If you asked Sangerian Jones that poisonous, American question, “What do you do?” he would look at you as if you’d mis-spoken. He would smile politely – and you would notice how straight and white his teeth were – and give you ample opportunity to correct yourself. Sangerian has a job – usually, probably – but it’s never anything worth talking about, and everything else he does is entirely fluid, because it depends on who he is currently loving.
Sangerian is in love. If you read these words a decade from now, he will still be in love, perhaps even with the same person. His body is built for love. He has a love-based metabolism. He can go without food for days and sleep for nights, and something in his tears makes his baby-smooth skin even smoother when he cries. He does not change for his lovers. He does not shave his mustache or alter his plain dress. He only opens himself, gives his lover root access to his soul, with the puppy-dog trust that they will leave him as they found him. And his lover finds in him, invariably, a large partition devoted entirely to her or him.
He never escapes these entanglements unscathed. He never escapes them at all. He is always left, never leaving. And each lover leaves inside him, not a scar, but a sketch. Etched upon his vulnerable insides are all their faces, smiling un-self-consciously, speaking secrets only he was ever close enough to hear.