At ten I could hold my breath underwater long enough to make the house inside my head go white like lightning strikes then all over was nothingness shining. I wore a short sleeve rash guard in the above ground pool but let Ashley paint my toes purple.
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What am I proud of when a slice of my own pittance goes eventually and over again to killing? And when children starve and split apart in ways I can’t entirely believe even while looking at. Here, too, people die on Santa Monica Boulevard having been given up on by the world and at the parade last week Wells Fargo marched behind the Sheriffs piggies and brought a gloom into the landscape of my champagne high that only and shamefully but just the same did only abate when a firetruck brought through a pile of young men in little dick hammocks striped all the colors like the flag and we argued at length about whether they really put out fires or were hired for the event. I hope they get the Babadook or else Abby Lee Miller to throw out the first pitch at the gay Dodgers game tonight. Walking on my lunch break some days the sun makes me cry. Nothing is fair but at least I’m not straight.
The blonde YouTuber from Canada who sells babydoll lingerie at a loss puts heavy bronzer—I think—around her chin and lips and pretends to be a boy in the back of the class hassling you with remarkable gentleness in tonguey whispers. Pick me songs are alienating because of my gratingly firm sense of self. Whenever the girls call the guys “boys” on Love Island a rush of great tenderness moves through me. They’re these shiny little dolls from a horny twelve year old’s dream. Childlike but trying to f*ck, bikinis too small and the men always hugging.
Have you listened to “Come to My Window” lately? Have you been so sick with wanting that you’re vapor and you seep? Seeking fingers slickly slipping I wonder if I’d have been happier in the dark before if someone had promised to me that one day life would be like this. Maybe not. I was sort of a c*nt and greedy about sadness. Either way it’s true that I would dial the numbers just to listen to your breath. Melissa, you’re so right. I would stand inside my hell and hold the hand of death. I’ve done that. I like that. Wincing!! Have you ever filled a vial up with tears and mailed it, in summer, to the spindly field hockey player you met at orientation, who laughed when you slipped in leaves? A “joke”. We saw Adam Lambert in concert once as teenagers still and had to let a man buy us wine in pink cans. The rest of the audience was women over forty in leather and throbbing almost as one for that gay redhead under the glitter and dye and this felt transgressive in a way that pressed on a door in me that I didn’t touch a lot yet and the women, I think, were unconcerned with how the sex in the air only bounced back at them and hung around. One important part of becoming a dyke is posting about formative 90s mood girl rock on Tumblr. Pillow between knees. Crawl inside! Wait by the light of the moon! That old girl like always glowing.
gay things:
Lesbian smash of the era PRIVATE RITES BY JULIA ARMFIELD. Have had mine months now I guess on account of being elite but it’s spectacularly sexy and made me cry. What more would one ask of a book, no? But then there’s the world ending too. Buy it!!! Then come back and together let’s say compliments about Irene that are mostly aimed at gassing up our prickly selves.
Me training to do pull-ups. I only began today but I have muscle tanks and stuff.
Trust me on this one: the idea of a Tony Soprano fancam set to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please”
Printing out Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” at work as a bit and because sometimes the computer hurts my eyes but I’m not done being annoying.
Most good things, the majority of jokes, shaved ice, going to concerts in running shoes that support my back, lemonade, public transit, little oranges, the best poems, my legs, not the film Showing Up by Kelly Reichardt really but the way it cracked me open, some stomach troubles and most attempts to heal them, water fountains, the zip off cargo pants I wore in childhood and will not be bringing back but feel a great affection about and for and in relation to, pickles that you eat and that happen in baseball, The Aces, and the sea.
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