Creative Nonfiction
Cuffing Season
By Halsey Hyer
“My feeling was, if you’re in the same ZIP code, you and I have enough in common.”
—Augusten Burroughs, Lust & Wonder
Let’s just get this out of the way, imagine everyone in this situation in full scene kid drag—checkered print vans & matching sling bags both causing irreversible damage to our backs, bangs hanging over our eyes blackened with makeup, shredded band tees with shredded font, bracelets & trinkets & buttons & clips & patches & rings &—first day, ninth grade Kierstin cups her hands around her mouth, happy feet “She’s a Maniac” Jennifer Beals in Flashdance, shouts, Happy cuffing season! Alina exasperates a sigh while she jabs a single finger into her open mouth along with a little gagging sound to signify her disgust of the bullshit Kierstin is on. Is that your way of saying you can’t wait to suck Little Nicky’s dick on the bus again this year, Alina? Shrill yet sarcastic, classic Kierstin—I’ll never tell her how bad I want to make out with her on the bus this cuffing season, how bad I want her to cuff me.
& so—then we begin to permeate back into our rhythm of return to everyone-has-grown-changed. You know this story—people come & people go & on & on & so on, & so forth. My point is this—by everyone acclimates to one another’s newness. It’s actually really funny, because usually I always fall in-love during summertime, whenever I am the least tethered to the juncture of locking myself in some white room of a library as the whites of my eyes redden for hours despite matching body-blinks to cursor-blinks disassociating into the white space of the empty page & of moseying around some deep cut suburban hollow only meant for dejected kids like us who steal pain pills from people who need them just so we can for once feel pleasure.
But cuffing season is it’s like, okay—here is the year—so, it’s September, everybody’s going back to school, you know, people have grown change, new people come, old people leave, so on so forth—this is the month of reacclimation. As days permeate into, you know, October, even maybe the middle of October? That’s whenever Halloween is haunting television advertisements, corn mazes & fright farms with bladeless chainsaws & Scream masks & pumpkin patches turned pumpkins stolen off stoops transported on heads to the highest concrete cliff smashed in an attempt to just for once feel pleasure. Costume parties follow a formula—(sexy) vampire, (sexy) nurse, (sexy) French maid (sexy) lumberjack, (sexy) Freddy, (sexy) Jason, (sexy) zombie, (sexy) mummy, (sexy) cowboy, (sexy) devil, (sexy) angel, (sexy) superhero, (sexy) villain, (sexy) cat, (sexy) big cat, (sexy) sexy, (sexy) etc. It’s sexy! You couple up.
Take your sweetie to the Saturday farmer’s market & buy them an Amish pastry—your heart does the thing where it beats quickly—your hand does the thing where you search for your sweetie’s hand as you walk into the corner store—your eyes do the thing where they dilate at the sight of them—your chest does the thing where it holds your breath up high in your lungs when you pull them in so they’re an inch away from your face—you do the thing where you catch feelings, you know?
& it’s time for Thanksgiving & you’ve been spending nearly every single god damn day together for the last few weeks anyway! so, you know, maybe you try to coordinate, turn-taking like which house do you like spend Thanksgiving at? Or, you know, depending on the conventions your mothers are gushing or writhing at the sight of you so to please them easy just jot both dinners into your schedule & even have some like some familial overlap. If it’s fucked, it’s over. It’s semi-fucked, it’s not, so this “thing” becomes a “thing-thing,” solidified—it’s, you know, the cuffing.
& ears turn red & eye lashes catch snow & wet hair freezes then snaps off from the cold so time’s spent in hibernation pressing your toes against the tops of your sweetie’s feet while you argue about whether Die Hard is an Xmas movie & it doesn’t matter. You know why? You don’t watch the movie anyway. You already knew that—two words: “Netflix & Chill.” & now that you’ve turned the key of your bodies like the key of your cuffs, it’s time to buy them something nice. Yes, not nice, nice. If it’s just nice, you might as well just skip the personal inconvenience of Target during holiday season and write “I tried” on the back of a crumpled Post-it note—you essentially will call your sweetie worthless. This is the first instance in which bolt cutters may be used to break the cuffs off you.
If it’s nice, you’ve solidified their value through monetary means. You just have to find the perfect gift for the person that you’re with—the look on their face as you hand them their nice gift & they exclaim, “Oh, you, did this, for me?!” This is Thanksgiving 2.0 with a festive knife twist as you co-coordinate who’s waking up & driving to who’s house because neither of your parents would ever dare suggest to let—even begin to imagine to entertain even the absolute slightest possibility, you both stay in the same bed because, “You’re not married yet.” As Seinfeld says: “It’s Festivus for the rest of us.” Criticize and Christ look similar on the page to me. Bolt cutters may be needed here.
If you survive—if. It’s New Year’s & it’s time for kissing. It’s time for straight double shots of whiskey with the girls & running bare ass naked through the snow as the boys sip Miller High Life tallboys (“The Champagne of Beer”—something fancy to celebrate the new year)? & there’s everyone sitting crisscross applesauce spilling red Solo cups full of bottom shelf champagne on the host’s dead grandmother’s shag carpet as everyone’s get-a-room making out with their sweeties as the ball drops in Times Square on the smallest box TV you’ve ever seen.
You have to make a choice. Now. It’s almost Valentine’s Day. If you want out & you fuck around by not lugging the bolt cutters from the shed before the 14th, you are the asshole. It is relationship reevaluation time: the magic & pain & glory & disdain—the holidays are officially over. In Lust & Wonder, Augusten Burroughs says something like this but not this—I don’t know whether I was in-love or if it was just the Chrysler Building. The holidays are the Chrysler Building & Augusten Burroughs is all of us in cuffing season heat. You get it. So, what’s it going to be? You’re an asshole if you break up anytime in February after Valentine’s Day, because it’s like this— “Why the actual fuck did you do any of that shit with me on Valentine’s Day if you didn’t mean it? If you didn’t love me? I knew you didn’t love me! I just fucking knew it!” Right? Valentine’s Day is the I love you let’s fuck without a condom & fly to Vegas & get married by Elvis & make our baby announcement in the Spring & this is perfect because you’ll have the baby right before Thanksgiving & won’t they just love having a newborn around? holiday & another time to buy an even nicer (not nicer—this is a bolt cutter territory) gift than the one you got your sweetie for Xmas.
& now it’s springtime & if you’ve made it this far, maybe the retired women who work as cashiers at the super market are asking you & your sweetie how far along you are as you rub your bump with chipped nail polish fingertips & you tell everyone at Easter Service when the pastor instructs you to turn & greet your neighbors that you eloped back in February after reassuring them that this was absolutely a honeymoon baby. You begin to nest & clean & redress the home & find yourself telling your sweetie, “Before you know we won’t have time like this to—” or not. Or you wish you were. Or not. Or you wish we were & you wish you weren’t—maybe you were like me, jammed into a place where being a faggot didn’t match the expectations set on you to do the damn white picket fence thing that all couples do, right? There’s a point where cuffing seasons turns into “the ol’ ball & chain” & what’s up with the way we’re taught to hate who we once loved as we grow old together in age?
At this point, if you’ve ditched, or been ditched, maybe you’re trying to stay true to your New Year’s resolution to try some new diet regiment & wake up at four in the morning just to take a jog around your block—some post-hibernation preparatory renewal for whatever summer antics might resume or become what’s new to you. A lot of goodbyes happen here—here is another bolt cutter juncture—going off for college or leaving for the summer & not knowing what’s going to happen while you’re gone & no one knows whether it’s something worth the long-distance maintenance. Double down or break down into the incubation of hot boy hot girl summer & practice your French kiss with some spring fling & maybe that will lead to your summer romance. There’s never been no room for me to be anything other than hot boy hot girl. It just starts all over again. Of course, as with all things, outliers exist—the following cuffing season is dependent on whether that hot girl hot boy summer romance bleeds into the following cuffing season come September reacclimation. & sometimes that can happen, & if it does, & it survives September reacclimation, the sexy of Halloween, & the snog into Thanksgiving—the trajectory is still the same—so many potential points of fracture based on the United States calendar year—we’re cuffed.
Halsey Hyer
Halsey Hyer (they/them) is the author of [deadname] (Anhinga Press, 2022), Everything Becomes Bananas (Rinky Dink Press, 2022), Divorce Garter (Main Street Rag, 2024) and forthcoming from Finishing Line Press PowerSwitch (2026). They earned their MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University and serves as an Associate Editor for The Fourth River as a member on the Reading Board for The Plentitutdes.