Sydney S. Kim

Green

It has begun to rain. The bedroom windows are crawling green with ivy from the outside. In  here, wet color touches wet glass, framing and obstructing the view. Dripping all the while.  Leaves like speartips, like mutated stars, like hands—reaching. Ornamental and intimate. 

It’s like the color is trying to get inside. 

Brilliant green seeps into my thoughts like moss on a headstone and slowly I become aware  of my own porousness, how susceptible I am to influence when I do not wish to be. When I  do not believe that I am. But I’m learning that’s your whole trick. 

Still, it’s all very beautiful, if disorienting. I keep forgetting where I am. I fall asleep on your  bed as it starts raining even harder. 

Disappointingly, I do not dream. 

I wake up. I remember that I am in New York. Because I decided to come see you. I came  to see you even though I had been feeling out of sorts for weeks. I told you I have not been  feeling like myself. But over the phone, I could tell the words meant nothing beyond what  they meant for you. Just like I am nothing outside of who I am to you. 

The bedroom door is open and you’re sitting on the couch. I hear the hum of the living  room air conditioner over the rain. In the bedroom, there’s no AC, not even a fan. The soft  trickle of the cats’ water fountain joins the continuous wet sounds of rain and I notice  there’s sweat on the backs of my legs, my ass, my lower back. All this moisture made by my unconscious body. 

I feel trapped in glass, like if I breathe too hard, everything will fog up. 

We end up kissing lying side by side. We have sex for what seems like a long time. Hours. It  feels good, dizzying, but also like it’s happening on a different plane of reality. Time crawls  like condensation, and as we continue touching, it becomes increasingly impossible to  imagine us existing and moving outside the sweating, green windows that, with every  moment, with every touch, appear to be closing in. 

My open hand through glass. 

My body won’t stop reacting to this city. It doesn’t matter if I’m indoors or outdoors; I  break out in heat rash pretty much everywhere. I can barely sleep I’m so itchy. Each  morning I wake up with long, red scratches on my back. Mindless ravaging animal. I feel  disgusting, unattractive, textured with bubbling welts where I am normally soft and smooth.  We have not touched since that first day and I am glad for it.

I cannot seem to extricate myself from you. Not for want of trying. Is it my own weakness  of resolve, I wonder, my ever-hungry ego, or your persistence, or maybe even something  bigger at play that neither of us can control. I joke about the stars and entertain whether I  am surrendering to the rhythms of the universe or abandoning accountability. 

We go to the beach. Or rather, we try to. Rainclouds chase us the entire drive, the rearview  mirror bending with impenetrable black. Above our heads, the threat of thunder. It’s  comically ominous. Can we outrun the elements? Turns out we can’t. We arrive at the beach  and immediately the sky rips open to release sheets and sheets of water. We laugh at the  drama of it all. We laugh at the people caught outside, the small children bullied by wind and  rain. Absurdity masks what feels like an unspoken competition for disappointment. You turn  the car around, drive us back. 

I think about how you came back into my life. Like the finest tendril of green reaching—for  me. How could I help but be tempted by the promise of new color? Love was gray and  confusing for so long. Meanwhile, a quiet little vine—a playful coil, a corkscrew, a spring— whispered around a finger, then wound up my wrist, my arm. I was pulled back in. I let it  happen. I stood motionless and waited patiently for leaves to sprout and unfurl and  compose themselves into something meaningful and worthwhile. A laurel, maybe. My most  private feelings photosynthesized into a crown of green. 

Instead, everything else in my life stopped moving. 

I escape to Valhalla by way of the Metro North. At Pam’s, we eat dinner outside. I marvel at  her colorful garden, all the flowers and herbs, even the weeds. I point out the beauty of the  ivy sprawling over the stone wall just behind the patio table. No, she says, they choke  everything out. 

Soak the color green, drown it, and it just gets greener. A deepening, and then suddenly, it’s  black. 

I slap you in the face as I fuck you from on top. You laugh, caught off guard, then your  hand shoots straight up from the bed to grab me by the throat. You wish you could steal the  air from me, I think to myself. You wish. I bend my back into a bridge, bring my face in  close, and as you strain up to kiss me, I hold you down by the neck, returning the favor. I  take from you what you take from me. But you hold my fingers in place as if to say: longer,  stay longer. 

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Sydney S. Kim (she/they) is a queer, Korean-American writer and artist based in Los Angeles. Her literary work has been published in FENCE magazine, Annulet Poetics, Nat. Brut, and Wildness. Her visual art has been published by A History of Frogs, Publication Studio, and Social Malpractice. Her middle name is Sujin.