particles & waves

i don't want to make a fucking substack

i need to write my way into this new relationship. X and X make fun of autofiction in the groupchat, but we're not all Elizabeth Gilbert, there's nuance here.

i don't want to make my body a metaphor. Reading "The Body is a Doorway" by Sophie Strand in conversation with "How to tell when we will die" by Johanna Hedva to help find this tonal difference. I just want my body to be my body, I want to look at it's failings clearly and precisely and compassionately but directly, Hedva style. Doom metal style. My connective tissue isn't a mycelial network, it's just here and I can be with it's disruptiveness without romanticizing it.

The GI doctor said my nausea was caused by constipation, as if I haven't been constipated my whole life. He gave me a drug that the nutritionist said would make my stools loose. I wait, I wait. No lose stools, mostly the same. Slow transit, they say. A GI doctor told my scared 18 year old self that I would need an ostomy bag one day, but why did no one look into why things weren't working? Doctors lose curiosity in the face of so much work, I know it's not personal. My current GI walked out while I was still talking to him, at first I loved how cunty and faggy he was until it was directed at me. I took Smooth Move tea last night, but belly has expanded to twice it's size, but no movement. How easily I could make this into a metaphor, WHAT DO I NEED TO LET GO OF? Three practitioners in the last month have asked me to talk to my disability, ask what it needs. I use it as an opportunity to say, I'M NOT OPEN TO THAT. Not that I don't think our body speaks to us in different ways, but I don't feel like this is just trauma or chronic stress or psychic unraveling, and I want to trust my intuition. I may change my orientation at some point, but it feels important to honor this current impulse, to see this bodily changes as challenging and impersonal. I fear there is ableism wrapped up in the question itself, like if I just excavate the right thing, I'll be cured. Maybe that's my own perfectionism, maybe it's just curiosity about what might emerge if we just ask the question, but I'm so sick of healing narratives that the question itself feels like an imposition.

the third time we hung out (the fourth if you count our five hour facetime date), i drove you to your friend's home, 40 minutes out of the way, in rush hour, just to spend more time with you. i already knew you had a dead brother, and i could tell by the way you talked about him that he died from a physical illness, not from a sudden traumatic event or by suicide or addiction. you wanted to connect over dead brother stories, but i already felt alienated by how different our narratives were. you told me about how your brother invited you into his misogyny when you came out to him, and your refusal to meet him there. you told me that your relationship to masculinity changed once he died--most of the clothes you wear now are his. even his boxers. the erotics of brother death. i recently texted c a series of questions, like "is my queerness inextricable from my grief? (yes)". yours is too, but it's a different story. i told you about how my relationship to masculinity changed after e’s death too, but in the opposite direction. i attribute white toxic masculinity as a cause of e’s death. he was so traumatized, and so divorced from his experience of trauma, that he could do little but numb it out. no one gives cis men the tools to actually find their own bodies. and he caused us so much pain and hurt and anger. why would i want to emulate any part of him? the only shirt i own of his i took when he was still alive. it's a flannel from when he was 12. that's what i want. sweet awkward boy, stumbling but tumbling over with life and giggles. i don't want that kind of man he turned out to be. not in him and not in me and not in lovers. 

i knew misogyny existed in queer community. in real and subtle ways. i just haven't experienced a lot of it because i'm mostly around queer femme of center ppl. there's a whole ton of internalized misogyny. but we name it and try to work through it and heal together. was this misogyny, what happened between us? i've never met a person socialized as a woman to cater so little to others. i was drawn to your confidence, to the ease in which you move through any room, to how every space felt a bit like yours. you offered me a distorted version of liberated gender and i WANTED IT. you ricocheted off my raw spots, my deep femme pain. "does my care bind me and keep me small?" i kept asking myself, the more i hung out with you. 

c said from the beginning, "i think this is a comet," and i said, "i know, it can't last, but i have to figure out what i have to learn here."  

can someone explain the difference between "carefree" and "careless" to me? are they not that same? when i gave you the field guide to hawks i bought after watching you joyfully swoon for an hour over the hawk perched outside my window, you said, "wow. this is worse than writing me a song." i spent two days after that explaining to you how no part of me is looking to replicate hetero dynamics in queer relationship. that i refuse to ever be shamed for being loving, because i do that to myself enough as is. you reminded me that the first thing i said to you that day after we met when you walked 45 minutes in freezing rain to sit on my bedroom floor----the first thing i said to you was: "what are your needs?" i don't know what kind of point you were trying to make by bringing that up, though.   

i told you about how no one has made me feel this destabilized since i was 19 and pining over my high school boyfriend and wanting more than everything, not to be loved by him, but to be him. is it misogyny if just witnessing you made me feel bad about myself? how do i keep myself accountable to my own unlearning of internalized self-hatred while also naming that you never collaborated on forming a container where i felt safe and seen, in my intensity and my deep fierce care and cry-when-i-come sensitivities? 

i first moved into the bedroom upstairs. it had a slanted ceiling, one window, everything about it smelled and felt brown and grey. dusty, warm, and removed. i stayed there one night and moved downstairs. what became my room wasn’t made to be a bedroom, but there were four big windows, and enough space for me to roll my body along the floor, and blue walls that held the sunrise for longer than it lasted. it was a week after e died. the southwest corner of that room holds so much grief in those intersecting lines, my body curled up in my bed, my face pressed between the right angle. a manufactured way to arrive at the sensation of my head held between someone’s hands. oh, and the light, the light, the light, how it forced me outside and into the world, and gave me glimpses of some way to participate in my life beyond this one story of losing e. that room watched me as i moved through grief, through queerness, through deep excavation of every nasty thing i ever learned to tell myself. i’ve never lived in one space for so long, and i’ve never been through so much in such a short period of time. but here we are. she is a container of memories i’m desperately attached to, because i’m now at a stage where the hardest moments of grief are a new kind of way of remembering e. my story is about him, my story is about losing him, my story is about what i did with that loss. and now, leaving this room, leaving this period of my life. i don’t have a name or vision for the kind of ritual i need. but i take time and space so seriously. they need to be marked. they need to be honored. 

leo sun, leo moon, leo rising.

dancing with straight men is such a battle because i love the sensation and connection but i don’t want anything more. i read an interview a while ago with director x about rihanna’s work video where he talked about how people interpret rihanna and drake’s dancing as so sexual, but in carribean culture, that’s nothing, like a lady can grind up on a dude with her boyfriend nearby and no one would think anything of it. there’s a distinct division between dancing and sex. i need that, i need that so badly. don’t compliment me, don’t try to get me to come home with you. just be fucking present. 

d asked for a “time-out” friday to talk about s, and i felt a lightness spread through my body. name the hard thing. say it out loud. talk to your friend about how you’re in love with his partner & you’re trying to figure out how to create a space for friendship that doesn’t leave you broken and longing.