This post was submitted by Jude

Guillermo and I basically began living together that weekend we first met. It was only until the end of this past summer, when I returned from my year in Japan, that we made it official. We were attached at the hip from the very beginning of our relationship, which didn’t make continuing it on opposite sides of the world any easier. For the record, I have never lived with a boyfriend before.

I’ve blamed my itchy feet on being a Sagittarius, though I don’t think my limited knowledge of astrology allows me any sort of authority on that. The truth is that I love to travel, and have gotten a seasoned education on what it means to call a place “home.” And in the six years since my moving to New York City, I have had six different addresses: 31 Union Square West, 300 West 20^th Street, then 323 Saint Mark’s Avenue (when I made the move from Manhattan to Brooklyn) and 617 Grand Avenue, which was basically right across the street. For a year after college, my address was 435 Tani in the sleepy town of Sakurai, Japan. Sometimes I miss being alone in my little house there, next to the little bamboo forest, and my teaching job that wasn’t really real but that I really needed.

Guillermo is a photographer from Colombia—a place I’ve never been to—that is relatively new to New York. We met because of Lorena, another photographer studying at Parsons from Brazil, whom I once lived with in Prospect Heights after we became close friends in our freshman year together. Lorena took hold of my arm and looked me in the eyes—“He’s, like, famous in Bogotá!” I moved here from Scranton, two hours west through New Jersey and the Pocono mountains, after graduating high school.

His body of work has a heavy focus on conceptual self-portraits. There are times I have to assist him during a shoot, and end up shining a hot spotlight at his face while he is dressed as Janis Joplin passed out on our bed. Or trying to capture the perfect angle of him in our friend Charlotte’s bathtub, posing as Jim Morrison. I don’t even know if Jim Morrison actually died in a bathtub at all, but we went ahead with it anyway. Weeks before, he was in dark makeup and my brother’s girlfriend’s bellbottoms, spread across our roommate’s bed with the guitar of a guy she’d been dating at the time—an actually convincing Jimi Hendrix. He’s been working on a project about people who died at twenty-seven ever since he began approaching the age himself.

Sometimes I have to model for him, and find myself walking up our stairs wearing only a horse mask, being shot from behind with the head of my penis peeking through my legs. That leads to my bare ass eventually appearing on the cover of a magazine in Israel, then an art blog out of Brazil and a Polish book called “New Nude Photography” with a vagina on the cover. I’ll stand next to it, trying to casually sip a plastic cup of red wine and try to sustain eye contact in conversation with my friend’s mother at a gallery opening in D.U.M.B.O. All because I have ended up with an artist.

I never wanted to live in Williamsburg. For the borough of Brooklyn, it’s hard to gauge which neighborhood you will fit best in. I had lived for two years in Prospect Heights, using the same Q-train station as the young parents and professionals of Park Slope, but living further east where the boundary is bumped by real estate ads on Craigslist and the lullaby of parking lot dogfighting sends you off to sleep at night. But living in Williamsburg made me feel young, and somehow allowed to go drop acid during the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island, then escape a fistfight with an equally inebriated Mexican family once the sun goes down and you know it’s time to go home.

Being at the foot of Greenpoint, northern Brooklyn’s Polish neighborhood, made me feel like I wasn’t out of place for the very first time. My self-consciously short-lived nose ring brought awkward stares and comments during my study abroad in India. The patchwork of tattoos across my thigh and butt and torso got me kicked out of the bathhouse in Japan. A man told me to take my homosexuality away from him while seeing my brother’s band perform at a sports bar in Scranton, the town I thought I’d been a son of. I took it all away, back to New York where it didn’t matter as much.

At least in Greenpoint everyone looks like me, and even speak to me in Polish when I buy my kielbasa. I only feel as Polish when a man on the phone at work tells me, after asking me to spell my last name, that the reason Polish people have such clear skin is because they eat so much goddamn cabbage. Or when Guillermo’s old roommate called me “Karol Wojtyła.” And that time my father ordered my boyfriend to walk into our house on New Year’s because, according to tradition, a man with black hair must be the first to enter the home after midnight. I don’t know why.

If walking up Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint makes me feel Polish, then I feel gay when I’m standing in an aisle with my boyfriend at Home Depot on 23^rd Street in Chelsea, trying to make home decorating decisions. I always complained about the dental hygienic white walls in our apartment, but for Guille it was more convenient when gallery owners decided to drop by the studio he doesn’t really have. After the near six months it has taken us to paint our apartment, we hand the man at the counter our color choice—Grasshopper Wing. This beat out the slightly sexier Deserted Island and Spanish Galleon.

Our walls were bare as I started a new job upon my return to the states. And while Guillermo graduated, to search for a job of his own. He has been working to secure an artist’s visa in order to stay in the country, to eat pierogies in our green kitchen and help me find my glasses at night. It took six months to paint our walls, but much longer to feel like I’d come home. It wasn’t in Williamsburg, and it wasn’t in Brooklyn or all of New York City.

It wasn’t even on any map.

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