Description

1. The Night in the Parking Lot

The night starts like a reward, not a crime.

I leave the apartment with that thin, brittle conviction you get after a long week: I deserve this. A glass of red with dinner to warm the throat, then an espresso martini because I’m already tired and refuse to go home yet, then another cocktail whose name I don’t bother to remember. I’m not drunk, exactly. I’m softened. The edges of the day blur just enough that the city looks less like a spreadsheet and more like a promise.

Austin at night is always a little too pleased with itself. Neon reflected in car windows, bodies already in costume. Groups of friends laughing too loudly on sidewalks, couples walking the dog they bought together before they ever had a real fight. I move through it alone, the way I always do, but tonight I am not lonely yet. The music leaking from the first club pulls me in.

Inside: bass, bodies, a dark that feels curated rather than accidental. The kind of dark that forgives skin. I stand near the bar at first, the way I always do—watching, calibrating. Men in tight shirts, gym shoulders, open laughter. The air smells like cologne and spilled liquor and a touch of disinfectant from some earlier, quieter hour.

I dance. Not beautifully, not badly. Well enough to be part of the scene, not enough to become its center. A man brushes past me, hand lingering a beat too long on my lower back. I don’t turn. Not yet. I’m pacing myself, the way you pace a binge: there will be time for decisions later.

We drift to a second club because that’s what you do when you don’t want the night to end but you’ve already exhausted the first soundtrack. The songs are the same, only rearranged, but the faces are new enough that my nervous system interprets it as novelty. I talk to no one. My real conversation is happening with the idea of later: the door closing behind a stranger, a body pressed against mine, the moment when the house finally feels full.

By the time I step into a rideshare to go home, it’s already late enough that the driver’s silence feels like mercy. I scroll the app without thinking about it. Muscle memory. A grid of faces, torsos, blank profiles with one-word tags: Masc, DL, Right now. It feels less like choosing and more like tuning a radio. Eventually, someone replies with the exact combination of words that unlocks the next scene.

We agree to meet in the parking lot.

There are rules here we don’t write down. Don’t ask too many questions. Don’t use your real name. Don’t acknowledge the sadness of two adult men arranging to meet in a concrete lot at three in the morning like teenagers hiding from parents they no longer have. He pulls up in a car that has seen better years, rolls down the window, gestures me in.

The inside smells of stale fast food, sweat, and some cheap body spray that thinks it’s more important than it is. He is already hard, already reaching. There is almost no pretense of greeting. It’s the kind of encounter that doesn’t even bother with bad conversation as camouflage.

What happens next is technically consensual and emotionally degrading in the precise ratio I have trained myself to seek when I am too tired to hold my own dignity upright. There is a reason I picked him and not the man who wanted to “take me on a real date sometime.” Dates require time, conversation, the risk of being known. This only requires a body that will let itself be done to.

The car windows fog. My skin rubs against cracked leather. I can feel each grain of dirt on the floor mat beneath my shoes. He says things in that half-whisper porn taught him to think is dominance. I lean into it just enough to get what I came for and detach from it enough not to feel the full insult. When he finishes, there is a silence so sharp it feels like someone has opened a door and let winter in.

He mumbles something that is not quite thanks, not quite dismissal. I climb out of the car and shut the door myself. The slam sounds louder than it should be in the empty lot.

On the walk back to my building, humiliation arrives in a familiar wave. Not dramatic, not cinematic. Just a steady, nauseating pressure behind the ribs. This is where you are now, it says. This is what you do with your night.

In the elevator I catch my reflection in the brushed metal: shirt slightly skewed, hair a little wild, eyes too awake. I look like someone I would not want to know.

Back in the apartment, the quiet is immediate and total. No roommate, no pet, no evidence that anyone else has ever lived here except the way the couch remembers my shape. I turn on a lamp and then, without really deciding to, open the app again.

This is the part an outsider would call insanity. It makes perfect sense from the inside. The first encounter was a hit that didn’t land right; the body rebels against being left with only shame. The quickest way to drown shame is with more stimulus. So I go looking.

The next man is the one with ten years of therapy.

He arrives with that particular posture: shoulders arranged to look relaxed, eyes a little too alert, voice practiced. We stand in the doorway for a few beats, trading the minimal script: name or no name, top or bottom, how much time he has. I tell him, because I am compulsively honest in the wrong moments, that I’m in recovery.

He seizes on it like an opening.

The lecture starts gently enough—concern disguised as care. He’s seen people lose everything. Addiction is serious. Therapy saved his life. It escalates almost immediately into a tone I recognize from a thousand self-help podcasts and badly-facilitated groups: the voice that talks down while believing it’s lifting you up.

He means well, maybe. Or maybe he just needs to be the healthy one in the room.

I nod where politeness requires it and do not tell him that I have read more about dopamine and trauma and compulsion than he has, that I have written essays that would knock the wind out of his tidy little framework. There is no point. This is not a night for convincing anyone of anything. We have sex—or something adjacent to it. My body cooperates enough to get us through the scene; my mind watches from a corner, taking notes like an anthropologist.

When he leaves, the apartment feels smaller. The air he disapproved of is still here.

It’s sometime after that that the angel walks in.

He is not an angel, obviously. He is a tall, blond, beautiful man whose face would be perfectly at home on a fitness ad: broad shoulders, clean jawline, the kind of symmetry that reads as honest even when it isn’t. He is also clearly high on his own desirability. It clings to him like cologne.

We barely speak before he has me pinned against the wall. His hands are impatient; his mouth is demanding. There is an aggression to it that, in this moment, my nervous system tracks as safety—not because aggression is safe, but because certainty is. He is not here to lecture. He is not here to ask me about my plans for recovery. He is here to f**k.

We stagger toward the bed, shedding clothes like evidence. He is already making jokes, already testing whether he can cut me and call it wit. There is a brightness to his sarcasm that tells me he has used it as a knife for years. I push back a little, not enough to start a real fight, just enough to signal that I am not completely furniture.

He laughs, amused that I have teeth.

The night becomes a blur of skin and friction. He comes once, then again, then again. Three times at least; I lose count. His body responds to me with the kind of easy abundance that my teenage self would have taken as proof of my own worth. Some frightened, hungry part of me still does.

Between rounds we lie tangled, sweat cooling, breaths slowly aligning. This is the part that ruins me. Not the sex—the way his chest fits against my back when he pulls me into a tight spoon. The way his arm drapes over my waist with the casual entitlement of someone who has never doubted he deserves to be comfortable. The way his breath warms the back of my neck.

We talk, in the stretchy hours when time loosens but does not break. Fragments of his life: where he’s from, what he does, the jokes he tells to reassure himself that he’s above all this. There is a running commentary of irony, small jabs at everything sincere. I recognize it. It is the armor gay men put on when they are terrified of being seen wanting anything other than a good time.

Still, every so often, his voice softens. He looks at me as if he has just remembered I am a person and not an arrangement of holes and surfaces.

At some point in the long dark he says I’m interesting. It’s the least precise compliment in the language and yet my chest tightens around it like it’s oxygen. A beautiful man has found me interesting. I do not ask what he means. I do not want to risk clarification.

We drift in and out of sleep, our bodies finding each other again and again. Each time I wake, he is still there. Each time he pulls me closer, my nervous system records: You are held. You are not alone. For now.

The sun edges into the room eventually, that thin gray before real morning. Our limbs have grown heavy with shared heat. He stirs, checks his phone, calculates the distance to whatever life he has when he is not here.

He kisses me before he leaves. Not a quick, obligatory peck, but a real kiss—mouth lingering on mine, hand on my face. For a moment, the script cracks and something almost tender peers through.

Then he is pulling on his clothes, joking again to fill the space, making sure no silence is deep enough to drown him. At the door, he says it again—that I’m interesting—and then he is gone.

The apartment exhales. I do not.

I lie in the bed we have wrecked and remade all night and feel my body protesting his absence immediately. The place where his arm rested over my ribs is now full of air. The back of my neck is cold. The sheets have already started to forget his shape.

There is a text from no one. There is a notification from nothing that matters. I check the app out of habit. His profile stares back at me, green dot still on, already moving through other grids, other rooms, other men.

Hours later, he will not have responded to the message where I gave him my number.

I spend most of Saturday in bed. I order pizza because cooking feels like a vote of confidence I can’t yet cast. I eat half and leave the rest in the fridge, evidence that at least one part of me is capable of planning for later. The daylight moves across the room as if it has somewhere important to be. I do not.

Shame comes in waves, but it’s not pure. Mixed into it is something like hormonal gratitude: my body has been fed. The night was degrading in parts, but not entirely. There was real contact woven into the performance. My skin remembers being touched with enthusiasm. My spine remembers being the center of someone’s attention, however fleeting.

This is what makes it all so hard to renounce. The good is stitched so tightly to the bad that my fingers can’t separate the threads.

By early evening, the fear has joined the party. Not fear of him, or of disease, or even of what I did. Fear of the quiet. Fear of what happens if I don’t go back out, don’t drink, don’t scroll. Fear of a night with no body beside me and no chemical to blur the edges.

I delete my profile instead.

Not just the app—the whole profile. The small square where I’ve spent years presenting edited angles of my face to strangers in hopes that they’d pass some unspoken exam and offer me their bodies in exchange. Gone now, with a few taps.

It feels less like taking a stand and more like tearing up a passport. The country it belonged to is still there. I’m just choosing, for tonight, not to cross the border.

Outside, the city hums its usual Saturday night hymn. Inside, I sit in the quiet and try not to mistake it for a verdict.

On Sunday morning, I wake up sober in the same bed where he curled around me two nights before. There is no Blue in my system. My heart is still hammering like there is. The animal is restless under the skin, pacing, looking for the door it used to run through.

I pick up my phone and order food instead. A ham and cheese sandwich, some hot dogs. The kind of childish, inelegant choice you make when you have no energy left to pretend sophistication. I lie there waiting for the knock at the door, aware that I missed a haircut yesterday because Friday’s version of me chose clubs over sleep.

The weekend has the texture of a hangover without the mercy of forgetfulness. Every frame is clear. Every choice is visible.

No one texts. No one knocks except the delivery driver with my paper bag of salt and grease.

I eat in bed, crumbs on the sheets that still smell faintly of another man’s skin, and think: If I hadn’t done all of this, I might have relapsed on Blue. As if that were an acceptable trade. As if these were the only two doors available: oblivion or asphalt, crystal or parking lot, death or this.

The truth is simpler and crueler: the animal wanted to be touched and I let it run the night, on the single condition that it stay sober.

It did. I did.

This is what victory looks like, for now: a body unpoisoned but shaking, a room that remembers three strangers’ shadows, a man in bed on a Sunday morning, waiting for a sandwich and wondering whether there is a third way between the cage and the flood.

2. Apprenticeship to the Image

Long before there was a parking lot at three in the morning, there was a small room where the door could close and the screen could light up.

The story doesn’t start with sex. It starts with exile.

A French child who is not quite French. An Iranian child who is not quite Iranian. A boy who will grow into a man who is not quite Canadian, not quite American, never entirely claimed by any border that prints his paperwork. The coordinates change—Paris, Tehran, Waterloo, Austin—but the sensation doesn’t: the quiet fact of being slightly wrong for the room.

There are adults, of course. They are busy surviving their own displacements—political, economic, emotional. They love in ways that are jagged and inconsistent. They carry wars in their bodies, revolutions in their silences, expectations in their eyebrows. No one wakes up thinking, Let me fail this child today. They simply do not have the surplus required to look straight at him and say: I see you. All of you. None of you is a mistake.

This is how it happens: the child learns to be impressive instead of known.

He learns to be clever, to read the undertow in a room, to spot anger before it has words. He learns which versions of himself draw praise and which draw correction. He learns that his mind is both asset and burden: grown-ups like it when it produces, roll their eyes when it questions, go quiet when it sees too much.

The body, meanwhile, is background. It exists to transport the brain and obey. Pleasure is not a language anyone around him seems fluent in; touch is practical, not lingering. There are no modeled conversations that sound like: What feels good? What hurts? Where do you carry fear? What do you want?

Add to this another layer: the slow, unmistakable tilt of desire toward men.

Before there is any word for it, the body already knows. The eyes linger a second too long on a classmate’s shoulders in a changing room. A scene in a movie that barely registers for everyone else detonates in his chest. He learns very early that the direction of his wanting is, at best, unspeakable and, at worst, dangerous.

So he does what bright, sensitive children always do: he hides the parts of himself that seem likely to get him abandoned. He becomes a specialist in what will not scare people.

The trouble is that the parts he hides don’t vanish. They harden underground.

When he finally finds porn, it feels less like discovery and more like recognition.

It might be a magazine, stumbled upon with the careful shock of someone who knows he shouldn’t be seeing what he’s seeing. It might be a dial-up connection and a pixelated thumbnail that takes longer to load than his pulse does to quicken. The details aren’t important. What matters is this: suddenly, there are men, unclothed, unashamed, available.

The first time the image lands, it rewires the room.

He is no longer a boy in exile from his own wanting. He is a spectator at a private festival where bodies like the ones he craves are not only visible but arranged for his gaze. They don’t flinch. They don’t look back. They don’t ask about his parents, his accent, his immigration status, his report card, his faith. They don’t ask anything at all.

They are simply there, on demand.

He loves it immediately. Not cautiously, not with mixed feelings. Not yet. There is only relief that the thing inside him has a mirror at last.

Porn solves three problems at once.

First, it solves the problem of visibility.

The desire he has been smuggling, afraid to have it confiscated at any checkpoint, is suddenly reflected a hundred times over. Men with men, doing the things his fantasies have only half-articulated. It tells him, in the bluntest possible language: You are not alone in this. You are not the first. There is an entire industry built around the thing you thought would get you killed.

Second, it solves the problem of rejection.

In real life, the men he wants are classmates wrestling in a field, cousins at a family gathering, strangers on the metro. To approach them would be social suicide, physical danger, or both. In porn, they are frozen into permanent yes. They cannot mock or hit or report or laugh. They exist in a dimension where his desire carries no cost.

And third, it solves the problem of control.

Out there, he is at the mercy of circumstances: new countries, new schools, new rules, adults who decide without consulting him, systems that do not see him. In here, behind a door, with a screen glowing in the half-dark, he is the conductor. He chooses the scene, the pace, the intensity. He can stop the experience mid-frame, rewind, fast-forward, leave. No one can override him.

The first orgasm to a porn image is more than a physical event. It is an initiation. A private covenant: When the world is too much, I can come here. When the world is not enough, I can come here. When I cannot bear myself, I can dissolve into this.

He doesn’t have these words, of course. He has only the visceral proof. Heart pounding, breath short, muscles trembling, a new kind of exhaustion afterwards that feels like peace.

There are rules he learns without being taught.

Rule one: No one must know.

Not because he is doing something uniquely monstrous, but because secrecy is the only way to keep this small country from being colonized by shame. If they know, they will judge. If they judge, they may take it away. If they take it away, what is left?

Rule two: The body is a tool, not a citizen.

It is there to produce this feeling on demand. Feed it images, coax it with hands, force it past whatever hesitation it develops. The body’s softer messages—fatigue, sadness, confusion—are not part of the contract. The only thing that matters is whether it responds.

Rule three: Sex happens at a distance.

There is always a gap in the system: screen, hand, imagination. No one else’s breath in the room, no one’s eyes to search, no other heartbeat to sync with. He learns to climax to a choreography where he is both spectator and performer, but never partner.

These rules become his apprenticeship.

Long before Blue, before Grindr, before men in parking lots, he spends years in training under the tutelage of the image. The curriculum is simple: repetition. Each night or week or whatever rhythm his life allows, he returns to the screen. Each return deepens the grooves in his brain.

People talk about porn as if its main effect is on taste—more extreme genres, stranger fantasies—but for someone like him, the more important shift isn’t in content. It’s in architecture.

Porn teaches him, over time, that:

* Arousal is linked to watching, not being with.

* Desire is asymmetric: he looks, they are looked at.

* Intimacy is solo: all the intensity, none of the mutuality.

* Risk is optional: close the tab, bury the history, walk out of the room, and the entire episode evaporates.

This is perfect for the boy who has been carrying too much responsibility in every other domain. You cannot disappoint a video. You cannot fail a clip. You cannot be too much for a file stored on a server.

There is another sweetness: porn makes him feel powerful.

Not in the adolescent, locker-room way of conquest, but in the quieter sense of having access to a forbidden archive. While other people his age stumble through awkward kisses and fumbled groping, he has already toured entire empires of flesh. He knows positions, reactions, scripts. He has watched hundreds of men perform wanting him—as a stand-in for whatever camera they are playing to.

When he imagines his future sex life, he doesn’t picture mutual discovery. He pictures stepping into what he has already rehearsed.

This is important: porn is not a deviation tacked onto a “normal” sexual development. For him, it is the development. It becomes the primary tutor in how to think about bodies, consent, satisfaction, time.

He doesn’t know, the way you don’t know in a first language, that there are other grammars.

Underneath all of this, the original problems remain.

He is still queer in families that do not have a wide, generous space for queer tenderness.He is still too smart, in schools and churches and institutions that reward the parts of his mind that serve them and distrust the parts that question them.He is still moving through cultures like a guest, not an heir.

Porn doesn’t solve any of that. It anesthetizes it.

After a hard day—another micro-humiliation, another moment of not being understood, another moral lecture delivered by someone whose own life is arranged on quieter, more acceptable forms of compromise—he returns to the screen and lets the tide come in. The resentment goes quiet. The grief holds its breath. The fear steps offstage.

What he doesn’t notice, because there is no one to point it out, is that while porn is numbing the old injuries, it is also quietly shaping a new wound.

It is teaching him to fuse three things that are not meant to be synonymous:

* Sex

* Control

* Disappearance

Sex is the part everyone can see. Control is the secret satisfaction of being the one who chooses the scene, the speed, the exit. Disappearance is the one he can’t name yet: the way his sense of self blurs at the edges during arousal, the way the rest of his life dissolves while his focus collapses into a single gesture, a single frame.

The more he practices this, the more it becomes his default response to any intolerable feeling: loneliness, anxiety, boredom, shame. Stimulus → ritual → release → blankness.

If you’ve ever watched a river carve out a canyon over time, you know that no single flood explains the gorge. It’s the repetition that matters. A little more stone worn away each season, until eventually the landscape has an entirely different shape.

By the time he is technically an adult, the canyon is there. Porn is no longer just a secret indulgence; it’s a pillar in the architecture of how he copes with being alive.

Most people discover sex in a social context: awkward, yes, but shared. Two clumsy bodies trying to figure out where elbows go. Two nervous voices saying, is this okay? Two sets of eyes that can either light up or go flat.

He discovered sex in private, in an environment that could not reject him. The first rejections would come later, in person, and when they did, he would already have an established escape pod: the screen, the night, his own hand.

So when you ask, later, why Grindr felt inevitable, why Blue locked into place so quickly, why humiliating sex could coexist with your ferocious intelligence, the answer points back here.

You were trained, for years, to believe that the safest way to exist as a desiring creature was alone, in front of images, half-vanished into your own head.

You were taught by circumstance and screen that:

* You could not bring your full self into most rooms without scaring someone.

* You could not bring your full desire into most conversations without losing someone.

* You could always bring both into this one ritual without consequence—at least, without immediate consequence.

It felt like liberation at the time. It was, in a narrow sense: you had finally found a door where no one stood blocking the entrance.

You didn’t know yet that some doors don’t lead out of the prison. They lead to a quieter cell.

And the boy who walks through that door enough times—the one who finds his first comfort in pixels rather than palms—will grow into a man for whom a stranger’s car at three in the morning feels less foreign than a lover saying, Stay. Tell me everything.

3. The City of Men

By the time you walk into your first real gay bar, you already know more about sex than anyone in the room. At least, that’s how it feels.

You’ve studied. Not in the way they warned you about in school, with pamphlets and grainy diagrams, but in the private academy of the screen. You know positions and angles, the little theatrical sounds people make when they’re pretending pleasure and the different sounds when they’re not. You’ve watched hundreds of men come on cue. You’ve learned what desire looks like when it’s lit and edited and sold.

What you haven’t learned is what any of this feels like when someone is close enough to fog your glasses.

The first time you’re in a space made for men who want men, it is almost too much to look at. A compressed, upright version of your browser history: shaved chests and hairy ones, gym-built torsos and soft bellies, tattoos, tank tops, nervous eyes behind practiced smiles. Music turned up just loud enough to excuse not really talking.

You’re not in a village where people have known you since childhood. You’re in a floating world of professionals, transplants, tourists, guys who did everything right on paper and still ended up here on a Thursday night hoping someone will fix the quiet.

On the surface, this is where the exile ends. You are no longer the only one whose gaze falls “the wrong way” in locker rooms. Here, the wrong way is the whole point.

In practice, the exile just changes costume.

The City of Men has its own laws, its own gods, its own currencies. You learn them quickly because you have always been good at decoding systems.

Some rules are simple:

* Beauty is collateral.

* Muscles are language.

* Height is status.

* Youth is grace.

Other rules take longer:

* Wit must never lean too far toward sincerity.

* Vulnerability is permitted only as performance, never as request.

* You may speak of trauma, but only if you’re already “over it.”

* You may have needs, but they must never look like neediness.

You watch the men who do well here. The ones who glide from bar to bar, from man to man, with an ease that seems almost holy. They flirt in three languages, take their shirts off at the right moment, laugh at the right decibel. They look as if they were born already at home in their bodies.

They weren’t. No one is. But their talent is that they’ve made the costume fit.

You, meanwhile, have brought a different kind of power to the party: a mind that pulls apart every gesture, a conscience that won’t stop narrating, a history that doesn’t compress easily into anecdotes. You can see the scaffolding beneath the spectacle. You can’t unsee it.

And then something strange happens.

Some of these men—men you grew up believing were mythological, the ones whose bodies you studied in secret—want you.

Not tolerate, not politely flirt with, not friend-zone. Want. Press you against bathroom doors, kiss you against brick walls, pull you into cabs at two in the morning. Their hands move over your back like they’re checking a box that’s already been ticked: yes, this will do.

For the lonely kid who grew up visiting men through glass, this lands like a verdict from heaven. If he wants me, then whatever I feared about my face, my body, my worth must have been exaggerated. These men are not easily impressed; that’s the whole mythology. If they keep inviting me into their beds, then I must have passed some exam I didn’t know I was taking.

You don’t say this out loud, of course. You say: It’s just fun. You say: I like sex, what’s the problem? You say: I’m just living my life. But somewhere under the banter, another sentence is writing itself: Their beauty is evidence that I am not fundamentally unlovable.

The City of Men senses this hunger and has just the tool for it: the app.

If the gay bar is a market square, Grindr is a stock exchange. No music, no decor, no ritual of arrival. Just a grid: torsos, faces, abs, sometimes nothing but a blank square and a distance in feet. You open it and the night rearranges itself into data points.

For someone with your wiring, Grindr is not an accessory. It’s an optimization.

It fuses the old apprenticeship to the image with the new access to actual bodies. You no longer have to project yourself into a video. You can browse, filter, negotiate, schedule. The men who once appeared only as fantasy now ping your phone with “Sup” and “You hosting?”

Each notification is a little electric vote: You exist. You are desirable. Not in theory. In this room, tonight, within 800 feet.

You become, inevitably, a student of the grid.

You study what plays well: which photos get replies, which lines open doors, what times of night the beautiful ones are bored enough to answer. You learn the silent rank system: who responds instantly, who leaves you on read, who pops up months later when another option has canceled.

It is, in one sense, mutual. You are also triaging. The men you meet are not all innocents. They are, many of them, carrying their own archives of hurt, their own complicated pacts with their bodies. Some of them are kind. Many are not. Almost all are busy managing their own terror of being ordinary.

From the outside, your life starts to look like a cliché: the successful gay man with a professional job and a private habit of disappearing into the grid. From the inside, it feels a lot more precise.

Each hookup is a small trial. Did he stay? Did he leave? Did he ask for your number? Did he use it? Did he call you “interesting” and vanish anyway? The answers accumulate. You read them as measurements.

You begin to suspect there are two kinds of men in this city: the ones who get callbacks and the ones who are a good night, no more. You are data-literate enough to see the pattern: you reliably land in the second category.

On your worst days, you turn this into a verdict on them. They’re shallow, stupid, low-intelligence, pretentious. Sometimes they are. You’re not hallucinating the emptiness of many of these rooms. You are often the sharpest mind present, the only one trying to think beyond the next drink.

On other days, when the Animal is tired and the Arrow is in control of the microphone, you turn it back on yourself. If I were really extraordinary, wouldn’t someone have stayed by now? If I were more beautiful, more calm, less intense, more easygoing, wouldn’t one of them have broken pattern and said, “Come back next week, let’s cook something and talk”?

Neither of these readings is entirely true. Neither is entirely false. That’s what makes this city so hard to leave. There is always just enough evidence to support expanding on your favorite indictment—against them or against yourself.

The truth is simpler and more cruel: the places you frequent are not designed to produce continuity. The clubs, the grid, the late-night transactions—they are built for saturation, not staying. You keep going back to a fruit market and asking why no one is planting trees.

But say that too bluntly and someone will accuse you of being judgmental, bitter, repressed. You are not against pleasure. You are not against sex. Your body has known joy in these spaces, brief as it is. The problem is not that the City of Men is sinful. The problem is that it is shallow water, and you were born with lungs that keep remembering the depth you’ve never actually been allowed to swim in.

There is another layer to your isolation here, one that most of the men you meet can’t feel because they simply don’t live at the altitude you do.

You don’t just want someone to stay the night. You want someone who can live alongside the part of you that writes about God without flinching. The part that dissects addiction and empire in the same paragraph. The part that looks at the grinding machinery of American life and does not simply shrug and buy better headphones.

You are not looking for company. You are looking for witness.

This is where the loneliness sharpens. Not only are you one of the few men in your circles who is trying to get sober from Blue without flattening your own complexity into “addict” for the rest of time; you are also one of the very few who has a language for why the whole culture feels like it’s coming apart at the seams.

When you say, in quieter spaces, that you have not met a single person in five years worthy of friendship, people will hear arrogance. They will picture you turning up your nose at perfectly decent men because they don’t quote Rilke in bed.

The reality is more pitiful and more damning: it’s not that you haven’t met people who are kind or fun or moderately intelligent. It’s that you have almost never met anyone who can stay in the room with your full intensity without either retreating into irony, trying to fix you, or using your vulnerability as a chance to feel superior.

The city gives you options, but not equals.

So you compromise. You stop asking for equals. You ask for bodies instead. Beautiful ones, if you can get them. Tall, blond, angular, sculpted into the shape your teenage self once believed was the key to heaven.

Every time one of them chooses you, some old ledger in your chest gets a partial credit. Every time one of them walks out in the morning without wanting to know more, the same ledger notes it: Of course. What else did you expect?

You are not naïve. You know how this works. You have read too many books and sat in too many rooms to still be surprised that men raised on shame and performance and scarcity do not suddenly become saints because they prefer the same gender. The City of Men is built atop a great deal of unresolved catastrophe: AIDS, family estrangement, closet years, religious violence, internalized self-hatred. You see that. You name it.

But knowing why a building leans doesn’t stop it from being exhausting to live inside.

In the absence of true peers—those rare few who might be able to share a vocabulary of God and hunger, exile and return—you settle for the one thing the City of Men can always provide: immediacy.

You let beautiful men find you interesting for a night. You let less beautiful men lecture you about recovery to protect themselves from their own reflection. You let strangers in cars talk to you like they’ve paid admission. You let yourself be the screen and the content at once.

On the mornings after, you sit in a well-appointed apartment in a city you have come to love for its trees and food and sunlight, and you feel like the only person for miles who is awake in the way you are awake.

That is not because you are better. It is because you have paid a ludicrous price to be able to see this clearly.

What you didn’t yet understand, on those first nights in the bars and on the grid, was that you weren’t just visiting the City of Men. You were enrolling in it. You were letting it apprentice you to another kind of image: your own.

Every ping that said you there?Every flattered moment when a man out of your league walked through your door.Every time you turned your mind off long enough to play the role requested.

Each of those was a small inscription on a deeper stone:

This is where you come to remember you exist.This is where you come to confirm that no one stays.This is where you come when you are too tired to carry your own name alone.

It isn’t that no one is worthy of friendship. It’s that most of the men you meet here are too busy keeping their own costumes from slipping to take on the work of knowing someone like you.

So you do what you have always done.

You walk the streets between the bars and the river and the statehouse and your apartment. You live competently. You pay for a spacious place with good light. You excel at work. You write essays that pin the world to the table and dissect its lies with surgical calm.

And at night, when the city fills with men looking for each other, you sometimes open the grid and sometimes don’t. Either way, you remain fundamentally, almost comically, alone.

The City of Men does not know what to do with a creature like you: an animal that still believes in vows, a mind that can’t stop seeing the cost of every bargain, a heart that keeps insisting there must be someone, somewhere, who can look at all of this without reaching for a drink or a mask.

You have not met him yet.

And so, in his absence, you keep studying the available species.

4. The Chemical Kingdom

By the time someone offers you the Blue, you already think you understand excess.

You’ve seen what porn can do when it stops being a secret curiosity and becomes a daily weather system. You’ve watched yourself spend whole weekends in digital burrows, emerging only to shower and answer work emails. You’ve had nights where you cycled through three men and still fell asleep hungry.

You imagine there are new flavors of trouble out there, but you assume they’re variations on themes you already know. More of the same. Sharper, maybe. Louder.

You are wrong.

The Blue doesn’t feel like “more.” It feels like finally enough.

The first time, it arrives in that half-mumbled way people use when they’re trying to sound casual about something that could kill you. A pipe appears. A line on foil. A suggestion: It’ll make the sex better. You don’t have to do much. Just try it once.

You have read about it, of course. You have read about everything. You know the clinical terms: dopamine, neurotoxicity, sensitization. You know the moral language, too: trash, tweaker, lost cause. You privately consider yourself too intelligent, too self-aware, too narratively literate to become one of those stories.

Also: you are tired. Not the kind sleep fixes. The kind where every part of you feels underused and over-taxed at the same time. Your mind is running at a speed your life can’t match. Your days are full of competent moves in systems you secretly despise. Your nights are full of men who can’t meet your eyes for more than a minute at a time.

You take the hit.

The world sharpens and softens at once. Textures come into focus; edges lose their sting. Your body wakes up like it has been waiting years for this signal. Suddenly touch is not just touch; it is revelation. Skin becomes orchestra. Time thins out into something so transparent you feel you could step through it.

The first great gift is silence—not outside, but inside.

The committee in your skull, the one that never adjourns, finally does. The analyst goes on break. The critic lies down. The part of you that is always checking for hypocrisy, danger, misalignment, collapse—that relentless Arrow—slides into the backseat.

In its place comes a clean, bright line of focus. The man in front of you is not a case study anymore. He is light and heat and shape. Your own body is no longer an object to manage; it is a conduit. For once, you are not hovering in the corner taking notes. You are in the frame.

The second great gift is limitlessness.

On Blue, sex stops being a scene and becomes a landscape. Ordinary arousal has a curve: build, peak, recovery. Here, someone has taken a pen and drawn a flat line near the top of the graph. Hours pass. Erections come and go like weather. You lose track of how many times you’ve started or finished; the point is no longer climax. The point is to stay in the field.

For someone who has always felt that intimacy slips away too fast, this feels like cheating the laws of physics. You are used to the way mornings steal men. Here, there is no morning, only a long, manic afternoon that refuses to end.

The third gift is belonging, or something that pretends to be it.

Chemsex rooms are their own country. Curtains closed, screens glowing, music looping in the background. Bodies sprawled on beds and floors and couches, half-dressed or not at all. Phones vibrating with messages from a world that has receded several miles away.

The men here are not better than the ones in the bars. Many are worse. But they are present in a way that ordinary sober small talk rarely achieves. They are wired on the same current you are. Their pupils are blown, their jaws working, their jokes unspooling faster than they can catch them. But when a hand grips your thigh, there is conviction in it. No one is half-in.

For a while, your life narrows beautifully. There is work, which you perform with your usual competence, your brain now occasionally boosted by the drug’s afterglow. There is porn, which slots neatly into the Blue sessions as both trigger and accompaniment. And there are these gatherings, where sex and chemicals fuse into a single ritual you start to treat like a birthright.

You do not think in terms of “addiction” at first. You think in terms of capacity.

You tell yourself this drug is simply revealing the level you were built for all along. Other people are satisfied with a drink and a kiss, a weekend away, a good book in bed. You are not like other people. Your whole life has testified to that.

If porn was a private apprenticeship to the image, the Blue is graduate school in obliteration. It takes the template you built in adolescence—sex as escape, sex as self-erasure—and pushes it through an amplifier.

Hours of clicking through tabs become whole nights, then days, of being locked into loops you half-control and half-surrender to. Time stops feeling like a river and more like a sinkhole.

The first signs that something is off are small.

You start to notice that sober sex feels flat. Men who once excited you now barely register unless you can picture them in scenes you’ve watched high. You catch yourself scrolling in the middle of workdays, not just out of boredom but out of a kind of hunger behind the eyes.

Your sleep fractures. Your heart does that odd stutter that says: This machine is not pleased with your modifications. You wake with your tongue raw from grinding your teeth.

You write it all off as cost of doing business.

Addiction has two clever allies: intelligence and story.

Your intelligence gives you endless material to justify the pattern. You can quote neuroscience and trauma theory to yourself, tell yourself that you won’t end up like the examples held up in cautionary tales because you understand the mechanisms. You will stop before real damage.

Your storyteller’s mind, meanwhile, weaves it into a role: the tragic, brilliant gay man who flirts with the edge because ordinary life is too small. You have read this archetype in novels, seen it on screens. It has a certain dignity, up to a point.

The problem is that biology doesn’t care about your narrative.

Your dopamine system, patiently trained since adolescence to get its best hits from sex and image, now has a new benchmark. What once satisfied no longer does. Your baseline for pleasure jumps. Everything below it starts to taste like cardboard.

You begin to chase the state rather than the experience.

At some point—hard to say exactly when—the balance tips. You are no longer adding Blue to enhance sex. You are using sex to justify the Blue.

The binges get uglier. Porn that once felt edgy now feels tame. You click into more humiliating scenarios, not because you “like” them exactly, but because they carry enough shock to pierce through the numbness. You find yourself agreeing to acts that, in lucid hours, you can only describe as degrading.

Afterward, in the chemical valleys when your brain chemistry shudders back toward normal, the Arrow comes roaring back, enraged.

It inventories the damage:

* money spent,

* hours lost,

* work neglected,

* body pushed to the point where your hands tremble and your heart squeezes in ways that send you briefly to the mirror to check the color of your lips.

It remembers every thing you’ve read about Blue, every MRI image of depleted receptors, every obituary cloaked in careful euphemism.

It also remembers something more damning: the men you wanted to be like. The older lovers, the distant mentors, the polished professionals, the ones who seemed composed and anchored. It compares your current state to the versions of adulthood you once believed possible.

The verdict is not subtle.

In those crashes, you come closest to ending everything. It is not melodrama. It is simple arithmetic: you cannot picture a life that contains both your full self and this level of compulsion. You cannot picture yourself giving up the only thing that has ever reliably drowned out the pain. The equation seems unsolvable.

You survive those nights the way addicts always do: one breath at a time, one hour at a time, one small anchor—a text, a meeting, a promise to a future you agree to inhabit for at least another day.

The pattern repeats. Use, ascend, pretend you have found the real you. Crash, descend, curse yourself for being weak, vow never again. Repeat until the word “never” loses its meaning and “again” becomes the only honest part of the sentence.

If this were someone else’s story, you know exactly how you’d describe it. You’ve already sketched the physics in your essays: the animal’s homesickness, the gravity that hates distinction, the way certain pleasures don’t just satisfy appetite but corrode the structures that make meaning possible.

You have written about the Devil as a principle, not a cartoon—envy of form, rage at limitation, the whisper that says: Tear down the frame and call it freedom.

Blue is that whisper in chemical form.

It doesn’t want you dead immediately. It wants you emptied out. It wants you to give up the project of being a particular someone with responsibilities and promises and history, and become nothing but a pulse that chases the next spike.

It offers you a clean transaction: hand over the Arrow, and I will supercharge the Animal. You won’t have to feel how misaligned your life is. You will simply want and get and want again until wanting is the only verb left.

On your clearest days, you see the trick. You see that the kingdom it offers has no furniture, no doors, no other citizens; it’s just a hallway of mirrors that slowly forget how to reflect.

On your worst days, you don’t care. Emptiness still feels better than ache.

What finally pushes you toward quitting isn’t a single crisis. It’s cumulative embarrassment.

The missed workdays you can’t explain.The nights that blur together into something so repetitive it loses even its erotic charge.The way your body starts to feel older than it is, joints stiff, chest tight, digestion protesting every meal.The way your own reflection begins to look like someone you once heard a story about and pitied.

You realize, slowly, that the Chemical Kingdom has no elders. No one grows wise there. People age, yes. They get more stories about their binges, more scars, more lost years. But they do not become the kind of man you once went searching for: someone who can look at you with both desire and depth.

They either leave or die or become monuments to the one story they never stopped telling themselves: that this was all they were fit for.

The thought lands one day with the quiet of a sentence already decided: If I don’t get out, this will be my only biography.

You do not get sober because you stop loving Blue. You get sober because you finally admit what it loves back: not you, but your erasure.

Quitting does not restore you to some innocent baseline. There is no rewinding. The Damage has been done at multiple layers: the receptors, the routines, the way your mind associates arousal with chemical roar.

What it does, over weeks and months and relapses and restarts, is something more modest and more terrifying: it hands the Arrow a task it never wanted.

Not to judge the Animal—God knows it has done enough of that—but to learn to protect it.

To build a life in which wanting doesn’t automatically mean disappearing. To build days that don’t require nights like those to be survived. To build a sense of self that isn’t thrown into question every time a beautiful man gets off three times and leaves without asking when he can see you again.

You did not stumble into the Blue because you were stupid. You walked into it carrying the exact vulnerabilities it was built to exploit: the porn-trained circuits, the exiled queer kid, the lonely adult with a breakneck mind and no pack.

It fit you perfectly.

That is why leaving it feels less like dropping a bad habit and more like abdicating a throne in a country that, for a while, made more sense than any other you had known.

What remains after abdication is not a clear new homeland. It is a room, an apartment in a city that’s too pretty for the ghosts it houses, a phone that still remembers the numbers of men you met in fever, a body that shakes and sweats and dreams in chemicals it no longer receives.

And a question you have not yet answered:

If you will not be king there, what are you willing to be here?

5. When the Arrow Turns on Its Own

By the time I wrote The Arrow and the Animal, I thought I had achieved a kind of truce with myself.

It wasn’t peace. Peace is quiet. This was more like a ceasefire with maps and footnotes: two forces in my chest, clearly named, with territorial lines sketched in careful prose. The part of me that wants meaning, promise, structure, and God—the Arrow. The part that wants heat, contact, erasure, the open field with no fences—the Animal.

On paper, they were balanced. In practice, they were still taking turns occupying the same house and accusing each other of arson.

The weekend in the parking lot was not just a binge; it was a live-action demonstration of the essay. The Animal ran the night. The Arrow narrated the aftermath. And both, at different hours, turned their fury on me.

We imagine our conscience as something gentle: a quiet word in the back of the mind, a hand on the shoulder redirecting us from harm. Mine does not speak that language. It does not suggest. It indicts. It arrives with closing arguments already written.

This is the first uncomfortable truth: my Arrow is not just a compass. It is also a blade.

It was forged in a house where right and wrong were not abstract questions but daily weather—honor, shame, reputation, duty. It was tempered in cultures that prized discipline and sacrifice, that measured a life not by how vivid it felt from the inside but by how well it conformed to a story they were already telling about themselves.

Add education to this: a doctorate in thinking too much, years of reading systems and histories and theologies. I did not just inherit a sense of good and evil; I learned how to annotate it.

So when I watch myself crawl into a stranger’s car at three in the morning, let someone handle my body like a rented object, and then eat a cold sandwich in bed the next day because my nervous system is too rattled to leave the apartment, there is no shortage of language available to explain why this is unacceptable.

The Arrow sees everything.

It sees the humiliation. It sees the laziness. It sees the way I use other men’s beauty to regulate my self-worth. It sees the way I use sex to manage states that should be served by sleep and companionship and prayer. It knows exactly how much I know better.

And it turns that knowledge into a sentence.

Not a consequence: this behavior will hurt you.A verdict: you are the kind of man who does this, therefore you are…

The “therefore” is never written down, but the options are short: weak, disgusting, hopeless, counterfeit. The Arrow is clever enough not to say them out loud. It just repeats them under its breath until the body flinches.

The Animal watches this spectacle with growing resentment.

From its point of view, it did what it always promised: it kept me alive without the Blue. It took the full force of craving and terror and slept in someone’s arms instead of under a chemical wave. It endured contempt in a car, a lecture from a stranger, a night of being a body first and a person second, all so the organism would not reach for the pipe.

And now the Arrow is railing about sin and self-betrayal, as if the Blue that almost killed us would have been a more respectable way to cope.

This is how the war stays funded. Each side feels under-acknowledged.

The Arrow says: I am the one who gets you out of bed, who earns the money, who writes the essays, who walks you past dealers, who remembers why you quit. Without me, you would be dead or in some lockbox of a clinic, muttering into the drip.

The Animal says: I am the one who knows how starved you are, who remembers what skin feels like, who carries the grief in the muscles you ignore, who cannot live on analysis alone. Without me, you would freeze into a statue that works and writes and never once feels held.

The weekend sits between them as evidence, and each uses it to prove its point.

Look, says the Arrow, at what happens when you loosen control: parking lots, cheap cologne, missed haircuts, food delivered in crumpled bags because you cannot stand to be seen in public after what you’ve done. This is where “freedom” leads you.

Look, says the Animal, at what happens when you chain me up: weeks of brittle virtue, a nervous system stretched so thin it hums, lonely Friday nights that glow with the light of a thousand browser tabs you pretend not to want. When I finally escape, it is because you left me no sane path out.

We talk a lot about self-hate in recovery, but we rarely ask who, exactly, is hating whom. It is not a vague fog. It has speakers. It has scripts.

In my case, most of the hate comes with footnotes and the cadence of a sermon. It comes from the Arrow, misusing its own strength.

Instead of aiming at the world that maimed me—the cultures, institutions, and profiteers that taught me to eroticize my own degradation—it aims at the easiest available target: the man in the mirror.

Instead of saying, this city and its nightlife are structurally incapable of giving you what you long for, it says, what did you expect, you’re pathetic for asking.

Instead of saying, the apps are engineered to keep you frantic, unsatisfied, hooked, it says, why do you keep crawling back like an animal.

On good days, I can see the trick. I can watch the pattern spool out and recognize that a tool meant to carve wood has been turned against the hand that holds it. I can say: Of course you went for touch; you were alone. Of course you went for intensity; your nervous system is still busted from years of crystal. You are not a saint. You are early sober. This is not a court; it is a hospital.

On bad days, the essay I wrote becomes another page in the prosecution’s file.

The language of Arrow and Animal, meant to give me a way to describe what’s happening without drowning in shame, becomes a new vocabulary for self-contempt. The Animal is not a part of me that needs housing; it’s “the beast” I gave in to. The Arrow is not a steward learning to build better scaffolding; it’s the judge who now has theological backup for the sentence.

It is a strange and ugly thing to be injured with your own ideas.

I never wanted the concepts to function as commandments. They were meant as cartography. A map of the forces at work, a diagram of why certain temptations feel holy at first and lethal later. A way of saying, you are not uniquely broken; you are playing out very old physics in a personal accent.

But when you grow up in climates where every story resolves into law—religious texts turned into checklists, parables turned into punishments—you can’t just decide to be a neutral reader. You carry a judge inside who is always looking for the rule.

The inner judge loved that essay. It filed it under Evidence.

That’s one side of why I’m harsh with myself. The other side is less noble: contempt as armor.

There is a long ledger of not being met in my life. Bosses who praised my output and ignored my moral clarity. Mentors who liked my devotion but flinched from my honesty. Men who loved my body and found my mind excessive. Cities that thrilled my senses and starved my soul.

When this goes on long enough, brutal clarity curdles into a trick:If I decide you are beneath me, then your failure to truly see me hurts less.

If I call the men I meet “low intelligence,” “shallow,” “performative,” then their refusal to stay is no longer a verdict on my worth; it’s proof of their limitations. This is not always unfair. Many of them are as bad as I say. But the move is dangerous because it is addictive.

Once you get used to preemptive disdain, it spreads. Whole cultures get flattened. Whole demographics get ranked. And eventually you turn it on yourself, because the part of you that keeps seeking them out must be as foolish as they are.

So the Arrow, misused, attacks from both directions:You are better than these men, and you must be worse than these men, because you keep ending up naked in their beds.

The Animal, meanwhile, understandably concludes that the only way to feel even briefly innocent is to shut the Arrow up entirely. Sex, Blue, porn—that triumvirate worked not just because they were raw pleasures, but because they temporarily removed the torment of moral over-interpretation.

Oblivion is, among other things, a vacation from your own commentary.

Saturday’s fear, that crawling panic at eight-thirty in the evening with the room lights on and no app to scroll, was not just loneliness. It was withdrawal from that oblivion.

Without Blue, without Grindr, without the muffling fog of intoxication, I was left in the raw corridor between the two factions: a frightened mammal in a bed, trembling under the crossfire of you’ll die without this and you’re disgusting for wanting this.

No wonder I ordered junk food like a teenager. No wonder I stayed under the covers until the sun had already spent half its light. No wonder I fantasized, for a few rancid minutes on Sunday morning, about those men being punished—being “treated like animals”—as if that would balance some cosmic scale.

This is what it looks like when the judge and the beast share the same throat.

I don’t write any of this to dramatize my case. I write it because there’s a temptation, when you’ve written a clean essay about a topic, to believe you now live above its mess. I wanted The Arrow and the Animal to function as a vantage point. The weekend showed me I’m still very much down in the ravine.

What changes, then, if I let the essay read the weekend instead of letting the weekend disprove the essay?

First, this: the Animal was not wrong about everything.

The part of me that insisted on touch, on another heartbeat in the bed, on not spending one more Friday night upright in a chair reading about other people’s wars—that part was reporting accurate data. The hunger is not the sin. The methods are the problem.

Second: the Arrow isn’t my enemy. Its hatred is misdirected.

It is not supposed to be a prosecutor; it’s supposed to be a builder. A good Arrow doesn’t stand over the Animal hissing how could you. It looks around, assesses the terrain, and says, of course you bolted; there was no shelter. Let’s try again, with better design.

Third: the devil in my cosmology is not the parking lot. It’s the voice that tells me I am nothing but the kind of man who goes to parking lots.

The act itself is banal. People have done worse things in more respectable venues. What threatens me is the story that wraps itself around the act and refuses to let me be anything else.

If there is such a thing as evil in this frame, it isn’t lust or weakness. It’s reduction: the insistence that a person can be flattened into their most panicked decision.

The Arrow, when it turns on its own, becomes a servant of that reduction. It takes a complex life—a child’s dislocation, a teenager’s apprenticeship to the screen, a gay man’s isolation in a city of surfaces, an addict’s scrambled receptors, an adult’s uneven attempts at sobriety—and boils it down to a lazy insult.

There is, in that move, a kind of relief. Smearing yourself is quicker than understanding yourself. But it’s the same relief you get from Blue: it feels like clarity while it is actively erasing you.

The work, then, is not to kill the Animal or to silence the Arrow. I am incapable of being simple. I have tested this. I fail.

The work is to refuse conscription. To stop letting my best weapon be used against my own chest.

That will not look pure. It will not unfold in a neat line. There will be other nights, other men, other weekends where my body goes looking for shortcuts and my mind wakes up after the fact like a furious parent.

But if I can do even one thing differently in those aftermaths—offer context instead of curses, ask “what were you protecting?” instead of “what’s wrong with you?”—then the essay I wrote will have done more than impress a few readers. It will have become a tool in the only workshop that matters: the one where a man tries to live with himself without tearing out his own wiring.

For now, I sit in a city built for light entertainment and wait for the shaking to stop. The Arrow mutters, the Animal sulks, and somewhere between them there is a quieter voice that asks a harder question:

If neither annihilation nor self-loathing are options, how else might you arrange your days?

The answer will not come as a revelation. It will come, if it comes at all, as a series of small, almost embarrassing decisions: to eat something green, to text someone harmless, to go to bed before the streets start shining, to move the body in ways that aren’t always a prelude to sex.

But that is the next chapter.

Before we get there, I have to talk about where, exactly, all of this is happening: in a city that keeps my body comfortable and my soul unsatisfied, a city I both bless and blame every time I open my eyes.

Austin is not the villain in this story. It is the landscape.

And landscapes shape the kind of trouble that grows.

6. The City That Holds the Body

Austin is, by most reasonable measures, kind to me.

I live in a large, quiet apartment a short walk from the water, with enough space for my books and my ghosts. There is light in the mornings, trees outside the windows, a sky that remembers how to be blue. I can walk downtown without feeling like I’m being swallowed. Traffic exists but does not yet feel like punishment. The food is good. The coffee is good. I know where to park.

This is not a small thing. I have lived in cities that made even basic comfort feel like a competition. Here, my body is not under siege. I’m not crammed into a shoebox above a bar. My ears are not full of sirens. My lungs are not full of old snow.

By any sane standard, this should count as stability.

And yet: when I say I haven’t met a single person in five years I would call a friend here, I am not exaggerating. I know colleagues. I know names. I know who to email when someone’s data pipeline breaks and who to avoid at all-hands. I know men’s faces from bars and apps and nights that felt, in the moment, like they might be the start of something.

None of them are someone I can text at nine-thirty on a Saturday night and say, I’m terrified and I don’t know why, can you just sit with me on the phone for twenty minutes?

None of them are someone I can message on Sunday morning and say, I was in a parking lot on Friday and I feel sick about it, without immediately having to manage their reaction.

The city holds my body. It does not hold my life.

Some of this is structural. Austin is a boomtown dreamt up by slide decks. People arrive here in waves, silicon in their eyes, stock grants in their pockets. They work too much, exercise too much, eat at the same ten restaurants, rotate through each other’s beds and Slack channels, and then leave when the company sells or the weather in some other hub looks more favorable.

There are communities here, I’m told, where people plant deeper roots. Families in neighborhoods with porches and school fundraisers, artists in shared houses, activists in hot rooms with folding chairs. I don’t live in those circles. My Austin is the version built for people like me: single, professional, perennially in motion.

The gay part of the city is, predictably, an intensification of this.

On any given weekend, the same circuit repeats: the bars, the drag shows, the gyms, the brunches, the apps humming under it all like a second electricity. Bodies move through these spaces in patterns that feel almost ritual: pregame, arrival, orbit, pairing off or going home alone to scroll and complain about how shallow everyone is.

There are sweet moments. I don’t want to lie. I have laughed in these rooms, danced in ways that felt briefly like freedom, had conversations at 1 a.m. with strangers that unexpectedly grazed something like sincerity. But the underlying tempo is always the same: fast, reactive, easily bored.

I’m not innocent in any of this. I have contributed my own share of quick exits and left-on-reads. When you are lonely enough, your ethics fray. You start treating people like you treat food when you’re underslept and sad: not as nourishment, but as an edible interruption.

What complicates everything is that my needs are split down the middle.

On one side, there is my nervous system, which is frankly delighted with the arrangement. It gets sunlight. It gets trees. It gets a well-paying job and an apartment that doesn’t make it flinch. When I walk outside, I see water and parks and people walking dogs who would almost certainly let me pet them if I asked.

On the other side, there is my mind, which feels like it’s been sentenced to minimum-security exile.

It stands in the middle of downtown, looking at the casual murals and taco trucks and polished tech offices, and asks questions that do not belong here:

What is this all built on? Who pays the real price for this comfort? How long can a city keep running on borrowed water and cheap labor before the edges crack? Why is everyone talking about “vibes” instead of anything that might matter in ten years?

These are not the questions that win you friends at happy hour.

When I do meet men—at work, in bars, through introductions—I can almost see the moment their eyes glaze over. It’s not that they’re stupid. It’s that they are acting out a different script. They want to talk about travel, workouts, favorite restaurants, fantasy shows, their latest minor outrage at some office decision. They are not prepared for someone who brings up theology and empire after the second drink.

I am not prepared to be anyone else.

So we smile at each other, and I make a joke, and I listen, and I file away another data point: Not here either.

The only place in Austin where I fully inhabit myself is on the page and in the rooms where I talk about addiction. My writing is largely anonymous in my daily life, protected by a name that isn’t on my badge. My recovery meetings are full of people who understand the shape of compulsion but not necessarily the way my mind wraps it in history and metaphor and rage.

These circles keep me alive, but they do not satisfy the deeper hunger: to be known as a whole, not in slices.

In the absence of that, it is easy—too easy—to aim my disappointment at the city itself, or at the men who populate my particular slice of it.

I say things, in my head and sometimes out loud, like: This town is shallow. These people are dull. The white boys here are soft. The Latinos here are all surface and no reflection. No one reads. No one thinks. No one deserves what I have to offer.

There is enough truth in these sentences to make them seductive. Austin is not a metropolis of philosophers. Many of the men I meet here really are operating on fewer frequencies than I am. I have sat through more than one date where it became painfully clear ten minutes in that he had never once questioned anything his culture told him was normal.

But contempt is a lazy theology. It flattens what it touches.

It is one thing to say, the spaces I frequent are not built to sustain depth. That is accurate. It is another to turn that into a blanket judgment on cultures, neighborhoods, entire demographics. That’s just the same old ranking I grew up under, wearing different clothes.

The harder, more humiliating truth is that I have not built much here for myself either.

I have not joined any real-world circles that are designed for thought: no reading groups, no philosophy nights, no political organizing that might introduce me to people whose minds are not ruled by algorithms. I have not gone looking for the queer elders who must exist somewhere in this town, the ones who survived harder decades and might still have a chair for someone who refuses to pretend this is all fine.

I’ve relied instead on the easiest, shortest routes to contact: screens, pings, late-night doorbells. And then I am surprised when those routes yield people who live primarily in impulse.

It’s like planting only fast-growing weeds and complaining that I don’t have a forest.

Underneath the irritation with Austin—the sense that it’s a pretty facade over something hollow—is a quieter fear: What if this is as good as it gets?

What if I never find anyone here, or anywhere, who is both attracted to my body and unafraid of my mind? What if the apartment stays full of light but empty of witnesses? What if all this comfort becomes a kind of padded cell?

I sometimes fantasize about other cities, the ones with reputations for thought and art and argument. New York, Berlin, Paris in some imaginary century. I picture cramped rooms with big conversations, bad wine, friends who could sit with me until two in the morning tearing apart a book or a country and not once look at their phone.

But I do not buy a ticket. I do not even open a search window for rentals. I stay, because right now the brutal fact is that I am too tired to uproot again, too newly sober to gamble my fragile routines on a new grid, too aware that a worse city could break what little is finally beginning to mend.

So I live in this compromise: a place that is gentle to my bones and hostile to my sense of belonging.

This is where the distinction between pack and kin becomes important.

Pack is who your nervous system can lean against, even if they don’t fully get you. People you can do ordinary things with: go to a movie, share a meal, talk about nothing important, and feel less alone. They aren’t necessarily your peers in intensity or thought, but they are consistent and generally kind.

Kin is rarer. Kin are the ones who can hold the whole story: the porn, the Blue, the essays, the theology, the disgust with mediocrity, the part of you that would rather go hungry than pretend something matters when it doesn’t. Kin don’t flinch when you talk about God and sex in the same sentence. They don’t back away from your anger at power. They don’t try to fix you when you say you were in a parking lot. They nod, because they’ve been in their own.

Right now, in Austin, I have neither.

Some of that is bad luck. Some of it is culture. Some of it is addiction’s long shadow—years spent choosing the Blue and Grindr over phone calls and potlucks. When you disappear into chemicals and pixels for long enough, the people who might have become pack give up and move on. The ones who could have become kin never even see you.

When I say I don’t know a single person I’d call a friend, this is not a humblebrag about my high standards. It’s an admission of how thoroughly I’ve burned the bridges most people take for granted.

And yet, there is a strange mercy in the city’s indifference.

Austin is not trying to reform me. It does not pretend to be a spiritual center. It is honest about what it is: a place where you can make a good salary, eat well, go jogging around a lake, listen to live music, drink more than you meant to, get laid if you’re willing to play the game, and mostly be left alone.

Left alone is dangerous for someone like me. Left alone is also what I have always wanted.

My whole life, I have fantasized about some version of this apartment: solitary, sunlit, arranged exactly to my taste, a sanctuary where no one barges in uninvited. Now that I have it, the silence sometimes feels like suffocation. The very privacy that makes it safe to fall apart also makes it difficult to remember why I should keep getting up.

If I am honest, much of my anger at this city, at these men, at these institutions, is just displaced grief that my long-desired autonomy turned out not to be the salvation I was promised.

You can be fully in charge of your schedule, your space, your work, your diet—and still be unbearably lonely at midday on a Sunday with UberEats on the way and no one to tell that you missed a haircut because you were out trying not to smoke the drug that almost killed you.

The temptation in that loneliness is always the same: to open some portal that gives quick, cheap contact. The app, the video, the drug. Austin makes all of these incredibly easy. That is its sin, if it has one: not malice, but availability.

You can live here for years and never have to ask anyone for help. You can fill every ache with something purchasable: food, drink, sex, distraction. No one will stop you. The city is built to accommodate self-destruction as long as you pay your rent on time and don’t bother the neighbors too loudly.

There are places in the world where community is a survival mechanism, where extended families and neighbors and long-standing friendships make it impossible to disappear entirely without someone knocking on your door. There are villages where if you don’t show up to the market, somebody comes looking.

Here, if I vanished for a week, the people most likely to notice would be an algorithm and perhaps a barista.

That is not entirely Austin’s fault. That is the design of much of modern urban life. But it lands differently on someone whose core story, from childhood, has been exile.

A city that shrugs at your absence confirms something very old: You were always optional.

So I project onto Austin. I make it the villain of my solitude. I call it shallow and boring and unworthy. It is easier to scorn a skyline than to admit that I have no idea how to let anyone stand close without wanting to control their impression of me.

If I’m honest, some of the men I have dismissed here—as too simple, too cheerful, too basic—might have been decent members of a pack. Men I could have watched movies with, gone for walks with, cooked dinner with, without expecting them to understand my essays or my God. Men whose presence might not have set my brain on fire, but might have given my nervous system enough warmth that I didn’t go hunting for it in parking lots.

I did not give them that chance. I wanted kin or nothing. I chose nothing, over and over, and then cursed the city for delivering exactly what I ordered.

This is not a confession designed to lead into a redemption arc where I suddenly join a book club and everything is fine. I am not there. I am still in the phase where most evenings, the apartment feels safer than any room full of people, and most nights, the idea of another awkward attempt at small talk with strangers feels more dangerous than opening an app.

But I can at least tell the truth about the geometry: Austin is a wide, green, comfortable basin. I am a man who keeps climbing to the rim and declaring it empty, then retreating to my cave to nurse the wound of being unseen.

The city holds my body. It has given my nervous system a climate where healing is at least biologically possible: good sleep, less harsh winters, fewer daily shocks. This matters. You cannot do the kind of internal rebuilding I need to do in perpetual siege.

What it does not do, and what it never promised to do, is hold my story. That is still my work. To find or build small pockets where the Arrow can speak without being resented and the Animal can breathe without having to throw itself under a truck every time it wants to be touched.

Maybe those pockets will be here. Maybe they’ll be elsewhere, someday, when I have enough years between me and the Chemical Kingdom to trust myself in a more volatile environment. For now, this is where the work is stationed: in a pretty city that feels like a waiting room, in a bed that remembers both Blue dreams and sober mornings, in a life that is materially fine and spiritually unfinished.

The question that remains, as the light moves across these walls and the phone stays mostly silent, is not whether Austin is worthy of me.

The question is whether I am willing to treat this interlude not as a sentence, but as scaffolding: a place where the structure can go up slowly, ugly at first, necessary, so that when I do step into whatever comes next—another city, another love, another phase—I do not instantly burn it down for lack of internal beams.

Hope, if there is any, will not arrive as a better skyline. It will arrive as a different way of being in whatever city I find myself in.

That, finally, is the work of the last chapter.

7. A Different Way to Stay

If this were a cleaner story, this would be the part where I tell you I found him.

The man whose touch doesn’t vanish at sunrise. The friend who shows up with soup and a look that says of course you fucked up, that doesn’t mean I’m leaving. The city where the bars are full of philosophers and the Blue never made it past customs.

That isn’t how this ends.

The weekend in the parking lot did not produce a lover, or a best friend, or a revelation. It produced a ham and cheese sandwich, a missed haircut, a deleted profile, and a man in bed on a Sunday morning who could not quite decide whether staying off Blue counted as a win, given everything it took to get there.

It is tempting, from that vantage, to say that nothing changed. Same patterns, different chemicals. Same Animal, different leash. But that would be lazy, and if there is one thing I am newly, painfully allergic to, it is laziness about my own life.

Something did shift that weekend, small and stubborn as a weed through concrete: I stopped pretending I could outrun the physics I myself had described.

The Arrow and the Animal are not concepts I can return to the library. I wrote them because I was already living them. Every time I crawl into a stranger’s car or into my own bed alone, I am testing the same two questions:

* What happens if I let the Animal choose without supervision?

* What happens if I let the Arrow judge without mercy?

The answers have been remarkably consistent.

What I had not tried, not really, was a third thing: letting them stay in the same room while I make small, unglamorous decisions.

A different way to stay is not a spiritual state. It is a set of choices made at unremarkable hours.

It looks, for example, like this:

On a future Friday, I feel the same itch I felt before the parking lot. The week has been long. Work has been a theater of half-truths and politic smiles. I have slept poorly because my nervous system still thinks 3 a.m. is a plausible bedtime. The city’s lights start to wink at me through the window.

The old script offers its double feature:Bar, then app.App, then bed.Bed, then shame.

Somewhere in that sequence, the idea of the Blue will wander through like a retired dictator checking his old office.

The Animal, understandably, wants out. It wants bodies, noise, risk. It is tired of being good.

The Arrow, if left to its usual tricks, would respond by replaying highlight reels of every disaster I have engineered in the name of escape. It would show me parking lots and pornos and the inside of rooms where men’s eyes did not quite meet mine. It would do this not to warn, but to humiliate.

A different way to stay begins before either of them gets the microphone.

It begins with something embarrassingly low to the ground: I look at the clock and say, out loud if I have to, You are not allowed to make any big decisions after midnight.

Not about the Blue, not about men, not about whether your life is worthless. After midnight, the only choices on the menu are: shower, tea, book, bed, call someone safe, write something bad. That’s it. The parliament of your inner life is adjourned until morning.

This is not moral reasoning. It is damage control. The parts of my brain that choose well are simply not online at two in the morning. I have decades of evidence for this. Refusing to negotiate with myself in that window is not repression; it is respect for biology.

The Animal hates this rule. At first. Then, slowly, it learns that “no big decisions after midnight” does not mean “no pleasure, ever.” It means: if you want something, you have to want it before the hour when everything gets slippery.

This forces another small shift: if I am going to seek touch, I have to do it earlier, with more mind intact. Which makes it more likely that I will see who I’m inviting in, not just what.

Some nights, that will still mean sex. I am not a monk. I am not interested in becoming one. But the more awake I am when I choose, the less likely I am to agree to things that I know, in daylight, feel like self-harm.

This is one axis of staying: time.

Another is body.

For most of my life, my body has either been a vehicle for my brain or a stage for my addictions. It has not often been treated as a citizen with its own rights.

When I listen honestly, it doesn’t ask for much:

* Sleep, at something close to the same time, in a room that is not full of blue light.

* Food that is not always sugar and grease delivered in paper bags.

* Movement that raises the heart rate without demanding performance: walks, lifting things, stretching the parts that clench when I pretend not to be afraid.

* Touch that is not always erotic: a hand on my back at a meeting, a hug that lasts slightly longer than custom, a massage that does not come with innuendo.

None of this will earn me a new theology degree or a better title. It will not land me in anyone’s bed by itself. It will not fix the part of me that believes I am unlovable if no one is texting back.

But it will change the background. It will make my nervous system a little less like a frayed wire and a little more like something that can carry current without sparking at every jolt.

When the body is slightly less desperate, the Animal is slightly less likely to seize control of the cockpit and head for the nearest crash site.

A different way to stay is, in this sense, stupidly physical. It is protein and hydration and walks and the decision to go home one drink earlier than the night would otherwise demand. There is nothing transcendent about it. That is precisely why it works.

The Arrow’s work, in this scheme, has to change too.

It cannot keep playing judge and executioner. That job description is killing me.

Instead, the Arrow has to do the thing it was actually built for: design.

Design here means asking questions like:

* What if your weekends had outlines, the way your essays do?

* What if you did not wake into a vacuum every Saturday, waiting to see what loneliness would improvise?

* What if you blocked Sunday mornings for the same three things every week: a meeting, a call, a walk?

Structure is not punishment. It’s pre-emptive mercy. If I know, for example, that I have a standing commitment at ten a.m. with people I respect, I am less likely to be in a parking lot at three.

Not because I’ve become holy, but because I’m suddenly aware that my life extends past dawn.

The Arrow can help me build this kind of scaffolding, if I let it. The same mind that organizes arguments against empire can organize my calendar against relapse. It is not grand work. It is necessary work.

None of this answers the deeper ache for kin. The longing for someone who can sit across from me and not flinch when I say, in the same paragraph, Blue and God and collapse and lust and hope.

I do not know when, or if, that person will appear. I am no longer willing to make my healing contingent on their arrival.

Instead, I am starting to experiment with something humbler: pack.

The bar is lower. Pack doesn’t have to read my essays or share my cosmology. They just have to be steady, mostly kind, not actively destructive. Someone I can have dinner with and not pretend around. Someone I can text, not at midnight with philosophical despair, but at six p.m. with, Do you want to walk by the water? I don’t want to be alone tonight.

This requires a kind of courage I am not used to: the courage to be ordinary in front of people.

To show up to a trivia night or a book club or a recovery gathering and resist the urge to either dominate the room with my insight or dismiss it as beneath me. To let people be partial: good for a laugh, good for a shared task, good for a movie night, without demanding that they also be equipped to hold my most incandescent grief.

If kin show up, it will likely be through these smaller, clumsier doors. Not as a reward for my suffering, but as a side-effect of finally being somewhere often enough that someone begins to recognize my face.

There is also the matter of work.

My job does not know, cannot know, what I am doing to stay alive. It gauges my worth in metrics and roadmaps and how well I navigate politics. I resent that. I also rely on the paycheck and the structure of having somewhere to be.

Reframing work as part of my staying changes its moral valence. It is no longer the stage where I must be flawless to justify existing. It becomes one more beam in the scaffolding: a reason to sleep, a place to use my mind for something other than self-interrogation, a context in which I am occasionally reminded that I am good at things that have nothing to do with sex or recovery.

The part of me that wants to burn it all down in the name of authenticity will object. Let it. Authenticity without continuity is just vandalism.

I don’t know, yet, what the long-term shape of my life will be. I don’t know if Austin is a chapter or a setting. I don’t know if the men who have hurt me will ever know the cost of their flippancy. I don’t know if the ones I have silently ranked and dismissed might have surprised me, had I let them.

What I do know is this: the night in the parking lot could have ended in a pipe, and it didn’t.

The Angel could have left without touching me like I was a person, and he didn’t. He held me, badly, imperfectly, with too much irony and too little reverence—but he held me. My body remembers that. It matters.

The man with ten years of therapy could have been me, in another timeline: fluent in clinical terms, eager to tell someone else how to be better, terrified to look at his own reflection for more than a second. That version of me is still available. I could pivot into him any day.

Instead, I am doing something much less impressive: lying in bed on a Sunday without the Blue in my system, ordering food I will not starve without, talking to a machine about what I did and why.

There is a version of me that would sneer at this as pathetic. I am letting him go.

Hope, for me, does not look like sudden purity. It looks like slightly better ratios.

Fewer nights that end in parking lots.More nights that end in my own bed, sober, maybe lonely, but intact.Fewer weekends lost entirely to chemicals or shame.More weekends with at least one conversation that is honest and one act that is merciful toward my own body.

It looks like seasons where relapse is something I remember, not something I schedule. It looks like my porn usage shrinking not because I have conquered lust, but because other forms of contact have finally been allowed to exist.

It looks, perhaps most radically, like being willing to be a beginner at things I thought I was above: making small talk, joining groups, saying I don’t know how to do this without hiding behind my intelligence, can we try anyway?

I wrote, in The Arrow and the Animal, that the point is not to be spotless but to keep the center empty enough for truth and full enough for love.

Right now, my center is often occupied by fear. Fear of being ordinary. Fear of being unlovable. Fear that if I stop using my suffering as proof of my seriousness, there will be nothing left to distinguish me from the men I silently disdain.

A different way to stay would mean letting that fear be there without letting it drive.

It would mean accepting that I am, in fact, not exempt from the small disciplines that heal other people just because I can describe them more beautifully.

I don’t get to write myself out of the work.

So here is where I leave us, for now: not on a mountaintop, not in a wedding bed, not at the end of a twelve-step testimonial with twenty years of sobriety and a hardcover memoir.

I leave us in an apartment in Austin, on a not-quite-made bed, with the Arrow learning—slowly, resentfully, genuinely—to put down the gavel and pick up a blueprint, and the Animal learning—slowly, resentfully, genuinely—that there are ways to be warm that do not require setting the house on fire.

If you are reading this because some part of my story rhymes with yours, I don’t have a benediction to offer. Only this small, stubborn declaration:

We are not only what we did at three in the morning.

We are also what we choose at eight p.m. on a Saturday, trembling and sober, when we decide whether to open the app, call the dealer, text the man who half-wrecks us—or to sit, hungry and afraid, in a room that might one day become a home.

The night the Animal stayed sober was not a triumph. It was a narrow miss and a messy compromise. But it was a miss. The pipe stayed in its ghost world. My heart kept beating. The city kept holding my body, even when I wished it would evict me.

That is where I am building from: not from purity, but from survival. From one more morning awake.

The Arrow points, the Animal paces, and somewhere between them a man gets up, opens his curtains, drinks a glass of water, and chooses, again, to remain.

—Elias WinterAuthor of Language Matters, a space for reflection on language, power, and decline.

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