you balance the catholic guilt & you still eat too many servings of pasta. you split the pomegranate but you think of the lord jesus and his guts spilled across your dining room table. yesterday was father's day and you went to church. your father is also a deacon. he wants you to marry a nice man one day, when the lesbianism wears off.
you are religiously traumatized, probably, but also the world is in absolute chaos. you feel guilty all the time about not being endlessly informed - about the mini breaks you take between in-person activism & volunteer work and doomscrolling through online news articles. you feel guilty you dropped a sweater on the ground. you feel guilty you cannot afford rent. you feel guilty, and you quite actually feel guilty that you feel guilty.
your father isn't a tall man, but he is good at being imposing. yesterday was hard. all father's day activities are. you watched him radicalize in the last 10 years, moving from a man who had some ignorant views to - whatever this is. he crowed at you that 250,000 people showed up to trump's military parade. you have seen the pictures and think that it's very unlikely there were more than 100k. but your father has no shame. your father just says the thing without checking it.
you have a conspiracy theory that, in some small part, the parade was also to rebrand june as military appreciation month. how often they have said why is there no veteran's month, even though there is. the white house's stance on pride this year was that they did not want to acknowledge something that "only affects 7% of the population." you don't know where they got that number, but it's guilt-free. it's just, like, out there. they get to just say things. you can't even fucking imagine.
you haven't grown up. you still wear the 2014 tumblr style shit sometimes. you are still on tumblr. you are still thinking about girls and "holy holy holy" and it always does feel magical and rebellious and incredible to kiss her. nothing is new about love until it is your love, and then it is impervious. and yet - still you feel stuck, and guilty, and the acid in your stomach refuses to settle. all the yearning and the stupid shit, and the fucking guilt.
you make a little poem in your notes app. you make your hands into a little prayerful steeple. your mother tells you that you make yourself crazy. you have a running joke with your friends that if you had no mental illnesses, you'd be unstoppable.
but when you kiss her, you feel it. when you buy groceries. when you forget to text back - you feel it. the little thing inside of you, always fucking chipping away at things.
