I have been thinking about Diego a lot these past couple of days, thinking of him in moments while riding on the train, while spacing out when someone is talking to me, and during all of these moments gaining insight into what it is to be this thing of skin and nerves and stirrings of a brain, of what is to be human and desire connection, of my life and how I have fucked up and how I haven't, and of how lucky I am. My sense of all this was really heightened this evening when I went to go look at the Elizabeth Peyton exhibit while at the New Museum for some other exhibit's opening. The galleries were uncrowded, everyone elsewhere, and more importantly I was a bit stoned, a bit drunk, and more than a little lovesick. The work hit me in all its beauty in a way it never had before, me always thinking it a bit too liked, a bit too popular, for me to really like it, that it was too surfacey, but this evening each of those images, their way of looking at people, was recognizable. They were songs sung in a language I understood. The melancholy that is present in a longing for someone was recognizable in the portraits of men, beautiful subjects that seem to barely care about your attentions, hers or ours, us viewers. And yet, despite that, maybe even because of that, still thinking the world of these things, these beautiful and distant men.

I was washing my face and brushing my teeth, was getting ready for bed so that I could wake up early again tomorrow, and while doing this, just moments ago, I realized many things, the thing that sparked all these other realizations though was the chronology of my relationship with Diego. It started nearly a year ago at a party during the MIX festival, at the now shuttered Boysroom. It ended at a party during this year's festival. That this queer film fest bookends my romance with him seems funny and seemingly meaningful, though what exactly it would mean I could not tell you, just that there should be some significance there.

In the Peyton show, there was a blue painting of Walt Whitman. I took that as meaningful also, a sign.