KRVenture

When you kiss a boy and he says, “You are mine,” tell him you don’t belong to anyone but your cat, and even she’s a temporary renter. Break up with the boy who whipped out the “I love you” almost as quickly as he whipped himself out. Love is not something he can force into you just because it’s standing like a third person in the room. Love is not a tattoo. Love is a strand of Lady-and-the-Tramp spaghetti. Love meets, it does not stab. And if it stabs, it isn’t love. He will cry more than you do when you tell him you didn’t love him. You will sit on a tiled bathroom floor after the phone call is over and you will not cry. You will spend the next day eating Oreos and moving on. People will tell you to be hard. But don’t be the dick you rejected. Be soft, and hard when it matters. Don’t let anyone say you can’t spend months at a time in your head. If they do, move in permanently. Construct your own love. Admit you feel love, and for the people everyone assumed you wouldn’t love. Read Foucault. Read Butler. Become comfortable speaking the word “sex.” Say the word “queer” aloud like it’s a lifelong friend. Declare your difference. If people don’t understand, forgive them, then slowly change them. Find fault in everything you watch and read. Enjoy it all anyway. The word “normal” will become the bane of your existence. Work to change it, then work to live with it. Fall in love. Write a book about your life. People will ask if they can read it. Tell them no. Tell them it is therapy for the fingers. If they don’t understand, don’t force it. Write. And read. Learn that you are only a brain constructed by the world around you. Let this empower you.

The way the sea belongs to the moon, I belong deeply to myself.