The boys enter your life. It is not a stready stream; the stream moves in currents, splitting itself along landforms and cold fronts and deep dives and occasionally arms of it splinter and die until they’re picked up by someone else’s current.
At some point, one boy from your current reaches your life. The exact details surrounding his initial arrival are unimportant. He may come with others. He may come alone. In the way that humans do, you and he make an agreement that you will share a physical bond and that you will select one of any number of sorted-by-intensity emotional bonds to accompany the physical bond. Note that these choices are made individually, although in the end one bond-type will also be chosen as the standard party line for the team. This arrangement will change repeatedly. The negotiations surrounding the arrangements are handled by multiple camps and in a broad set of venues and via many assorted media. There is no clear process in place for these negotiations, although there are guidelines. But they can sometimes veer askew, with responsibilities delegated to small terrorist cells, and one hand has no knowledge of what the other is doing or feeling.
And by the time these negotiations have ended, one way or another, there is another boy exploding out of the current and into your life. Again, the details surrounding his initial arrival are unimportant. You’ll move side-by-side through the aforementioned process. But what has happened to the first boy?
He has moved out of the current and into the woodwork. There is plenty for him to do in the woodwork. He is not bored. He likes the woodwork just fine. He is just waiting, although he’s not sure for what. But usually what happens is that his woodwork girlfriend dumps him or he drinks a little bit too much of the woodwork tequila, and then he decides to crawl out of the woodwork and into your life again.
Since the initial set of negotiations has completed, you get to show each other your cards. “I never told you this,” the boy says, “but I had an ace. I didn’t play it.” You tell him you had three queens. “I had the fourth,” he says. You begin negotiations again, more tenderly and feeling safer. You are older now. And the negotiation reaches a resolution, which holds until it doesn’t anymore. And then the boy returns to the woodwork, and another emerges. Sometimes they crawl out in packs and you have to hold negotiations in separate, sound-proof rooms.
Once in every many years, a boy will return to the woodwork leaving you heavy, empty, with a piercing through your chest which you just know is the sticking point for the invisible string that connects to his heart. You run your fingers over the woodwork, trace the caves and concaves of the mahogany chairs and the walnut dresser sets until they’re worn through past the varnish, and you can feel him in there and you wonder if he can feel you too. If the string still connects to his heart. If it ever did. And when he comes out and you see him and it’s clear both your strings have strengthened but then what the fuck was he doing in that dresser set all these years? Negotiations at this point are foreign and terrifying and cannot be delegated. You wish you could cut your string but it’s not that kind of string. You know he can’t stay. You can’t keep him. It can’t work. You hope he’ll go back into the woodwork and stay there quietly. He won’t, of course, because that string is stuck in his heart too.
The boys in the woodwork are listening. “She needs a break,” one of them says to the other. And they agree to send one — maybe two — back out of the woodwork and into your life. The simplest ones, they choose. The easiest. The kind of boy who will take your hand and carry you to bed and make love to you on a backdrop of his corny jokes when you need it, and the kind of boy who will choke you and slap you and pull your hair as he fucks your body when you need that, and you will never in that time feel that string start to form, the string that would end at those boys.
But with him tugging on that string and with you tugging on that string and with the woodwork boys rubbing on it and smacking at it and cumming all over it, the string weathers. It’s still there and it always will be. But it’s lighter now. It is split from him. Although you know that it belongs to him, you can carry it on your own now. You no longer have to carry him as well.
