I once saw a boy lift right off the ground and into the air. The wind took his body up above the concrete of the playground, he was so thin and light. It dropped him back down and he lay there crumpled like a little stepped-on insect, the way they gradually begin to move their dismantled limbs and you realize they're not actually dead yet.

In Texas, my little brother and I rode our bikes down a dirt lane that sliced across some fields of alfalfa grass. We were heading to a sunken forest where our landlords grazed cattle. Within the forest was a small pond that had a boat you could go out into. A dust devil appeared before us on the road, and we sang out loud the tv show theme to "Mission Impossible" as we decided to ride through it. The dirt smacked my eyes and I faltered: I flew off my bike and into the beautiful green alfalfa.

The next time I flew from my bicycle was a few months ago. I was very drunk, unable to stand, but I felt confident about riding home from the bars south of Market. It'd been an exceptionally unlucky evening, only a Waylon Jennings lookalike had tried to pick me up from some bar's back patio. Oblivious, I was determined as always when I tried to chat up a fellow drunk boy from my bike on the sidewalk.

Unfortunately, only the bike's front brakes were working, and I hit them a little too hard trying to slow to his walking pace. I shot right over the handles, onto the concrete, and the bike slammed down on top of me. I split my head open, gored my right hand in several spots, scraped my knees up.

That guy just kept right on walking.

Last night I went out with the most beautiful boy I know in San Francisco. He's sort of younger, unsure of how to handle his sexuality, and basically reeling from the confusion of situating himself to the city. Having just moved here from a small northwestern town. It was such a great night at first, we drank, ran into friends, and bounced off each other perfectly for several hours-- laughing and telling all these stories from our lives. I couldn't stop thinking how lucky I was, looking at his chubby pink face and weird blonde-ish brown hair and bushy moustache and wandering blue eye.

"This is the most perfect boy in the world!!"

We compared our deformed pinkies. Mine's the result of tripping on acid and thinking I could somehow leap, spin 360 degrees on a treebranch, come back around, let go of the branch and land on my feet. Naturally, I fell and broke my arm, and that left pinkie never developed properly. He broke his while skateboarding: after doing some sliding trick across an upturned bike rack perfectly several times, he was distracted by the sudden appearance of an art teacher who he loved and wanted to be. He fucked up, somehow caught his finger under the board or something, and totally ripped it out of its joint.

We laughed about how I slid down a flight of stairs a couple nights ago, how he pogo'ed across a beer puddle and slapped the linoleum like a slab of meat in front of everyone who hated him… We giggled about what impulsive fuckups we are and held our pinkies parallel to each other's. We're both always falling down, running into things, going up into the air and coming right back down face-first.

What more could someone like me look for in another person?

And as we were walking from that one bar, I gushed about how much I loved him and what a great time I'd had and he in turn thought out loud to me how much he really wished he could echo the feelings I have for him. I looked at his beautiful face, and then I looked up into the air, and when it didn't lift me away from that shitty sidewalk, my eyes filled with water and I thanked him for the night, and I just kept right on walking while he got on his bicycle and rode away.