Selective Attention
by Henry 磊磊 Roark
Henry 磊磊 Roark, Let’s Go To Bed, 18 x 24 inches, collage, 2026. Courtesy of the artist.
SELECTIVE ATTENTION
Henry 磊磊 Roark
AUG 2026 | Issue 54
FLASH
The ring’s cost came to low triple digits, and I wondered if I could use it one day to propose to him again. The next week, I met a man named Chance at a Polaroid conference. As we exchanged contacts, I saw his very Dutch surname and very un-American suffix—II—as in the second, rather than junior. He joked with a prepared line: he was a second chance. He couldn’t know how hard the metaphor hit. Here he was grinning at me, while all I could manage was a fake polite smile back, privately wishing for Conor. The weekend after, I came across a poem about chance encounters and shared it with Chance, despite never getting close enough to ask, will there be a third? He never replied.
For the time being, I wore the ring on my own ring finger for solace. Three days later, I lost it—or rather, it fell off, and I couldn’t find it. I walked out early in the morning for a 7 a.m. Tuesday fellowship and turned the corner when it hit me: I didn’t feel it on my hand. I considered continuing and looking for it when I came back, but I knew I would obsess over it. I turned around and scoured the path back inside, up the patterned carpeted steps, and inch by inch on my knees on the wood floors of my apartment. I texted my neighbors to look out for it. I needed eyes to cover the less than 40 feet total outside of my own apartment. I shined a flashlight, hoping the bronze would glint back at me. After the third pass, I looked up to see if bronze was magnetic, thinking I could use a giant magnet or metal detector—anything to bring it back to me.
I processed the stages of grief in rapid succession. My roommate was away, thankfully, but I considered opening a window for a proper primal scream to the world. I refused to read into the metaphor of the situation despite its reality pressing in on me. My mind was melting down. I could see it happening at an inner remove, what I imagine the colloquial phrase watching a slow motion car crash refers to, except it’s with my own mind. When it happened before, I never knew how it would end. Would my mind crumple like sheet metal crushed by an SUV? Or pop back like a bumper in a low-speed fender bender? I’ve fallen into depressions for far less, sometimes for no apparent reason at all. By the end of the hour, I had come back out of the sunken depths: a personal record. It was a humbling reminder for acceptance and detachment, condensed into half an hour. In the aftermath, I still griped about the loss to those who would understand. Every now and then, anxiety would still tug, and I’d scan the floors again. Surely I’d find it this time. Instead, the kitchen linoleum desperately needed mopping.
Henry 磊磊 Roark is a writer and visual artist based in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Foglifter, San Francisco Story Fest, and forthcoming in a book of essays, Love Letters for Queer and Trans Crips.