The dew point lays at 2 degrees, and your next words have got me staring at the exit. My feet are hanging off your couch, cold and shivering until you bend down to kiss it. You’ve taken, swallowed down too much so you lay your head in my lap. Due to chronological loyalty, I run my hands through your slippery dark hair. You are the mold of the newest version of the national beauty standard, death oriented and playing the line between petty crime and criminal offenses with a devotion to the concept of family that borderlines on sacred. You occasionally sleep by your gun as you do tonight, pistol next to a cracked phone, magazine underneath the mahogany nightstand, self-annihilation two fingertips away. Poverty, you explained once, comes with the flavor of desolation. 

Suddenly, it’s three in the morning, and I’m asking you to put your foot on the gas, thinking of your sun and how it brought some sickness, though the light that turns red far more often than green. There is an angel in the cold car, burnt feathers still attached to your back, sweating from the proximity of the sun that I look to, hard rain falling in my eyes through the passenger window. You’re in the driver’s seat of my car, comfortably quiet, tentatively wistful, hand reaching towards mine, slowly, so slowly. You have the capability of becoming a maniacal man: that potential went largely untapped, due to a constant stalemate within. 

You could never know, how could you, of how your actions reminded me of an unbridled Southeast military junta, of 2014, of careless sweaty bodies colliding into each other, grenades falling on rebelling figures, three fingers arched in the air towards a line of young soldiers, frightening my teenage self to my deepest core. Here in America a sign reads Why? Why? Flames behind the man holding white cardboard crudely attached to a wooden rectangular stick. I do now know if you know a semblance of an answer. You did, I suppose in every sense between you and Washington, between you and me, burn it all down. I think of you, Maladaptive, insular, and completely convinced of your non-ignorance. Here blooms an image of you tearing through acrylic, taking things in the name of a vengeance that I hardly believe you believed in. Ideology, a thing you couldn’t seem to reconcile with that gentle— or passive— personality of yours. 

We are one state above Oregon, who according to the state, flew with her own wings. George Floyd has died, and horridly, rightfully our city is up in flames, doors barricaded, so called friends abandoned, disappointment in acquaintances everywhere. You tell me you have broken glass, broken signs in solidarity though as a man who passes as you, I cannot imagine you understand the connotations even as you tell me your life belongs on the streets of Ballard, of Capitol Hill, the valley of death, the devil's backbone. 

Some monetary absurdities and western desert fires later, you call a detached version of myself to tell me about a friend running into an empty high school, searching for a sister when that seventeen-year-old boy pulled the trigger on another child. I wondered if they had put his body in the freezer, so they could burn him on a Sunday like a remembered boy I had known and loved. I know the coroner comes for birthdays and second Mondays alike, so tell me, young Atlas, how heavy do you believe your world is? 

Published 2nd September, 2024.


"King, or so You Called Yourself briefly details my relationship with a man affiliated with Seattle gangs, and our summer together years after my immigration from Thailand after the country’s martial law, and following the Black Lives Matter protests in Seattle. The piece is not meant to provide political commentary, but to draw vague parallels between similar conflicts around the world, and to look at someone who was directly embedded in the cultural conflicts. The essay details how everyday life proceeds after 2020."

- Pran Phucharoenyos

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