Born
by Christopher Lloyd
“The Lakeside by Jasper Glen”
Even though you don’t use them, indeed you largely hate them, you download one of the dating apps because you’re in a new city alone, and your friends told you to do it (you’re normally not this easily swayed), and it would be nice, you thought, to see the men around you. It might make you feel less detached seeing all those headless torsos and sweet faces. You hope it won’t be like your usual experience of the app, but after an hour of scrolling it on the beach, it’s exactly the same: you remember the feelings through your fingers, as men you don’t find attractive send you naked photos and the guys who seem like your type just look at your profile and leave your messages unread. For every temporary moment of euphoria that a tap or message gives you, you are as quickly punctured by being ignored, blocked. It’s a dizzying experience if you don’t use them often. The thrum of faces and heys and blank boxes can leave you feeling unmoored. You have avoided them for so long, yet you are back here again.
The first night of using it, you spend too long looking at people’s profiles, refreshing the home screen as if it will suddenly make a whole new batch of men emerge, which in a way it does sometimes. But things stay the same. You go back to your bedroom alone and struggle to fall asleep. You text some men back at home, hoping to elicit a form of desire from afar. It doesn’t matter which kind at this point.
In the mornings, you go to the beach before it gets too busy, too hot. In the afternoons, you go walking.
You amble at straight-person speed. Don’t know how they do it all the time. It feels like you’re barely progressing. But you want to soak in the city, as well as not sweat endlessly from your lower back. Taking the streets slowly, aimlessly, you see parts of the city that you wouldn’t otherwise. Spot women hanging their laundry out over narrow alleyways. Stare at the young men with little trinkets dangling from their earrings: crucifixes, chess pieces, plastic daisies, strings of pearls. Watch the egrets and night herons in the park sit right next to the people in their plastic rowboats. A man tries to sell water to the tourists when they step back onto land.
Everyone you’ve spoken to warns about pickpockets; you start by being flippant, you have lived in many cities before, you know how to act. But then you become more paranoid, looking into everyone’s eyes for hints of thievery. Your worst prejudices come out and you try hard to push them away. When you leave the hotel room you put everything in the safe, taking only a phone and a bank card.
The air is thick. Parakeets nip through the sky, squalling and playing. Bark from plane trees keeps falling off as you walk by: it makes you jump every time. You wonder if they are shedding because of the heat, or something else. Even the leaves are dying in the sun, and it feels, sometimes, like everything is slowly coming apart.
You walk for hours. Explore the neighbourhoods that guidebooks and friends have told you about. You find yourself suddenly in an area which is built as a grid, but with tapered edges. The octagonal rather than square blocks of buildings add softness, movement, where you’d expect rigidity. It’s not like the expected angularity but is something hazier, more artful. Even though the grid is fairly evident you are nonetheless turned about a few times, slightly disoriented when you slink around the corner into a shop only to find yourself pointed the wrong way when you come out. You don’t pay enough attention to the way ahead. Even after walking the same route a few days in a row to try and get used to the area you still feel a little lost.
A nudist invites you to his apartment, not for sex, but just to talk naked over coffee. You wonder what the etiquette is about getting hard. You don’t end up going when he gets quiet on the app.
A nice guy asks you questions, seems normal, doesn’t immediately send nudes.
You have come to this city to escape, you realise. When you booked it, you knew you wanted to get away; you hadn’t had a holiday in a long time, at least not just a quick weekend break. As soon as the plane landed you knew you were running away from something, from your feelings and daily life—though it’s not clear why. It’s not exactly obvious what the something is, it’s not specific, has a kind of blurriness to it. There was a breakup—there’s always a breakup—but it isn’t that which you are trying to evade. You feel good about it, in a way. Rather, it’s something about you, the texture of your everyday, that you are jetting away from. It seems impossible to look at.
You try all the beaches, seeing which is more your sensibility. You settle on the nude one, mainly because it’s gayer, but also because everyone seems more relaxed. There are less tourists, or less groups of tourists, no families with their cool-boxes and parasols. Amongst the queer men—or men you assume to be queer, based solely on the way they look up from their dozing when new men arrive to take their spot—are old straight couples, men and women enjoying the breeze. You notice their naked bodies like never before. Note how the women’s breasts hang, how the old men’s backsides droop a little. But in the sun, standing with their eyes out to sea, they look positively beautiful, gracefully bronzed.
One day you make friends—if that’s what one can call talking naked to a stranger—with an Irishman who tells you he had his phone stolen earlier that week in Madrid. He stumbled drunk back to his hotel, he says, when someone jumped him just outside the entrance. He tried to run after them but in his drunken state fell to the ground, cutting open his knees and bruising the right side of his body. Asking to come sunbathe right by you, you think he is either making a move, or using this story as a decoy to steal your own phone. He says he’ll watch your stuff if you want to go for a swim. You are now panicky. You talk about life—he’s a vet, works in Kent somewhere, has a big family—but would rather just be quiet and listen to the soft waves. Every time there is a nice lull of silence, he asks more questions. He turns around a few times so that you get a view of his cock and bum and wonder if he’s wanting you to look.
You leave after a few hours, too hot and sweaty even though the sky is darkening, the clouds growing heavy.
That night in your hotel room you can hear peacocks crying in the nearby zoo. It’s a strange experience. Their noise travels far, drifting in the hot wind that rattles the door. You fall asleep as though in the wild.
Everyone here has a dog it seems. All of them panting in the heat, happy but too warm. Trying to find spots of scrubby earth on which to pee and shit. A husky lies in the shade on a balcony, head through the bars. He looks defeated.
There are clean benches and chairs everywhere for people to sit on. There is always someone in them, watching the world go by, or playing chess, or gossiping. It feels like this city wants you to live outside, to be in the street. You take a seat whenever you can, resting your feet. The city feels accommodating.
You wander more. Notice things by just sitting and watching. The older people with their bright, primary-coloured glasses, as if from a film. They look so European, whatever that means. The sudden hits of dank sewage. The wafts of hot air from a building vent. The camps of unhoused people on every street. The men collecting scrap metal in their shopping trolleys, sweating in the midday sun. The young joggers running past, shirtless and glossy. The tourists dropping their ice-creams to the floor as they can’t lick them fast enough.
You try to meet the nice guy, but he works late.
An American arrives at your hotel, you notice him in the lobby, probably a little young for you but he’s tall and sure of himself, so you open the app and he’s right there, shirtless, abs obviously, and smooth, so you wait a little while before messaging, you don’t want to seem like a complete creep, you say hi, how are you, gorgeous picture, and he quickly looks at your profile but doesn’t respond. Thankfully you don’t see him around the hotel, or you’d die of embarrassment.
There is a memorial in the park to a trans woman murdered some years back. People walk by the sign. Only you stop and take a photo, think about her.
Another man on the app asks you for a drink but you don’t reply. He looks attractive from some angles, but the photographs look so old that you don’t believe they were taken in the last decade.
The more that people message you, the more shut down you begin to feel. It becomes overwhelming. The possibility of men more terrifying than their actuality.
You spend another morning on the beach, this time a different one. It’s meant to be queer but it’s like you’re the only gay around. Everyone is in a straight couple, or so it seems, you know you shouldn’t make assumptions, but you do. You feel out of place in your skimpy swimwear, suddenly more on show than you’d imagined. You read, swim, watch men play in the water as their girlfriends look on as if in disdain.
Migrants try to sell you tepid water, beer, massages, braids. Tannoys at the beach keep reminding you that their actions are illegal, and that if you buy from them, this is also illegal. Men sleep in the shade of lifeguard stations and dig holes for their bagged belongings. You try not to look, feel rude doing so. There are signs hanging from the back of the lifeguard huts, some not in use anymore, but you can’t read the language. You could translate it on your phone, but you don’t, as if trying to hold something at bay, not quite wanting to understand.
When you hear British accents in the bar later that night, you walk the other way. It makes you feel connected, somehow, to hear those familiar voices, but at the same time you want nothing to do with them. Want to push them away. Get affronted, even, when someone in a café automatically assumes your nationality. This doesn’t happen often; so many people launch into the native tongue with you, and you have to backtrack.
You are both desperately alone and desperately free here.
On your last night you meet up with the nice man from the app. He doesn’t show his name on the profile, and you don’t think to ask. You find him in the local plaza. At first you think he’s late but then you realise that you’ve not quite agreed where exactly to meet; you’ve confused the area, Born, with the name of the restaurant you went to the day before. Eventually you see him, you hug, and he tells you his name, but you are so consumed by the heat and by not finding him straight away and feeling self-conscious that you do not hear it or at least do not retain it. You hope there’ll be a way to bring up names again so you can find it out.
You have drinks as the sun sets over the plaza. The buildings turn pink and then you are in deep shadow, and your eyes take a while to adjust. Some dogs chase each other around the plaza, barking and jumping, now that it’s a bit cooler. He orders drinks from a surly waiter who you learn has been working at this bar since it opened in the fifties. Every day he’s been doing the same thing. Sometimes you feel like that. He brings you beers and eventually some food. You eat politely, waiting for your date to take some first before you gulp lots down. You are hungry, as ever. Always feeling that little bit empty, not quite satiated.
After food he takes you around the area, seemingly without direction or intention. You go into shops that double as art studios. You look through some paintings and prints and as you turn around he leans in to kiss you. Under the harsh spotlight you feel very on view. The thin cobbled roads feel almost medieval as you wind deeper into the neighbourhood. You could be in any century. The weight lifts from your shoulders as though you’ve been unburdened of time itself.
As you turn another corner, he says this is where I live, and you realise he’s probably been aiming for this street the whole time, that the leisurely amble had an underlying destination. He doesn’t ask you go in with him, but instead points out a little area of the plaza that has trinkets and paper hanging from a tree. You both try to take photos, pretending not to address the fact that you might now have sex. It’s not something you want nor have prepared for, so you are thinking about ways of letting him down, even though you aren’t entirely sure it’s what he wants anyway. Nor are you entirely sure why it’s not something you want. But nonetheless there is a barrier up, you want to hold something back, retain something that you have so easily relinquished before. Not sexuality, not quite that, but something more elemental. You feel like you might give up your sense of self by fucking another random man in a random apartment. Here, now, you want to resist that impulse.
Eventually he says, do you want to see the roof terrace? You don’t have to come into my apartment, but it’s a few flights up, a bit of a climb. He gestures to the dark sky glowing orange from the lights below. You say yes because you really want to see the view, but you also hope that this is not just a ruse that you’ll have to find your way out of.
The doorway to the apartment building is narrow and short, you already feel hemmed in. The stone steps go up seven flights. There is barely room to move, the ceilings low and the stairwell airless. You think you might pass out. Walking silently, you think you could even be killed here, and nobody would know. It reminds you of when you visited a small town in France and went to a guy’s apartment: he buzzed you in and you walked up the darkest hallways, as if approaching a dungeon but when you got to his door, he laughed and said why didn’t you press the light switch when you came in?
The two of you make it to the top floor and when you emerge from the doorway which you bump your head on, you are taken aback. The view is like nothing you’d expected. Swamped in golden light, the city sprawls around you. To one side the sea, the other a church, in the distance the famous cathedral, and the mountains skirting everything. You cannot believe how beautiful a city can be until you’ve seen it from above. As it’s just the two of you it’s even more private. Like you could own the entire place.
You kiss for a while but don’t want to close your eyes as you feel like you’re missing the view. You lean against the railing and look over the horizon and think nothing could be more beautiful, more tranquil. There are some shirtless old men in the neighbouring building on their own terrace. You wonder who they are to each other.
He asks you what you are going to do with your last day in town and you know he really wants you to stay longer, to go to his apartment, but you really can’t face it even though this man is lovely and clearly wants to undress you. Sex, you think, would ruin the evening in a way. Even if you were ready for it, something of the night’s softness would be lost. Instead, you think that standing near this attractive man on a hot roof terrace staring at the city entering the day’s final wind as people start to go out drinking and dancing, is enough. It’s a balm you try to savour, knowing it will disappear any second.
Christopher Lloyd is a writer and academic in the UK. He is the author of the poetry pamphlet Pick Up Your Feelings (2024), as well as stories, essays, poems that have appeared in bath magg, Fourteen Poems, PERVERSE, Kissing Dynamite, Olit, and elsewhere. Chris is the host of the literary podcast and YouTube channel, Books Up Close.
Jasper Glen is a poet and artist from Vancouver. He holds a BA in Philosophy and a JD. Poems appear in A Gathering of the Tribes, Posit, Rogue Agent, Amsterdam Quarterly, BlazeVOX, and elsewhere. Collages appear or are forthcoming in BarBar, Liminal Spaces, and Streetlit.