welcome to my dream page

Pressed into me

Between us still -

White-faced heron

Whose gullet shakes, snatching crickets.

What calamities repeating in

The garden, unknowing

Driving cars through the apocalypse. A convoy, winding down a mountain and into a gorge. My sister was there, some of the leaders had to cut out the vagina of a rebel with a large apple corer. I felt like I was on the evil side, I didn't like that this was happening. I didn't want my sister to watch. I could feel her judging me.

I must have been in America. I was visiting S, and even though he was happy to see me he had forgotten my name. I was going to stay in their room, they had a bunk bed, one of those ones which was a double on the bottom bunk and a single on the top. I felt the presence of her easy sexuality in the room, it was kind of messy, it was small, I could probably smell some old sweat. S had to go out with their housemates to a party, so gave me a quick hug goodbye and left. I felt a bit shunted, but also hopeful that maybe later that night we’d hookup. But first I had to get ready for a soccer game. I felt a bit shy getting dressed into my old soccer clothes, worried that people would see the wrong parts of my body being accentuated, that I wouldn’t look like a girl. I tied my hair back into a long ponytail, but felt unsure about it. I asked one of the housemates who’d stayed home if they thought my hair looked silly like this. My hair was now short, and in the mirror I looked exactly like the boy I once was with short-back-and-sides, but with a long ponytail as well. The housemate said she thought I looked cool.

So, I have detransition urges probably about once a fortnight. I was talking about them with a friend, and during the conversation I realised that my desires to become a boy again is actually a misdirected desire to be skinny again, a desire to remain desirable to the people from whom I've habituated receiving self worth: the gay guys I used to fuck. The internalised fatphobia of it all is difficult to grapple with, I know how damaging it is to people, to me. But, I grew up with health-nut parents, with a dad who I once saw go up to a fat woman's trolley in Woolies and say "oh good, you've got some healthy food in there!" (he did know her, and tried to pass it off as a joke... but that doesn't really make it any better). That stuff doesn't leave your brain straight away.

I think about 2 out of the 5 or so pills I take every day claim weight gain as a side-effect. And while we could have a little Preciado inspired TED Talk on what it means to claim that weight gain is a side-effect of HRT drugs... Actually fuck it, I will have that TED Talk. How the hell is weight gain considered a side-effect of "feminising" your body? Is breast growth not weight gain? Are a woman's curves not just a sexualised portion of her body fat? The medical community is sooooo scared of fat!

A mental block I have RE starting a blog is - what if I have nothing to say? And I rarely do, in the way that I never write; but I always do, in the way that I'm always talking. But I want to be writing, and I've listened to like 5 episodes of This Jungian Life pod recently, so I'm making a dream analysis blog in the hopes that my nonconscious dream mind will prompt the things that my hyper-conscious writing mind is too stage-frightened to type. An aspirational writing practice.

I was on a camping trip with my family, and I went to the top of the hill, where there was a servo. A delivery boy, a teenager, drove up to me. He had a parcel for me, but he was confused by the name. He was reading the company name, Vevoke. I didn't really care about the package, it was something for my old workplace, but I thought the kid seemed nice, so I asked him to show me around the town, and he did. I asked, don't you have more deliveries to make? He shrugged, no, I only had two or three deliveries today, and I get paid by the hour so I may as well take a while.

I had a nice time driving around with him. I could tell he could tell I was queer, and I felt an affinity with him, like we both knew that if two gays could randomly find each other in front of a small town servo and drive around some streets together in the afternoon then... idk, anything would be possible etc. It was nice. I dropped him off near the servo and went back down the hill to where my family had set up camp. It turns out my brother knew the kid somehow.

This is bringing up for me a queering the map flavour of nostalgia. The kid in my dream wasn't anyone I know in real life, and it's not the first time I've created friends in my dream. Often I create people I crush hard on, but this time I had a more maternal, maybe even fraternal feeling towards him. It's interesting that the character was so specifically a teenager who could drive and had a job. These were things I wanted when I was young and living in a small town. In comparison, there is a very specific mention of my old job in the dream. I'd just had dinner with a friend from that job in the irl hours before the dream, and we were talking about our boss, a deeply repressed, deeply misogynistic, trenchantly evil older gay man. I remember once he shouted "FUCK THEM IN THE ARSE" in a meeting, after hearing we got a leg up on our competitors. As someone relatively new to arse-fucking at the time, I felt so angry that a gay man would evoke it as a kind of capitalistic, domineering... man thing. Now I feel sad for him. Maybe he really does think anal sex is so abhorrent; maybe he and his partner only treat each other like mates until the lights are off, until they're drunk?

I like that in my dream I wasn't needed as some wise person who could help the kid step into his queerness or figure anything out. Being gay was never even talked about. In fact, it was the kid who had something to give me, in the form of a parcel, which I didn't really care much for except for that it brought us both into a presence with each other, where the presence and normalcy of a tension free gay friendship is what was needed. I think about this in the context of the pressure I feel by my desires to mother a child, to let them grow up with the whole freedom of their own self. I think about this in the context of the anger I felt at my dog, crying at 4:30am in the cold, crying for the heat of a proximate body, not needing me to fix anything, just needing me.

I dream of a world where young gay kids only have a few things to do as they cruise around town, where they can run into other queers and not feel the shame drilled into them push fear and blood into their faces, push them away from remembering the world at the top of the hill, the world that their bodies promised them, which was always theirs, to make echoes, to befriend, to arse-fuck in........

P.S. We need to save Colleen Ballinger's brother's dancing child.......