the palindrome

chalant 20 year old melodrama

[palindromeofus]

I moved out of home a couple of months ago. I have my own bedroom with a soft mattress and furniture. I bought a cabinet from a charity thrift store and I keep random things in it, with my unfinished paintings sitting on top.

I bought earbuds to listen to lectures last week, im paying them off.

I cut my own hair with hair clippers I bought too.

Everything I have now is because I worked for it.

Is this a poem?

When I was 16 I couldn't wait for this time to come when I would have somewhere that was MINE to live that wasn't my parents house. I pay rent, and contribute to the other bills. My flatmates have long hair and it gets on the floor all the time. My job is vacuuming. One of them doesn't cook very well. There's a rose almost touching the living room window. We keep onions in a cupboard that is hard for me to reach. I love how the sun shines on the grass of the front yard. On friday there was a guy at the house on the other side of the road sitting shirtless on the step calling someone for a couple of hours. There's an evil yellow-eyed cat near by. I am alive. I am everything. I am nothing. I am depressed. I am joyous. I am not alone. I am alone. I made a dear friend last week, I've seen him 4 times since then. Everything is fine. Everything is eh. I have an exam at 7pm in a few weeks. My product design cube isn't very good. My cinema class is the easiest one. My mum misses me. I miss my sister. I'm going to see a doctor tomorrow for the first time in over a year. I need a new backpack. This is a poem now.

[palindromeofus]

UPDATE on the gay child catholic mother situation:

She does not believe me

[palindromeofus]

Reeling from the wonder of not having to be completely alone for the next few months.

I have made a friend.

The intense and ever present loneliness, the deep suffocating depression, the classic college intrusive thoughts of flinging myself over the stairs at the massive library, the exestential angst over food prices, will not abate but I somehow can bear it right now because I have someone to have fun conversations with, to talk about our experiences in our early queer journey. I think of him with fondness and gratitude because he said hi to me first. I do not really know him. I do not really know anyone.

But I can survive. There is a queer third space I have been to 3 times now. There are friendly people. There is a kind of mild salvation to be found within the four walls of that room, black chalk board scattered with insect drawings and motivational quotes, green couch, little tables with trays of fidgets, bowl of condoms, educational books and pamphlets. I will get to know people. I will make a life now. I will make more friends. I will see him regularly. I will continue to have intrusive thoughts about throwing myself down over the stairs but I will also continue to recieve small smiles from the queer students who pass me by, read the class discord messages with sympathetic anguish, feel the sunshine, drink tangy orange juice, watch my bank account decrease each week, and watch my new friends like my art posts.

It might be too early to say this but I kept telling myself last year that I would survive by the skin of my teeth, and parhaps I do not need to do it like that. "Whatever it takes," i said, with the raw desperation of someone truly alone. And now I think I might have been presumptuous. Maybe I do not have to do whatever it takes. Maybe I just have to try, and hang out with good people. I can replace religion with life.

[palindromeofus]

Just finished watching "I Saw the TV Glow". It has absolutely destroyed me.

[palindromeofus]

Been watching Brideshead Revisited for the first time with my Catholic mum lately, and safe to say we have had wildly different experiences.

She sees it as a slow and gradually intensifying story of redemption and the crumbling of an agnostic's defences against virtue and God, through his failed relationships that lead to conversion.

But I don't see it that way. I think Brideshead Revisited could alternatively be about the destructive and corrosive effects of Catholicism on relationships and happiness, and I'm prepared to write an essay post on it.

I recognise the haunting effects of thinking of life in terms of sins and not sins. In their dialogue Julia clearly leaves Charles because being with him is a sin in her eyes, and sins seperate you from God. Seperation from God is the worst possible thing, so she is chosing a higher good than to be with him. But he is devastated. Their last conversation is so sad and so representative of so many relationships with Catholic and non-Catholic people.

I'd like to make a post about the ways that the idea of sin haunts the story and influences the desicions of Sebastian and Julia, and about how Charles did not cave to believing in God, but rather followed through with prayer as a resolution to the massive impact religion had on his life through the people he loved.

Comment if you think that might be interesting.

[palindromeofus]

Watching Maurice for the first time as someone who never got to see queer love growing up, and who lived 20 years believing it was not something rightly within reach.... it gave me hope. Maurice is is like 20-22 when he meets Clive, and before that has never accepted that he loves men. I'm twenty, and I've only just accepted my queerness, I think I might be alright.

[palindromeofus]

One day this angst will be gone, and it will be replaced with flowers and growing things. I will not think of that softness with abhorence, I will have found a balance to the hardness and softness of myself. I will look in the mirror and see a strong thing. Now, I only see a thing that wants to be strong.

I am pathetic for wanting to be strong. For years to come I will be the most naeive of any group. I will be the one who wants so badly to make it, people will look at me and talk about me when I am not there with pity. But one day I will have become what I hoped to be, and the hardness will pay off, and I will have been detirmined in the right way to yeild the rewards for myself that I can only dream of now. I will look in the mirror, and I will see a strong thing, and my eyes will be wise, and the pain will make sense. I will be savage and desperate no more.

[palindromeofus]

I came out to my sister last week on the steps of the back door. We were eating food I had prepared earlier in the day. I underestimated her chillness, I predicted wrong. How can I be wrong like that? I did not trust what she said, I did not trust her humanity to be stronger than her religion. But she told me quite frankly that she doesnt care, and it wasn't harsh or unkind. The way she said it was kind, and later that day she asked me if I would dress gay and if I would get a pride pin for my bag and if I would get a girlfriend and if she can make gay jokes now and it was funny and fun and she almost seemed pleased.

But still. She is part of a relgion that excludes me from the graces of its god. I am not one of them, even if I wanted to be, because I do not believe that it is wrong for girls to kiss girls and men to go on dates together and people to decide not to live as their assigned gender at birth, to disregard gender entirely if they want. Simply wanting to do those things is seen as perversion, and any catholic who doesn't hold that view is not representing the majority opinion or teachings. My family is part of something I cannot be part of. For so many years I grieved in church before the candle sticks and old prints of Jesus and Mary in gilded picture frames. I grieved because my life was hard and if I was just holy enough then God would listen to my begging for an ease to things. God never listened. God wants me to keep praying until I die. God made me to need him and Mary, but he in his omnipotence made a place for me to suffer in all eternity if I decide I don't want to need them. God wants me to not be gay. I do not believe any of that any more, but my sister does.

People who were not raised Catholic or who were never really invested in catholicism as a member cannot understand how consuming it is. I can say the rosary without thinking. I can zone out to know exactly what part of mass it is when i come back. My back knows the feeling of pews better than it knows the feeling of a loving hand. I have recieved communion more times than I have seen friends. I have rung a bell at special services more times than my father has hugged me. I have felt the awful watching presence of God for as long as I was old enough to believe in it. Since I was seven till recrntly I have thought of my wrongs as sins, and of my sins as venial or mortal, and of the amount worth confession or not. I don't feel it anymore, but sometimes still, when I am anxious about something, I will default to make the sign of the cross and beg Jesus for help. It's like when I jumped off a bank into a river and felt myself rush through the air and couldn't help but say a hail mary as I splashed in. The smell of incence and the feeling of cold holy water on my fingertips won't leave me. My body will know how to genuflect until I die. But I hope that one day I will be able to go to a church and not feel dread, and instead just sit there in a disconnected perspective and think about how the people there just want something to believe in.

So tragic that their belief birthed so much pain for peope like me. It is time to not let the churches hold power over us. They don't even want us, anyway. They want us stripped of our perversion, repentant, renewed in grace so that we want to be heterosexual and follow gender roles and live in their idea of peace. Their peace is violence for us. Their harmony is unnatural. Their god will not save us. Their love is lies. Their precepts are control.

It's not wrong to be queer. I think my sister feels that in her heart.

[palindromeofus]

I am perpetually on the edge of coming out to my sister.

We walk down the street in the sun and her newly dyed black hair swishes around as we joke. She wears a cross around her neck because we were raised catholic. I have a little picture on my desk of angels playing violins to a sleeping Mary and Jesus. It's summer in this part of the world. I wear button up shirts because I don't feel authentic in the fitted tshirts I bought when I was 18. Small things remind me of my ex boyfriend. "That's what M did," I say. "I can't wait to forget about him."

I can't wait to not feel the sting of who I was with him. The terrible homophobic things he got me to say, and believe. I was partner to his awful disgust and instead of dumping his ass right away I stayed for nearly two years until I eventually realised he wasn't my type and had never been. I don't like guys. I am the thing he hates. I wonder if he would find me and strangle me if he found out what I am.

I am perpetually on the edge of coming out to my sister, but I wonder how her dark eyes would look at me just after. Would she smile uncomfortably, and then look disapointed. "I can't wait for you to find a good guy," she says contentedly.

I realised I was gay when I watched a scene with two naked vampires levitating and it didn't do anything for me. I used to think I was asexual because I knew I never wanted to have sex with a man. I can admire the beautiful lines of a man's face and feel an intense longing to be his friend and ask him interesting questions and have camaraderie with good guys. But I don't want to see their bodies. I cannot marry a man. I cannot have a man's children. I cannot use my body to bring life to a man's child. I cannot wear dresses and go to church and sit next to a guy in a suit and pray to a God who loves me but not my sinful heart. Why did I have to be born to a catholic family.

"If I ended up marrying a woman, would you come to the wedding?" I say to my sister.

She says yes right away. "I'm coming to your wedding no matter what. I'm GONNA be a bridesmaid."

"Even if I married a woman?"

She hesitates a little. "Yes. I'd wanna be a bridesmaid, I wouldn't care. I would love her and you guys. She would be awsome." She really means it, and it breaks my heart. I can't do this bursting much longer. I'm going to spill it and her dark eyes will be shocked. She's my sister. I love her so much. I'm so scared of the faith she takes so seriously in her ripped jeans and handmade croped tops with the little gold cross. She has a split in her eyebrow. It's more gay than I am but she's going to kiss boys and go dancing and drink cocktails and swish her hair in bar lights and find a nice man and be a catholic woman who can party. I cannot party.

I want to stop commenting on the pleasing aesthetics of celebrities or characters or random guys or tropes to have people think I would ever want one of those for my own. "He's actually kind of fine." That's all it is.

I'm perpetually on the edge of coming out to my sister. I want to have a woman who I can give everything to. I want a girlfriend, I want a wife. I want to paint gold stars around her eyes and touch her hair and sing Sailor Song on the edge of a cliff in the sunset with her. Why did I have to be raised a girl in a catholic family? If God controls everything and has intended nature for us, then why did he let me grow up to be gay if it was so wrong? If God is real he looks at me with disdain and I look at him with contempt for being so narrow minded. The whole universe and he wants me to kiss boys?

I want to come out to my sister.