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the first time i ever saw you, i wanted your arms around me. it was instant, knowing i’d fit against your chest with my head tucked just under your chin, feeling your heartbeat race and skip and then match mine, slow and steady. i knew you’d hold me like something precious, a little bit delicate, valuable if in one piece, and irisdescent but cloudy like sea glass. you knew enough not to squeeze, not yet. the closer i’d press into you, the tighter you’d wrap your arms around me, and i thought at any moment i’d shatter but you knew better.

i still wonder if one day a jagged piece will cut you, an edge i’ve forgotten to treat, a reminder of how we both felt broken when we met. but you are attentive and careful. you are holding back a tiny bit, six months of wanting still to go, and i’m going to do my damnedest not to hurt you til then, so you can see what you thought was sharp is all softness, so we can hold each other and never let go.

you’re luring me out a little bit, like you would a new kitten you brought home who doesn’t know how to put her claws away yet. there are all these tender spots i’m discovering on my heart, and where someone who couldn’t understand might press too hard and bruise, you lay your palm flat against it just to let me know you’re there, gentle and patient. i know there are moments i cozy up next to you like we’ve always been together, and moments you’re not sure if i’m baring my teeth or crying. i promise i’m warming up. i’m still skittish and it’s not your fault. i like venturing out a step farther at a time and seeing you waiting just up ahead. i like testing the ground beneath us, making sure it’s solid, then meeting your outstretched hand, reaching back for me, waiting. people talk of falling in love as a cat & mouse game but i don’t think this is a chase. i think i found another life when i met you. i had been trying to force a closed door to give way, and then i wandered down the hallway and yours was wide open. i know it won’t always feel so effortless, there’ll be work and hard times, but i have never felt so seen, and the parts of me that everybody else hates are the parts of me that you’re most proud of. i don’t think i’ve been with someone who saw me growing, saw me being the tiny baby kitten and the adult wildcat and the domesticated housecat all at once. the first one left before he had the chance, and the second one didn’t pay enough attention. maybe third time is the charm & we’ll have lots more lives together. i wanna find out.

#writing

“we’re not saying some things, but i think we’re in the same place. we’re not saying it.. but we’re saying it.”

i know because i’ve told you a thousand times already. i know because i turn to putty when i imagine your arms around me or your breath on my neck. i know because it keeps getting bigger and bigger in me and one day soon it’s gonna burst through. i know because you say you feel butterflies and suddenly i feel them too, you laugh and the world opens up a little wider for me, you lower your voice and i lower my walls.

i’ll keep saying anything else instead and you’ll keep hearing what i mean. i’m falling for you. i know.

you used to pull me away from grad school parties, leading me up the stairs with my hand in yours, dropping it in your bedroom doorway before jumping onto the mattress like a little kid. what are we doing, i thought, but i didn’t dare say a word. i sat on the edge of the bed and kicked my shoes off, tucked my legs underneath me and looked at you. you looked back. i couldn’t hear the party anymore, not even muffled calls for shots and bowl game and fetty wap, just our breathing, my heart racing, the stillness of being under those string lights with you.

i spent so many months wanting to be as close to you as possible, and then every time it happened it was too much, i couldn’t bear it, i thought i would blink and you’d be gone, so i murmured something about how we should go back downstairs, and still you were looking at me.

“let me read you this page.” what was that fucking book? i would trade any other memory to be able to recall it. something meditative maybe, i think you were reading motorcycle maintenance at the time, years too early for you to have gotten into kerouac or eugenides, or maybe something closer to bell hooks or thich naht hanh. “okay.”

so you read it aloud, perfectly paced and slightly deeper voice, turned the page and started reading more, snuck a glance in my direction to silence any protest from me, kept reading to the end of the chapter. closed the book. looked at me again. and that was all. me in your bed, you reading to me for gods sake, and that was all, and we put our shoes back on and we went downstairs, not even touching, and of course everyone wondered but no one would say anything, not in public anyway, just lauren later leaning into me on the couch and asking what happened. “he read to me from this book he’s reading?” the confusion in her face, searching for anything i might be hiding or withholding, and finding nothing, saying nothing. “that’s all.” i said. but i can’t explain it, feeling both disappointed and exhilarated, the smile i couldn’t wipe off my face even as my heart beat out what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.

i used to be able to sense when you’d text me, feel you enter a room even with my back to you, wake up from your nightmare in the middle of the night. now i don’t know if you think of me at all. everything is what are we doing and what the fuck and that’s all.

i miss you i miss you i miss you

why does it hurt more on nights i’m happy?

thefugitivesaint

Langston Hughes (1902-1967), ‘Tired’, “New Masses”, Vol. 6, #9, Feb. 1931 Source

i’ve been sick twice since you left, sicker than i ever remember being before.

the first time was a wet, sticky cough, something trapped deep inside me that i couldn’t get out. i wanted to dig my nails into the center of my chest and empty everything out myself. i coughed until my throat throbbed, then i promptly lost my voice. still in the midst of the pandemic, i was nervous to make an in-person appointment, but i literally couldn’t speak and wasn’t sure that’d work out over telehealth. along the way everyone took pity on me, asking only the most necessary questions, accepting head nods or holding my fingers up to communicate otherwise. and at the end of it, they couldn’t really give me anything. “the good news is you’re on the other side of it, it’s just going to take more time.” i could tell she felt bad sending me home empty handed, so instead i left with a strong prescription of a thick liquid that tasted terrible and numbed the throat completely when gargled. after a couple days it didn’t hurt anymore but my voice was still gone. i went to work and the students gifted me with a mini whiteboard and dry erase marker, eager to have me back again, even if in an accommodated way. for a few more days I suffered through it in silence, solo, mostly focused on proving to myself that i could get through this, and i did.

the second time (right now), it started when i felt so feverish i thought i would melt. for four days i slipped the thermometer under my tongue and watched it climb to 100+ degrees, while a literal heat wave swept across the country. i had to learn to sleep sitting up, as if in a hospital bed, otherwise i tossed and turned and wanted to give up. i lived off nothing the first day, raw bread and blue gatorade for two days, then small bites of rice and big cups of echinacea tea with honey when i felt slightly more hopeful on day four. all day I’d ask myself, did i want you here? would you have taken care of me? in the middle of a work week would you have made sure i wasn’t dying? an old friend came into town on day five but i didn’t want him to see me like this. “it’s not covid but i really can’t,” i messaged him through instagram, and he understood but was disappointed. i slept 14 hours each day, napped in between, couldn’t recall a single dream. remembered how much it hurt last time - how do i not do that again? and I think i’m on the other side. i was a little more gentle with myself, didn’t force a run or any work, tried to listen to my body telling me what it needs.

but what are the odds that they happen so soon after we broke up? am i that much more vulnerable now, or was i trying so hard to maintain everything back then that it was all going to come crashing down like this eventually? “it’s fine you’re just the air i breathe” says that one song, is that why I’m suddenly having the worst respiratory infections of my life, because you’re gone? i can’t tell if it’s getting easier or if i’m getting more resigned. i hate feeling like it’s all lost time, you being gone, me being sick, everything we could and should and would be doing instead. and then i remember how profoundly sad i was. maybe physically healthy, but emotionally crushed, beyond fatigued, just so worn down from living with you but not really living with you. i don’t think I’m quite happy yet, but I’m not that sad anymore. even with my throat raw, even with my fever dreams, I didn’t wanna cry myself to sleep at night. i miss you but i can never have an unhealthy love again.

metamorphesque

— The Door, Margaret Atwood

[text ID: Anyway my dearest one, / We still have the moon.]

feral-ballad

Pedro Salinas, tr. by Ruth Katz Crispin, from Memory in My Hands: The Love Poetry of Pedro Salinas; “The voice I owe to you”

[Text ID: “I don’t need time to know / what you are like: we knew / each other like lightning.”]

lunamonchtuna

— Amal El-Mohtar, from This Is How You Lose the Time War (via lunamonchtuna)

metamorphesque

― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

[text ID: To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.]

the love story i wanted with you was our own. instead i get to sit by myself watching a play with parts of us splattered all over the stage. the way persephone braves the darkness, season after season, mirroring the way i stood by you each time your shadows took control. and orpheus looking back, one fatal glance at the past, like me replaying our highlight reel and wishing i could pause the film there and strip it bare - what made that feel like that, and where did it go?

so tomorrow i’ll get all dressed up, legs shaved and nails painted and eyes lined. as an offering to the gods, i’ll make my body into something delicate and soft, something temporary and prone to ruin. i haven’t owned waterproof mascara in years, and even the best setting spray doesn’t hold up against wiping the tears away over and over. but for a moment, when the curtains open and everyone takes their places, i think i can play the part too, i think i can make myself feel loved again.

kendallroynsfw

everything everywhere all at once is about intergenerational trauma. about depression and passive suicidality and the gravitational appeal of nothingness. about aging, getting older in your twenties and getting older in your fifties. about the specific hurt mothers can cause their daughters and daughters their mothers. about the harsh reality of the immigrant experience and the american dream. but it’s mostly about kindness and family and it’s about choosing to sit at home talking about taxes with someone who loves you, and it’s about telling your daughter that you’d choose her over the entire universe, and it’s about how even in the universes where life didn’t form, love can still exist. and it’s really all of that at once.