bread and butter, briefly

The promise of sourdough
waited on the table,
still warm.

He did not break into it.

His hands,
made for doing,
did nothing.

Butter waited there too,
shimmering with the ease
of an ordinary future.

I did not cut into it.

My tongue,
made for naming,
named nothing.

There were chocolates
we did not savour.
Pistachio-sweet.
Cocoa-spicy.

Sweetness planned
for a room
we almost unlocked.

Our lips
never reached it.

Still.

For a minute,
the machine within me
stopped making white noise
when his arms wrapped around me
as if no one was watching,
though everyone was.

bread and butter, briefly.

A line kept moving through me:

I wish we could afford us:
one bedroom,
faux silk sheets,
rich perfume.

We could not.

His scent stayed only on
the neck of the plastic bottle
left behind,

the collar of the soft Virgin jersey,
the surfaces
his wrist had touched.

Overnight,
we made a different life
out of not speaking.

We filled the room
with the heaviness
of a kitchen
after cigarettes.

Mistook the unlaid table
for a future.

By morning,
the air inside
was sharp as the knife.

Outside,
the last flight home cut
across the black water,
punctual, indifferent,
carrying what I had not named
seven time zones away.

The knife
did not cut the bread,
nor the butter,
but stayed in me
as if it had.

Simple motions, forever. Do not trust. Do not fear. Do not ask.
Only my spade knows where to place their silence.

I smooth the mound like linen.
One cut of earth, memory lies flat.
Cigarette packet tucked beneath satin pillow.
Breathe evenly. Forget. Forget. Forget.

Warsaw: concrete’s chill, loam’s steam; rope-bite.
Names, dates, facts: blur. The ground does not.
Do not trust words—trust motion.
Do not fear their gaze. Do not ask for forgiveness.

One stroke. One cut. One knot. One stitch.
One life; a million deaths. Tears fall—soil to mud;
boots slip; cords sing; tobacco to ash. We count knots.
A mother’s breath greys. The heat in the back is prayer.
Wind lifts what hope remains.
Nie wierz. Nie bój się. Nie proś. Nie kochaj.

Faster now: shoulders burn. Shovel—thud. Shovel—thud.
Do not look up.

The city presses close; sirens far; clay grips.
Earth to earth. Heart to heart.
What goes unseen, we shoulder.
A bus ticket loosens in rain.
Nie płacz.

No names; no small talk. Only weight and gravity.
Only rope, blade, cut, closing seam.
Only dirt doing what dirt does after breath leaves the body.

Do not stay.
Do not.
Do.

The body is a box; I am the earth that seals it.
Simple motions, forever.

A queer myth of rupture, haunting, and the long return into the body.

In the beginning, there was nothing but white noise — the synthetic symphony of a life lived on schedule. The whine of the tube braking into Archway. Metal against metal. Bodies pressed too close. My gym locker slamming shut. Protein shake powder ghosting the air, synthetic vanilla fooling my tastebuds into mistaking it for something real. The fluorescent hum of office strip lights. Elevator dings. Coffee machines hissing with steam I could never release enough of.

And always: the second heartbeat, the one behind my sternum, that whispered: faster. You’re falling behind.

I moved at the speed of performance. Words always ready. Shoulders always braced. A grin that could pass for ease.

No one could tell that I flinched at silence. That beneath the velvet voice and chameleon charm — learned for approval, performed for survival — my nervous system was threadbare.

They saw presence. I felt absence. Hope systemically eroded — thread by thread, until it no longer registered as something I could reach for. Relentless loneliness.

Spread too thin to gather. Too hollowed to resist the conditioned urge to collapse.

But the city wasn’t just noise and ache. It was also a crucible.

I became a filmmaker in that city. I built a body of work, and a body of flesh that looked like it belonged to someone who had answers. I learned how to wield beauty — and how often it was mistaken for safety.

London gave me mirrors — some gilded, some cracked. In gym changing rooms. In dark rooms. Between the thighs of men I devoured and let devour me, trying to locate something sacred in the unholy.

I fucked my way through longing. Through trauma. Through strangers who looked like answers until the high wore off.

The chemsex scene was pleasure. That’s what terrified me. Because in those moments — euphoric, dissolved, primal — I felt something that almost resembled connection. Almost. But it never held. And when it left, it took more than it gave.

London gave me access. And then it turned.

A fucking characterless cappuccino at £5.50.

Even the mortgage I’d once called my lifeline began to resemble a noose — and it was more than my nervous system could carry. There were no longer streets — only obstacle courses. No longer lovers — only distractions.

So I left.

In a rush. No great plan. I didn’t say my goodbyes — not to the city, not to the friends, and certainly not to the version of me who thought he could thrive in it.

I boarded a train. Then a ferry. Then my own feet — dragging me away from the cycles of dissociation and controlled self-detonations I had been walking for years.

I found a house. Not a home. Not yet. A semi-habitable structure.

Wood swollen with damp. Stone veined with moss. Windowpanes fogged from the inside. She didn’t care that I’d finally arrived. And still — there was a hook in my gut.

No key. Just a rock on the doorstep. And beneath it: my name.

Inside: a smell like peat smoke and wet wool. Mould curling at the corners of the ceiling. A chair too low. A kettle with limescale like barnacles. A sink that groaned when you asked it for water.

And still: something exhaled in me.

My breath hit the air like it hadn’t been granted exit in years.

I didn’t decorate. I didn’t rearrange. I stood still and listened.

The stove refused me. My hands blistered from firewood. The damp clung to my clothes, my thoughts, my bones.

I began to ache in new places. I began to feel.

There were no lessons. No spiritual slogans. Only repetition.

Cold. Heat. Crackling joints. Hunger. Sleep.

The feedback loop of living.

And then: the rupture.

Triggered by the terror of nearing something sacred, I unravelled into old betrayals. I reached for the ritual that had once mimicked flight — the sweet, deadly whisper of soft annihilation. The exhale that always turned on me.

I laced it through my bloodstream like a lullaby. And woke up missing.

Three nights of no sleep. My skin pulsed like a live socket after rain. A week where food repulsed me. My jaw locked. My bowels twisted. Shame sat in the throat like a hard unripe fruit.

My thoughts circled like stray dogs around the remains of self-respect. I lay on the wooden floor and watched a spider trace a web between two beams and felt jealous. At least it knew how to build something. And me? I couldn’t even get dressed in the morning without crying.

Stillness wasn’t peace. It was exposure.

And still, the house didn’t move. She didn’t soothe. She didn’t care. But she didn’t leave. And that was more than my mother.

Eventually, the nausea lifted. Like fog parting around a shape I hadn’t realised I was inside.

The ache remained. But it had corners now. It didn’t bleed into everything.

The enamel mug shocked my teeth. Salt settled on my lips from the sea air. Loneliness had texture — coarse, like hessian.

I didn’t heal. I noticed.

That was enough.

The deer appeared only when I was still. The kettle only sang when I was patient. My shoulders only dropped when I stopped performing solitude and let it touch me.

Rituals came. Not from Instagram. From need.

Wool socks on the radiator. A knife kept sharp. Water boiled, forgotten, reboiled.

Sometimes I returned to the city.

Because grief has a rearview mirror and loneliness doesn’t want peace — it wants the familiar.

I walked through Soho and saw ghosts. Not spectral. Personal.

Versions of me and Steven — hands brushing, coffees cooling on cracked café tables. Us laughing at jokes no one else would understand. Us choosing the same lamp in a furniture store and pretending it was fate.

I returned, not to reclaim. But to remember what I’ve already survived.

The tube still whined. The coffee machines still hissed with steam. But they no longer shaped my pulse.

I had other rhythms now.

Animal. Inconvenient. Honest.

Still, sometimes, I felt the old pull — the magnetic seduction of being seen. Of being recognised for something polished.

And I let it flicker. I let it walk beside me.

But I didn’t follow it.

And in those rhythms, I felt the residue of my father.

Not a ghost. A weight. In the curl of my spine. In the way the beams creaked at night, like someone pacing above me. In how I check the attic door each evening before bed, even though I know it will always stay where it is…

The house felt firmer in its foundations.

She let me hang my coat. She let the scent of sweat and woodsmoke settle into the sheets. She let the cold enter less fiercely.

And yet, just this morning, I dropped a mug and startled so hard I almost wept. There are still parts of me that don’t know I’m safe.

But now, when the beams creak at night, I don’t assume collapse. I listen.

And beneath it all — the wind, the breath, the floorboards shifting — I swear I hear it: someone coming home.

A mythic queer memoir of eros, exile, and emotional survival in San Sebastián.

Prologue: The Pilgrim and the Wound

There’s a myth about Saint Sebastian. Pierced by arrows. Bound to a tree. He did not die. Not then. He survived the first execution.

That’s the part they don’t teach you in school. That pain doesn’t always kill you. Sometimes it just opens the door.

Sebastian was martyred twice. The first time — his body. The second — his return. And in between? A kind of queer divinity.

Saint Sebastian has long been canonised by gay men — sculpted into art, desire, metaphor. He is our patron of survival and sex. Of beauty and brutality. Of the body, undone and radiant.

A man pierced, punished, gazed upon — and still glowing.

So this is my return. Not to martyrdom. But to motion. To hunger, to heat, to holy contradiction.

This is not a city guide. This is not a diary. This is what happens when a queer heart walks across Spain dragging its own myth behind it.

I. This Was Never a Holiday

I didn’t leave for leisure. It was a hasty escape from the increasingly suffocating frame of familiarity. I needed to learn who I was underneath it — without the gym, the meetings, the men who say they want me but only in theory. I left London to excavate. To expose.

Heathrow was not an airport. The departures lounge, not a punctuation point. They were a threshold.

British Airways thought they were flying me — and my hastily packed Carl Friedrik suitcase — to Spain. But I was flying into myself — straight to the belly of the beast.

This wasn’t a holiday. This was a reckoning.

And landing? I have never experienced more violent turbulence. Clutching the gold cross on my chain, I tensed so hard my thighs nearly fused with the cabin floor.

II. Bilbao — Steel and Sweat

Bilbao didn’t seduce me. It let me arrive.

There’s a quiet eroticism to the city — feral but grounded. The kind of place where men don’t beg for your gaze because they already know they have it. Masculinity feels lived-in. Worn like denim. Heavy with silence and silver.

There was one boy I saw twice. Round earring. Low-slung joggers. A moustache, unapologetically scruffy. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His glance lingered like a palm on my neck. Not possessive — just aware.

I kept thinking: If Bilbao were a man, he’d fuck you against a corrugated metal wall and walk you home after.

And then there was the Guggenheim.

Its steel shimmered. I wandered its curves like a votive maze. Especially the central installation — Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time — giant spirals of rusted steel. I moved through them like confessionals. The space narrowed and widened. Sound dissolved. I could hear my own breath change.

I wasn’t looking at art — I was shapeshifting with it.

That museum didn’t ask to be photographed. It asked to be felt. Just like the city. Just like the boys.

But I left. Not because I wasn’t wanted. Because I was beginning to feel too comfortable.

III. San Sebastián — Beauty and Its Absence

Letoh Letoh, a swanky four-star hotel — modern, well-designed, comfortable — looked perfect on paper. But the room didn’t meet me. Neither did the city.

It was too clean. Too posed. Like a man who knows he’s handsome but can’t hold conversation. I walked the promenade and felt like a ghost. No friction. No recognition. Just surface.

And for the first time on this journey, I felt it. The comedown. The fragility beneath the performance. The Bilbao high had made me believe I was still golden. But here, in the sterile air of an unheld city, the illusion slipped.

I started to ache. Not for sex. Not even for love. For meaning.

I opened Grindr. Boys replied — taps, maybes, suggestions wrapped in vagueness.

“Looking for sex? Tomorrow, maybe?”

I replied:

“I’m looking for food. Now, for sure.”

At 23:53, I had no dinner. No dick. No drama. Just a notification I turned into a line:

“Apparently too late to get bread around here. Getting bred, however…”

It was funny, it was true and it was sacred.

That post wasn’t a joke — it was a sigil. I was asking the void to send me communion. Instead, it sent me myself.

IV. Morning Reframe

May 24th. Not a rebirth. Just a breakfast.

Detox juice. A double cappuccino. Sourdough toast with salmon and avocado. A chocolate plum cake.

Divine.

I felt reenergised. Temporarily, at least.

I decided to stay. Not because the city owed me anything after the frosty welcome, but because I didn’t want to run from the discomfort of my arrival.

Then I moved to a new room — one that faced the light — and called my mum.

Out of nowhere, in the middle of planning my day, I said:

“I think my depression’s coming back.”

I wasn’t collapsing. I felt clarity. And I could hear my voice breaking under the weight of that confession.

She didn’t interrupt. Didn’t soothe. She just let it land.

And in that silence, I felt her love.

I skilfully moved the conversation back to my day. — “I’m hitting the beach,”. As if that could close the sentence.

V. The Wedding and the Weeping

I didn’t plan to pass the church. Didn’t plan to cry.

The bride was luminous. The guests radiant. The staircase — stone and sunlight — felt like a final scene from a Disney cartoon. I stood across the street and watched them pose, kiss, glow.

And I broke.

In my headphones, Brodka sang:

“Zamiast tak, on powiedział nie…
Kto z miłości nie umarł, nie potrafi żyć.”

“Instead of yes, he said no… Who hasn’t died of love doesn’t know how to live.”

I cried softly. Sacredly. Not because I envied them. Because I remembered what I once believed was possible.

VI. The Beach and the Spiral

I had to move. Had to walk.

On the sand, I took off my shoes.Walked past couples, children, dads with prams. Past laughter and sunscreen and youth.

Every muscle fibre in my legs tensed as I moved faster — cutting through their unfiltered joy.

Not toward anything of my own. But away from the unbearable suggestion that I wasn’t meant to feel it.

At one point, I muttered under my breath:

“I’m 35. A junkie. Alone. A mess.”

And still — I kept walking, almost running.

Not hope. Not transcendence. Just a miracle of forward motion mid-collapse.

Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes, that’s all you can do. To get through.

VII. The Ascent and the Silence

I couldn’t stop walking.

So I climbed to Cristo de la Mota. The statue of Christ that towers over San Sebastián. Arms open. Gaze fixed on the bay.

I didn’t pray. I just stood there. Let the wind cut through me. Let the city shrink beneath me. Let the ache stretch into perspective.

And in that moment, I saw him — pierced too, in marble memory. Saint Sebastian, somewhere below. Christ, carved above.

Two men, broken open by conviction. Two queer relics of pain turned divine.

Even the divine looked lonely from that height.

VIII. Saint Sebastian and the Lovers

Later that evening, beneath the cathedral, I saw them.

Two boys. One shirtless. Both glowing in golden hour. Kissing like the world hadn’t tried to shame them.

And above them — Saint Sebastian. Tied. Pierced. Watching.

There was no distance between them and him. Between them and me. Between pain and pleasure.

It was all one scene. One myth. And I was inside it.

The Grindr notifications started again — relentless, hungry. But I didn’t need to be chased to feel real. I didn’t need to be undone to feel alive.

It wasn’t the kind of closeness I craved.

So I packed. Straight to Barcelona. Skipping Pamplona. Skipping Zaragoza.

Not chasing the next high. Just ready to carry the weight of this one.

Epilogue: The Threshold

Saint Sebastian didn’t die from the arrows. He lived through them. Returned with them still inside him.

Not as a warning. As a witness.

I haven’t arrived anywhere. I haven’t ascended. I haven’t healed beyond recognition.

But I’m moving. Still ritualising. Still choosing the harder kind of truth.

This isn’t the end of the journey. It’s just a hinge in the narrative. A turn in the spiral.

I’m not writing from closure. I’m writing from the edge — where clarity and collapse blur into something almost beautiful.

And if you’ve ever stood there too — between hunger and grace, between longing and departure — then maybe you know:

We don’t always need a conclusion. Sometimes, we just need a direction. And the courage to keep walking toward it.

I. Eros in the Dark

On a summer evening while the air is humming hungrily with lust and sweat, I conjure Eros. Not the cherub with a bow, arrows, rose petals as painted in soft blush on Valentine cards.

But the old one. The feral one. Eros, the ancient disruptor. The god born of Chaos and shadow. God of longing and undoing.

They say he came before laws and language — like a pulse that seduced the cosmos into creation. He didn’t teach us to love; he taught us to want. He doesn’t bless weddings; he undoes them. He lives in thresholds — between touch and trespass, between craving and collapse.

And maybe that’s the part of him I’ve always understood. Because the truth I’m about to share is one I’ve carried like a secret too tender to touch.

It comes not from temples and moments of clarity, but from the bleakest and most intense corners of darkrooms and backseats.
It comes not from poetry, but from the half-lit stare of a man who grips you a little too tight around the neck and vanishes before the echo of your voice asking him to stay bounces back from his shadow.

I’ve called that love more times than I’d admit.

II. The Cappuccino Confession

As I stirred the foam of my cappuccino and laughed with Serena — our familiar blend of lightness, honesty, and the occasional emotional excavation — the conversation took a turn. Not dramatic, but distinct.

We found ourselves circling a quiet confession that took both of us by surprise: the safer we feel with someone emotionally, the less we seem to want them physically.

Desire doesn’t always spark in the arms of kindness. It flares in chaos — in the places we feel most unsteady.

She spoke of Robert, her first long-term partner — the best sex of her life, she said without hesitation. He was generous, attentive, deeply present in bed. But emotionally, he remained distant. From the beginning, something in him felt closed off, unreachable.

Then came Tim. Their connection ignited in a rush of physicality. Sex wasn’t just frequent — it was their language, their anchor, their way of staying close when nothing else felt stable.

But that intensity didn’t grow into steadiness. Over time, the relationship frayed. It left her more drained than held, more silenced than seen. It wasn’t simple. It wasn’t linear. But it left her with a pattern she couldn’t ignore.

And I nodded in recognition — because my experience had been the inverse of Serena’s.

III. Steven

In my case, that emotional safety wasn’t abstract — it had a name. Steven.

For fourteen years, he was my home. We built a life out of softness and loyalty, the kind of rhythm that doesn’t demand performance. Our partnership was everything I’d spent years longing for: stable, warm, gentle.

But the sex was never there. We tried to summon it — conversations, new dynamics, moments of forced spontaneity — but it always slipped through our hands back into absence. Not with cruelty. Just with quiet inevitability.

And that absence eventually wore us down.

On 14 February 2023, we opened the relationship in hopes of salvaging what we still cherished, but what cracked open never resealed. We separated on 1 June. A month later, he was with someone new. Five months after that, they were living together.

Sometimes I wonder if he’s found the best of both worlds — the comfort we had, and the spark we couldn’t hold.

And I miss him.

Or maybe I miss the undeniable warmth and love of our companionship. The coffee rituals. The ease. The feeling of being known without needing to explain myself.

But I also know: we reached the end of our road. Not with violence, but with truth.

IV. Pleasure as Pattern

From Dionysus to Hades.
From Byron to Batman.
From James Dean to Patrick Bateman.

The bad boy is ancient. Eternal. Always cloaked in danger. Always half-feral, half-divine. He leaves bruises that feel like blessings. And we keep biting. Or he keeps biting.

The man who leaves you on read. Who kisses like he’s hiding something. Who disappears for a week and reappears at 2:14 a.m. with a cigarette behind his ear and a look that says don’t ask.

The one who replies to your private album on Grindr with: “I’d destroy that.” And you reply, “Hot.”

Because somewhere in the body — not the brain, not the therapist’s office, but the hotwired ache of flesh — he registers as alive.

Queer desire is no stranger to this paradox. We come of age in shadows, in secrets, in exile. We learn early that longing is dangerous. That to want is to risk. That love, if it comes, will likely be something we must either hide — or be hurt by.

So when desire arrives as chaos, as hunger, as harm — it feels familiar. The unpredictability, the sharpness, the ache: it doesn’t scare the body. It soothes it.

Because that chaos once kept us safe… Or made us feel seen… Or gave us something to hold when nothing else did.

It’s not dysfunction. It’s a blueprint. A nervous system trained to read instability as intensity, and intensity as intimacy.

And gods, the thrill of it.

There’s something almost mythic in the way we eroticise our own undoing.

A Persephone who keeps choosing the pomegranate.
A Narcissus who wants the reflection to bite.
A queer Orpheus who keeps turning back — not to lose his love, but to feel the loss again.

Just to feel.

We don’t just want to be touched. We want to be shattered. To be chosen and consumed. To be transformed. Or ruined. Or both.

And maybe this is why the emotionally available man — the one who listens, who texts back, who doesn’t need decoding — feels so flat. He doesn’t light the fuse. He doesn’t summon the wound. He doesn’t feel like godhood, or doom.

He feels like… rest.

But when you’ve mistaken tension for love your whole life, rest can feel like absence.

So we say he’s “not our type.” Or that the chemistry’s off. Or that we wish we were more into him.

When maybe — our bodies just haven’t learned yet how to want without bracing for collapse.

That’s not a flaw — it’s a scar that still speaks.

V. I Always Let the Good Ones Go

There was a time when Jonathan and I were only outlines. Blurry, anonymous, mythic.

We met in the half-light of a city that wasn’t home, spoke in half-truths, touched like men who expected to vanish by the morning. And maybe that’s what we wanted from each other at first — something ungraspable. Something raw.

What followed was a kind of queer odyssey. Party boys at the gates of empire. Brussels. London. Miami. Dance floors and darkrooms thick with music and sweat. White beaches in the Caribbean where the salt on his skin tasted like prophecy.

We were beautiful then. Or maybe just reckless. We mistook the rush for revelation.

But somewhere along the line, the music slowed. We laughed more. Slept in instead of staying out. He told me stories about his childhood. I showed him my deepest scars. We stopped performing. We started seeing each other.

And with that came a soft grief.

Because the more emotionally close we became, the less electric it all felt. Not colder — just quieter. The mystery began to dissolve. And in its place stood something else. Still tender, but no longer charged. He became less of a god, more of a person. Less of a thrill, more of a truth.

I don’t say that with resentment. I say it with reverence.

Because what we built in the aftermath wasn’t lesser. It was just… real. Less Eros. More Echo. Not the fire that burns, but the warmth that stays.

And that, too, is holy.

But it’s not what my body was trained to crave.

And maybe that’s the rub.

When desire has been fused with danger for so long, gentleness can feel like absence. Safety doesn’t always register as chemistry. Emotional intimacy doesn’t always translate into erotic charge.

Sometimes, the ones who stay — the ones who see us, hold us, soften us — are also the ones who leave us least aroused. Not because the spark is dead.

But because, for once, we’re no longer standing in the fire.

VI. A New Myth

So then what? If the blueprint is broken, how do we build something new?

What happens after the fire?

I’m still learning. Still unlearning. Still catching myself reaching for the familiar ache, the sharp hit, the man with heavy hand.

But lately, I’ve started to wonder what it would feel like to want someone and feel safe with them. Not to be undone. But to be met.

To want not because I’m starving. But because I’m full. To let desire be slow, sovereign, strange.

Maybe that’s what Eros becomes when he’s no longer fused with fear. Still wild. Still god. Less combustion. More becoming.

The Invitation

If you’ve ever mistaken chaos for chemistry. If you’ve ever let the good ones go. If you’ve ever whispered “hot” when someone said “I’d destroy you”…

You are not broken. And you are not alone.

This is my reckoning. And if it echoes — Then maybe we’re already beginning to write a new myth.

One where we don’t need to be ruined to feel alive.

A mythic journey through shame, strength, and the slow unravelling of queer masculinity.

The Opening

In the quiet morning, I conjure Hercules. Not the Disney hero, no… but the Farnese statue: broad, towering, draped in a lion’s skin. Sculpted. Revered. Eternal. They call him “the epitome of popularised masculinity.”

But look closer.

He’s weary. His club rests. Eyes not blazing, but tired. Exhausted from all the labours, and still not done. Even he, the paragon of brute power, is undone — not by a beast, but by a poisoned cloak he didn’t see coming.

And still — this is the myth we’re given. This is the blueprint.

For years, I chased it. Tried to carve myself into its image. Tried to sculpt away the ache.

But the truth is: no body can carry shame without eventually collapsing beneath it.

The First Wound

My love-and-hate relationship with masculinity didn’t begin recently. We go way back. All the way to thirteen — to the locker room, before and after PE.

Puberty hit, and the hierarchy arrived. Unspoken, but everywhere.

The golden boys emerged: taller, broader, louder. Their shoulders filled doorways. Their thighs burst through PE kits. They played football like gods rehearsing war. And they were worshipped — by teachers, by girls, by boys, by parents. By me.

I, meanwhile, was short. Allegedly awkward. I didn’t chase the ball and wasn’t masculine enough. I spoke wrong. Walked wrong. Was wrong. And everyone made sure I knew it.

They cornered me in gyms and schoolyards alike. I became the easy target. Even if my peers didn’t understand the meaning of cruelty, they practiced it fluently.

Inside, I prayed that the tenacious voice in my head — the one that whispered too much, not enough, unlovable — might one day become my ally.

And then — one of those golden boys became my first.

Not my boyfriend. Not my love. Just… my first.

Five years of blurred lines we were never meant to cross. We only ever touched after forbidden substances faded consent into secrecy. We’d ride out to the lake and fool around — always in the shadow of shame.

He remained a god in daylight. I remained a secret in the dark.

I didn’t have the tools to name it then. But that was my initiation into queer masculinity. It didn’t feel like power. It felt like disappearance.

The Gym: Sanctuary and Spectacle

When I first stepped into the gym, I wasn’t chasing health. I was chasing permission to exist.

I trained in the off-hours, avoiding the beastliest men — the ones who ruled the floor like demigods in tank tops. They didn’t just lift. They performed. Their charismatic presence — infused with sweat, testosterone, and unbending pride — turned the gym into a cathedral of comparison.

I moved like a ghost. Afraid to make mistakes in the presence of gods.

But sometimes, the noise would fall away. And flickers of light would surface. I’d focus on breath, on steel, on form. And in that silence, I found something close to peace. I didn’t have the language yet, but I was building something sacred. Not a body. A portal.

Even then — peace was rare. The body still carried shame. Still trembled under the weight of exile.

But a seed had been planted.

The Recast: London, Legacy, and Lust

In 2015, I moved to London. Not to become a god. To become a filmmaker. To build legacy through lens and voice — to sculpt meaning instead of muscle.

I left the gym behind. Traded dumbbells for storyboards. Built my body of work instead.

But burying the ghosts of the past never works if they remain unnamed.

The darkrooms of Soho didn’t heal what the locker room broke. The sex-infused cathedrals of Grindr, XXL, and Vauxhall didn’t sanctify my queerness — they just repackaged the rules.

The gods returned. Bigger. Hairier. Sculpted. Still universally worshipped.

Power had changed clothes, but the criteria remained the same. The bigger the body, the more desire. The more followers, the more worth.

And I spiraled.

I rejoined the gym with resentment. Hated how soft I’d become. Hated how Grindr ignored me. Hated the echo in every “masc4masc” profile: You are not enough.

And slowly — I began to believe it.

I trained like a man possessed. Not chasing health, but visibility. Not lifting weights — lifting the weight of shame.

The Descent

Then came Autumn 2022.

Professional burnout. Emotional collapse. On the cusp of my thirties, I began therapy for the first time.

A month later, Steven and I opened our relationship — without the architecture to hold it.

A month after that, our cat Lara was diagnosed with kidney failure. She died in May. In my arms.

A few weeks later, Steven left.

The weight was beyond imaginable.

And I broke.

I was suicidal. I spiraled into sex and substances. Up to eight hookups a day — complete strangers. Chemicals I couldn’t pronounce. I stopped caring if I survived the weekend.

But beneath it all — beneath the numbness and the ache — something else was forming.

I still went to therapy. I went to the gym. Not perfectly. Not heroically. Just… persistently. Like a man digging himself out of the underworld with a plastic spoon.

Seeing Through the Gods

There were so many times I thought I’d hit rock bottom. And every time — I fell further.

But somewhere in those depths, something cracked open.

I started seeing through the myths.

No matter the mass. No matter the status. No matter the postcode. When I looked closely — really looked — I saw scared boys. In their twenties. In their thirties. Even in their forties.

Longing not to be left. Desperate to be loved. Brittle beneath the armour.

We weren’t training for power. We were camouflaging grief.

And once I saw that — I stopped worshipping them.

I saw the gods with softness. And I began to see myself, too.

Now

These days, I train for different reasons.

I train for presence. For clarity. For ritual.

I choose sobriety. I choose movement. I choose mental stillness over digital noise.

I no longer go to the gym to feel fuckable. I go to remember I am already whole.

And yes — of course I still love when the outside mirrors the inside. Yes, I still care about aesthetics.

But now? Now I don’t train to punish my body. I train to praise it.

I don’t kneel before the gods. I no longer mistake hardness for safety.

I’ve peeled away the armour I built — head by head — like a Hydra of shame.

I am not a statue. I am not a myth.

I am soft. I am sovereign.
And I am still — Herculean.

The Invitation

If you’ve ever trained to outrun shame — 
If you’ve ever stared into a locker room mirror and only seen absence — 
If you’ve ever looked at a sculpted man and felt yourself disappear —

You are not alone.

We don’t need to become gods to be worthy.

We already are — especially when we tremble.

Thank you for witnessing my becoming.
Now tell me yours.

— Artur