed in the middle of the day, refusing to eat or bathe. The shuffle and bump of my bad feet on the wood floors of my apartment on those days is the only sound I can bear, the only one that cancels out the voices in my mind screaming failure, failure at me as I let this man get under my skin once again.

The poems I’ve written about Luke could fill a collection. I could paper my apartment with them, have my failures stare me in the face and make me doubt and wonder if I should replace any sense of self-worth I had with the way the laugh lines around his eyes would crease when he smiled. Or how excited he was when we opened his graduate school acceptance letter together and we embraced, and the world seemed possible and entirely, delightfully, cliche.

I haven’t figured out what to do with the poems yet, so they sit mildewing in a drawer, my enduring shame. They’ve followed me from state to state, moving past the borders of Bryn Mawr and Haverford to Rochester in lilac season, when the world is green and the life I wanted once has finally stretched in front of me and yet, still, there he is, the annoying coworker I can’t live without, the constant and aggravating muse that’s fueled my art for years. You could say I don’t know how to let things go, and you’d be right. But something in me died that night in April when he kissed me in the dark, and I’m still trying to recover it. I don’t even know what it is. So. What’s there to do except what I know how to do best, and that’s writing.

But the silver lining: they’re good poems. I’ll give them that. Must be why I keep writing them. I mean, case in point, see how much I’ve written about him in opposition to any other person mentioned in this essay. Even Logan, who this was supposed to be about.

Luke sang tenor. And unfortunately, the association writes itself.

*

I have tortured myself by asking the question: years away from that April night, and a whole new version of myself in play, why am I still writing about this past heartbreak that somehow still has the intensity and pain of a fresh cut, a gash in my side where his indifference found a home?

Because years later and a whole lifetime away, I still find him, discover him, the elephant in the room of all my other relationships. When someone has so intrinsically dictated how you view yourself as a person worthy of love, of genuine human affection and consideration, it leaves more than just a passing blow. And I never asked him for anything except that consideration. I asked that if he had ever loved me, he showed it by being gracious with my grief over the relationship ending. I still sometimes return to the text he sent me two months before he cut me out of his life completely: I’ll be here if and when you decide to reach out again.

When he did finally unfriend me, it was two days before Valentine’s Day. At the time, I wondered if this was an act of kindness or self-preservation. Today, more than a year and a half since we last spoke, I’m still undecided. Maybe adulthood is realizing you will never have the closure you want, and for the rest of your life, you are defined by that which you’ve been made to go without, willingly or otherwise.

*

My partner is bewildered every time I thank him for doing something small: for getting me a can of coke from the fridge, or bringing me Tylenol after a long, cramped day of driving to and from my office job. He’s puzzled because it doesn’t occur to him to be anything but supportive, anything but decent. He brings me the soda. He brings me Tylenol. Unprompted, and without complaint. In the world of metaphors, our bed is a boat on a calm sea, and we glide through the water together. We glide easily.

*

I show Logan out, watch him fade into the August heat. The palm trees on his shirt seem to wave back and forth as he retreats, and I go upstairs to where I will pass my hours until I fall asleep, or until my partner comes to get me. He knows I’m talking with Logan today, and he tells me to do what I need to do, only let him know when he’s needed. It feels nice, having a home to come back to, a person who is making me unlearn these behaviors I have cultivated out of a fear no one will ever love me again.

My apartment is barely cooler than outside, but I sit, feeling sweat gather on my lip, and there is a note of relief, like the air clearing after smog has hung like a fist overhead for days. I do not tear my hair. I do not rend my garments and feed scraps of fabric to the wind for a man who does not love me.

*

My life, when blown out to the periphery, seems infinite. And the past stays firmly where it is. It is rock solid. It moves only when I want it to.

Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer is the author of the poetry collection Bad Animal (Riot in Your Throat, 2023) and the chapbook Small Geometries (Ethel, 2023.) The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, their work has been published or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, The Adroit Journal, Crazyhorse, Poet Lore, Beloit Poetry Journal, and others. They’ve been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. They attend Syracuse University’s MFA program and serve as Director of Development & Publicity at BOA Editions.