thereoncewereflwrs

[thereoncewereflwrs]

in where i find myself in the absence, part 2

it’s night time, and i sit here afraid you won’t want me the way i wan’t you. thoughts and feelings cross my mind like rockets launching into space but i can’t seem to tangibly conjure the solution for this problem that keeps us entranced and entrapped. 

i feel things, and i want to know things, and they both require an honesty and vulnerability that became unavailable the second trust left our dynamic. it picked up its shit one day, put on its hat and left us for good. trust doesn’t even write anymore, and instead, i’m here left nostalgically picturing the sensations and feelings i once had when it and i intermingled in your presence. 

would it help if i say i’m angry? i’m fucking angry, then. oh god i’ve never been angrier. but more disturbing then that, i’m hurt. i’m so much more hurt. hurt because you betrayed me, because you rejected me, because you did not, even against what you might believe, explain to me fully what it was about my entire existence that seemed to upset you so much that it was worth drowning this friendship over. maybe i was a monster and without knowing it i’d wake up with stains of your blood on my shirt and mouth every morning. and i’d walk up to your mangled body and smile and see only the sunshine of my own desire reflected back at me, while in some strange reality i had hurt you beyond healing. maybe i was hurting myself in this delusion as well. 

the point is, i’m hurt. how can we come back from so much hurt? you say you’re hurt too, how do we begin to quantify the magnitude of this between us in order to address it? like workers sifting through battered and stained paperwork, filing one piece here one piece there until all things are set and organized and we wait for the next batch? or like fingers attempting to split the ocean water? our friendship is like that, you see? like the ocean, scary and expansive, my fucking god so expansive. there were times i’d look out to it and see nothing but shining foreverness and feel so wholly enveloped and consumed i’d want to drift into its calmness forever. sometimes it would be tremulous  and it would threaten to swallow me whole with only the last gulp of air lodged between my throat and lungs. but no matter what, it always tasted like salt and stung behind my eyelids. no amount of drinking this friendship could quench my thirst. and you see, there, i am the problem. i can tell just by these words that attempt to transcribe the barest essence of this relationship. well, this used-to-be relationship. this no-longer relationship. this ugly thing. i am the problem for needing you so much it ruined us both, harmed us in the act of trying to keep us together. the more i tried holding on to what you gave me the less room i left for you to breathe, until we found ourselves in a small crowded corner with my grip around your throat and nothing but space between us both. 

okay, but less ostentatiously, you hurt me too. and i can’t figure out what would make that better. i am angry because i loved you so much and you chose to be away from me anyways. in theory i can understand that anybody and everybody has the damn right to move away from any relationship that is causing harm, discomfort or even ceases to be fulfilling. but was that what this was? truly? if so, i’ve been living this trickery for much longer then i thought. if so, i don’t know where i lost you but it must have been a long while back. i can’t shake off the feeling that expressing my anger is not useful. i say useful because it’s not that it is not there, or that it does not fuel me in my most desperate moments as consolation, but that in it of itself i do not believe it will save me. 

i am disappointed. i am hurt. i have lost the trust i had for you. i have lost the vulnerability and willingness to risk anything for you. maybe that is a good thing. maybe it will be what keeps us safe. i am not dramatic enough to think that we cannot get those things back. you see, i love you beyond anything else in this world. i do not know how, other then to not love you feels like a denial of myself. but that secretive, unbalanced love will not save us. it alone cannot plug the holes where the water bursts and rushes in on this wrecked ship. but maybe there in lies the key - instead of believe there is a body to be saved amongst all this, we can understand: we have died. this has died. and now we are entering the unknown of death. and what will it become and make of us? 

part of me can see a glimmer of light at the sensation of knowing that the true purpose is not to recreate or to get back to wherever we were. but to fully and wholly accept the new manifestation of what this is, whatever it may be, if it is even “something.” if it means we only talk a little bit and never again, so be it. if it means we keep a bitter distance from each other forever, so be it. if this is the give and take of healthy boundaries then there is no negotiation. i must learn and accept. 

all i ask is that you arrive at the place where you can speak your needs and boundaries, and not at the last minute in the most hurtful of ways. 

you’ve hurt me too much, and i want to learn from it all. i cannot be with you in any capacity other then from this distant engagement, because to do so is to put myself in the front lines of harm. to do so is to stand in front of a warm weapon waiting to be triggered. i’ve matured now, and know that some risks are not worth taking. i am choosing myself, loving myself, and hopefully, i will come first in both of those at some point and time. but today, it is enough to say that while i want to choose you, it is better that you have not chosen me. i am, if not happy or content with that, at least learning to be peace with it. please do not choose me. 

[thereoncewereflwrs]

in where i find myself in the absence

i read an article last night that spoke of the fallacy of cooperatives. more specifically, it spoke on how cooperatives in actuality create the conditions for workers to actively participate in a capitalist market, rather than encouraging them to engage in deep class struggle at the workplace through union building. i instantly thought it was an argument missing in analysis, but i also found myself with each new paragraph asking out loud ’what exactly is the idea of a socialist economy in practice if it cannot start with a business set up that allows workers to become owners of the means of their own commodities?’ also and at the same time, i found useful how the article aimed at articulating the real tension in whether worker-owner businesses can exist within or outside of a capitalist political economy all together. this article didn’t make me think of you, but i did dream last night that you called me to tell me you had been married to a man - out of potential convenience on his end? because he had been terminally ill, you said - and he had died recently. you berated me for being so careless and caustic with my words and tone over the phone, and maturely told me i should calm myself because you just wanted to talk. clearly even in my dreams a similarly singular tension continues to prevail about whether i can in fact exist beyond my own conditioned responses or whether any improvement simply exists within those confines. my body, muscle memory, and even (sub)consciousness are like the boundaries of capitalism, and maybe my aims to improve myself beyond what i am are mere attempts at participating in my own free market under the guise of pseudo-socialism. 

i don’t know why i felt like writing to you - or maybe this could be considered reaching out? i woke up from the dream carrying the emotions and thoughts i had held while dreaming it, and i spent all day attempting to untangle myself from the made up scenario my sleeping mind had conjured that had felt so tangible it had made me lose track of reality. in the dream you had insisted that we meet up (again, your suggestion was met with childish remarks on my end) and throughout the day i kept thinking i needed to rush home and shower so that i could get ready for this meeting, as if you had jumped from my sleeping mind onto a table at a nearby coffee shop and were ready to continue scolding me. beyond this sensation that i haven’t been able to shake off regarding this fake conversation that never took place but was so real in my mind it feels like it did, it’s become increasingly hard to reconcile just how much i’ve wanted it to have happened with how much i know it won’t ever happen. you see, i’m just all types of fucking angry all the time about you and everything that went down, but this isn’t an email about that or about my anger, i promise. this statement is just to say that i am upset with myself for wanting what my logical mind has strictly placed off limits: to just be in your orbit without the memories of the past year and a half weighing me down. 

i’m not asking for that now, so don’t worry. i’ve thought over and over again about your general anxiety with receiving emails from distant folks whom you feel bound and committed to in some way or another. probably you’ve already done the work to extricate yourself from those ungrounded self-imposed obligations, but maybe you haven’t. and if you haven’t, well maybe you’re reading this email (maybe you’re not at all, maybe you didn’t even open it, in which case these words are just space on your google cloud and don’t matter at all and I can make some ridiculous confession that will never be seen) and feeling pangs of anxiety and dread at the idea that soon after you’re through you might have to set time to process it all and then perhaps consider actionable steps around whether you type a response or not. or maybe you haven’t worked through this particular anxiety but you have worked through our failed friendship and no longer feel or think anything about me and these words are just boring and slightly sad because you had wished i had just stopped thinking about you all together and would leave you alone. in deep retrospect i can understand that this particular anxiety that you have, combined with my conditioned response to pretend that nothing or no one i deeply care about can hurt me in a real way, is a dangerous thing. 

anyways, this email is sort of pointless. it acts as a creator of self-inflicted anxiety and self-indulgence more than anything else. i’m not going to ask anything because that would put us both in a really awful position, right? it forces you to decide whether you answer me back or not and brings with it all the implications and annoyances that come with either of those things. and it puts my pride on a heavy and potentially unbalanced line, in where the only proper way of restoring it would be for you to send me something in return. if you do, then that’s a mess, and if you don’t, well that’s just a mess too in its own way, just less compromising and collective. instead i’ll say sometimes i think about you and wonder so many different things, and sometimes amongst that wondering i wish certain things. i can imagine all kinds of shit about how you are, where you are, what you’ve become in the last year, and most of the time i have no choice but to let my imagination do its thing. but ~sometimes~ im able to actively wish you were well, healthy, somewhere you want to be, with the people you want to be with, and that you are no longer entrapped in relationships that make you feel cornered or unable to set your boundaries. those wishes don’t come often, but in the spirit of having felt that we had talked on the phone, set up a meeting time and place, and felt that we would be alright after all, i wished that today. that’s good enough for now.

p.s. here is the article i mention above, but be warned, it's not consequential enough to even warrant a read, imo https://organizing.work/2021/01/you-cant-win-without-a-fight-why-worker-cooperatives-are-a-bad-strategy/?fbclid=IwAR07R1hJogQ8cemiH9vZfLbSOJa6AnoCufPTeEG-QzzpDW_X3Qt2h8tZm9Y

[thereoncewereflwrs]

in where we catch what falls and climb the mountain to nothing

writing sex scenes              like writing dialogue 

every beat          counts

never have a moment just for the sake of it

they should always carry on some form of narrative

- some iteration of a quote by Sally Rooney from “How “Normal People” Makes Us Fall In Love”

she sat halfway on the kitchen counter and spread her legs. she could have been anyone else anywhere else and here she was with her legs open, the gap between her thighs small as the thickness of her muscles and the weight of her fat stretched.

she sat halfway on the kitchen counter and her belly protruded outward and hanged midway above - or below - the stretch marks lined all across her belly like scratched wounds healed over time like dried river trails leading nowhere leading to places forgotten leading onto her skin. 

she sat halfway and her breasts hung low on her chest both nipples puckered and taut from the coldness in the air and the fright of being exposed so casually caustically to the small world of the kitchen to the eyes of the white refrigerator and black oven and silver microwave to the burning eyes staring back with blank expressions as if unsure of what to do with her with this information with her body.

she sat and her arms ached from holding her upright as she shivered and stretched each limb to its capacity. there were hairs on her body that stood up in unison with each shiver and hairs that laid placidly on her personhood like old dead branches waiting to be swept up and removed and there were hairs she’d never even seen before doing things she’d never considered and hairs that she hated more then anything but came back day after day to embrace her anew. those she said good morning to like a good woman because she had learned that southern practice of being extra sweet to those she disrespected and talked about and because when an old friend came back to you what else were you to say?

she was in this position for several moments and imagined eyes sweeping over each crevasses and large hands gripping the outsides of her hips and thighs and squeezing hard harder then she could tolerate and letting out a sharp low sound that felt pleasurable in her throat and tasted of sugar cubes with some bit of acidity like lemon or tangerine but real sour. she imagined eyes full of adoration and disgust and humor and a full mouth descending on her neck and the roughness of a two day old beard that moved above her skin and poked at her intrusively and deliberately as if this particular feeling was the price to pay for being this much of herself for this little of a man. she imagined that her fully naked body met a fully clothed body and that the sensation of a crinkled white button-up shirt and ironed straight charcoal suit pants met her curves like a wash of rain plummeting on a mountainous surface. she imagined the eyes of each surface behind them bulging as the gasps of noises ruptured the air and soon there was neither harmony nor symphony in what they were making but a cluster of sounds or clamor or a jumble of confused moans and groans turned into a story telling of a far away princess adored by her prince right at the moment the dragon came and to slay them all. 

she imagined victory and then being alone again and the coolness turning to frost and her body existing once more in this reality that comes and comes in unnatural waves in where she is all together too much for her world and not at all much for this world. comes and comes in those shapes and sizes too big for her to grip and comb and love or touch and then again until she is overwhelmed and drowning and taking large gulps and gasps over the iterations of her own stories. comes and comes until she is done.

[thereoncewereflwrs]

in where i try to date a professor, and we never get to the point

A few years ago (in 2019, although we had known each other since 2015) I fell in love with my ex roommate in Brooklyn. He was, in fact, the total opposite of anyone I had ever had a remote or deep feeling towards prior to him: a white, Jewish, red curly haired, thin, freckly, trans man from upstate New York who had studied at the University of Chicago and knew fancy words in Russian. Regardless, or in spite of this great gap between my taste in men and his entire being, he had been the only man I had ever truly seen myself happy with. With him I learned new things about myself, words like ‘fat’ and ‘ugly;’ I learned that I was not a socialist because of its existing inability to reconcile the impact and affects of the industrial revolution; I learned I liked traveling with him and embarking in mindless and meaningless traditions in ways I had almost sworn myself off to. I had thought ‘well, I don’t ever want kids, but I’d raise his,’ or ‘I’ll never find a singular partner to spend the rest of my life with, but I don’t need that when I want to spend the rest of my life with my best friend anyways.’ Funny how it only takes one particular bundle of culminated cells to eradicate years of logical conclusions that have led you to the ideological and pragmatic decisions made. During a trip to New York that involved a very chaotic Passover dinner that led to an even more chaotic, and much more dangerous, outing in the middle of Manhattan at a lesbian dance club at 4 in the morning, I came to the realization that maybe the love I felt for him was beyond the kind one feels for friendship (up until this point I had convinced myself, and everyone around me, that I was living into the values of radical friendship....). On that trip I drunkenly confessed my newly realized feelings, clumsily putting together words the way a small child puts together lego blocks for the first time with sticky hands. That same trip his boyfriend gave me two books as a gift. I’ll never know why he did this, or what they really meant, but the awkwardness of the moment has stayed with me almost as if it happened yesterday.

Yesterday, in all actually, I scrambled through the piles of books in my small library and stumbled upon the selection of poems by Ocean Vuong that he had given me. As a general, personal rule I dislike poetry. Most often then not I don’t understand the different scraps of sentences cut and pasted together in strange formats to describe, what really? Hardly a plot, hardly a set of characters. A feeling, or sensation, or a set of things subjectively and rhythmically important but lacking in context or deeper development. Vuong is not the exception to this rule, but rather one that cleverly supports my self developed premise. Of course, my ex roommates boyfriend did not know any of this, and probably, he liked poetry and Ocean Vuong very much and thought it was a very nice gift indeed to give to his partners best friend (at the time). I feel inclined to say that Ocean Voung is a beyond amazing writer and I thoroughly enjoyed the few pages I did read of his novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” Anyways, I perused the pages on his poetry book with slight amusement. More then the words on the pages, I relived my ex best friends face as his partner handed me the gift, his expression as he described how annoyed he’d been by the uncalled gesture, and how intrusive he had found the entire affair. I imagined his laughter, his comments, how his silence felt like so much presence that it felt like being home. That’s what it was like to be with him: home, being my own, authentic home, and always having him to gently guide me to that conclusion over and over again.

The only pages that stood out from the book go as thus:

From ‘Night Sky with Exit Wounds’ by Ocean Voung, Part 1:

‘Tell me it was for the hunger

& nothing less. For hunger is to give

the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light

whittled down by another war

is all that pins my hand to your chest.’

//

A few months ago, while driving up from South Florida after having picked up my mother from the airport, I confessed to her that I had been dating for the last 4 months, and had recently broken up with a Married Man. It had been the early hours of the dark night, and we had just passed the traffic infested city of Atlanta and were making our way through curved roads that led deeper into rural Georgia before it met Southern Tennessee. Tennessee was a new home away from an old home that had never been home to begin with. My anxiety came from the obvious places - a fear that she’d disapprove of my actions, that her judgement would lead to scrutinizing all my past decisions and actions until they became morally ambiguous to us both, and a fear of anger. More and more I think that in reality I feared seeing what I had been feeling all along: that I’d made a cliche joke of myself. Even through that haze, however, I could still feel the overriding, desperate sensation of being utterly heart-broken and sad. I had carried this feeling with me for the entirety of the 21 hour trip, and once the first words tripped over themselves to be heard, the watershed of memories and experiences flooded the car. It was both unbearable, like drowning, and overwhelmingly relieving, like being seen for the first time. Of course, this wasn’t the first time I’d told this story. But it had been the first time with my mother, and that, for some unrecognizable, instinctual reason, was different.

She held her tongue - an unusual practice for my mother - as I recounted event after event of the last 4 months. I was as honest as I could be: we’d met on tinder after my break up with my previous partner of almost a year, I had wanted to have casual sex, he had wanted more, and (I emphasized) I had not known he had been married at the time. More importantly (I *double* emphasized) when he did tell me, he had confessed that the marriage had been one of convenience. As a fellow immigrant, and as a person who had witnessed a few of these kinds of entanglements, I had cleared myself, in almost the same quickness as I draw breath, of the moral implications of the situation. “As long as you’re not *cheating*” I had muttered, and he had nodded emphatically, “I’m not.” His reassurance was short lived. Soon after that the realities of his “entanglement” became less clear, and more obvious. He had a 4 year old daughter, he had been married for several years (technically, more years then necessary), he couldn’t, as a matter of convenience and then as a practical, legal afterthought, tell his wife where he was or what he was doing (he was lying, that is). I knew very early on that he was indeed cheating on his wife, even if the beginnings of their relationship had started as a marriage of convenience. But by the time I came to that conclusion, it had felt too late, almost as if I had dug too deep into the ground and could now fight my way through mud and dirt until I asphyxiated, or enjoy the eternal rest that was promised.

Loving the Married Man (because yes, I had foolishly loved him) had not been like loving my ex best friend. Married Man’s love had been wide but shallow - not in the way that denotes a superficiality, but in the way that one sees on the surface of a lake small things grow fast and move away even faster - small tadpoles and water lilies, the creeping of little reptilian noses and little ducklings floating on by. It was the kind of love that felt strongest when we touched, as if my physiological sensory threatened to spill in words and phrases that put together sounded like ‘I love you,’ ‘please don’t hurt me,’ and ‘yes.’ Married Man was married, and therefor there had always been the foreshadowing of a great plot twist, one were he (very unoriginally, as to be expected from men) promised to leave his wife and start a life with me. I rejected this almost as much as I desperately and willingly fell into it. In the same breath taken to tell his lies, almost as if our tongues collided from the desperation of wanting to believe our own delusional narratives, I gave him everything I possibly had in me. My energy, my time, my body, even my money. His wife, you see, had been away for a few months, seeing family in Baltimore with their baby daughter, while he had stayed to work. I had known from the beginning that we weren’t going to end up together, I had righteously, almost superiorly, thought that I knew exactly where we were heading and therefor had control over the entire situation. He had persisted he loved me, didn’t want to lose me, didn’t want to see me with anyone else, needed me there, and that he was in fact preparing the divorce papers as we spoke. I upgraded my status from a casual fuck to his girlfriend, and shamelessly introduced him to my best friends (who, true to who we all are, did not judge but made room for my own dramas to unfold). It took me a while to see that I was a mistress playing the role of pretend-girlfriend. Even more, I was a clown donning on mistress attire.

I can understand, in subtle and in abruptly immediate ways the ‘hunger’ Vuong speaks of. Married Man did not create the conditions for this ‘hunger’ in me, it has always existed. Before Married Man there had been My Ex, and before My Ex there had been my Ex Best Friend, and before him there had been every other man I’d engaged with romantically and in a familial way.

I know this ‘hunger’ inside me craves what can only go right through me. I have stubbornly, recklessly and without analysis, allowed myself to feed it with emptiness disguised as bountifulness. I have sat myself in a table that is all together wrong for me, in a chair that has been made too small for my thick thighs and bulbous belly, looked up at faces that have not smiled back, and taken a bite of food that has not been prepared with love, not really. This is no ones fault. I do not remove myself from accountability by saying this. What I did in a lot of ways can be considered hurtful, immoral, disdainful, distasteful, etc,. I also know that I am learning, still always learning, and need to be graceful and gentle with myself. Today, through a configuration of thoughts, I have realized I have been feeding my body meals foreign to me and my well being. And that I must now learn, or re-learn by tapping into what I hope is some collective, ancestral knowledge, how to make the meals that will nourish and settle in me forever.

//

From ‘Night Sky with Exit Wounds’ by Ocean Voung, Part 2:

‘I wanted to disappear - so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast-cancer ribbon on his key chain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of the suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky - to hold flight & fall at once.’

\\

In October of 2020 I went on a date with a Professor from a State University. His profile on tinder promised 1 free joke if you matched with him, and I had casually indulged in the free entertainment. He had sent me 2, neither of which were funny, and instead had proceeded to insult me through a flurry of scattered presumptive discourse that I, true to my very nature, found anxiety inducing and oddly attractive. He had originally chosen to withhold his profession from me, having stated that he had “too many people under him” and wanted to keep the information hidden “for now.” I shrugged it off. I could trick myself into finding this level of secrecy mysterious, or I could see it for what it was, a waste of time as most tinder conversations tended to be. Through further indulgence he had confessed that he was a teachers assistant (here on by known only as the Professor) and was doing research on something or other in history (I really wish I could remember, but it was THAT obscure). I wanted to ask him what the impact and reasoning, and really, the justification he gave himself, was for embarking in studious, rigorous research and reading for a subject matter so far removed from our every day realities, especially during a pandemic and the mass murders of black and brown people at a national scale, but I kept silent. Instead we bantered a bit, exchanged ideas around Imposter Syndrome, and settled on an evening to see each other in where I’d drive to his apartment and he’d cook for me.

I wore my ‘date dress’ - a simple, black dress that hugged my torso and spread over my hips, tricking the eye into seeing less fat then there was on my body. I dressed this way not to obscure my fatness (although I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t sometimes don the dress in part because it had the added bonus of doing so) but because it was an easy ‘fuck’ dress. All I had to do, I knew by then from practice, was lift the skirt part and bring my underwear down. The efficiency of the dress, and how it made me feel, gave me confidence enough to walk into a complete strangers apartment and make casual conversation as if pretending to be old friends who were excited about catching up. This is always the pretext that is built. I pretend to be captured by the magic of his words - he being whoever he is - and ask question after question in the hopes of digging deeper into who the person really is. I didn’t really care that he was from Ethiopia or that his parents had been revolutionaries or that he was stressed about his profession although he got paid almost double what I did, but I didn’t *not* care either, which made all the difference. He had been the *presumably* smartest man I had talked to during my time in Tennessee, and I have always liked feeling like I knew less then the male partners I had. I had my period that day, but after a few awkward moments in where he asked to kiss me (I said no, then felt horribly guilty about it and relented), grabbed my boob, and had his dick out while still in the couch, he came. It was one of the few times I have had casual sex with someone where I didn’t finish. In a strange, almost methodical way, I could give men my attention, my emotional presence, my intellectual capacity, my dry or dorky humor, even my body willing or unwilling, but I found it unacceptable to not finish while having sex with a cis-hetero-male. For this alone I was vexed by the entire interaction, and after taking him to buy cigarettes at the near by gas station and back (he was a Professor without a car), and after he had reassured me that he liked me, that he had had a nice time and that he hoped to see me again, I made the 30 minute drive home. We texted sparingly after that. We tried to make plans but he always flaked, claiming to be too busy and stressed with work (I don’t disbelieve this) and apologizing profusely about it. Saturday, October 31st had been our last text exchange, until two days ago. There’s no reason to berate this long winded summary with the details of that conversation. Suffice it to say that he once again asked to meet up with me, and then today canceled with the familiar excuse of work and stress. I think about him now and write about him because it took everything in my power to not text him reassuring words, to not ease his expressed anxiety at potentially “wasting my time.” To not ease his turmoil of using me by sending him a song and being witty and casual. I have felt, in fact, that my time has been wasted. That he got way more out of the flimsy arrangement we had concocted, and that after having had sex with my hand and mouth, he had no longer felt a genuine interest in talking with me. Of course, he owes me nothing and I am not entitled to his time or presence. But all together this story feels too similar to the many random encounters one has with ‘fuck-boys’ in where they feign interest until they are sexually fulfilled and then suddenly no longer remember your name. I don’t type any of this with bitterness. At most, I feel a slight comical annoyance at him. More importantly, I feel things for and towards myself.

Where does this hunger that needs fulfilling come from? Where was its conception? It’s birth? I wonder if I’ll ever be good enough for myself.

As Nina Simone once said, “you’ve got to learn to leave the table when loves no longer being served.” Tables and chairs and foods and a hunger. That’s all I can think of today.

[thereoncewereflwrs]

in where my body is an anthology, and literature knows more about people then we do

Today I feel ugly, my facial features angular and put together in a way that makes me feel like someone cut pieces of faces from a magazine and placed them together to create me. My clothes feel confining, probably because I haven’t worn regular clothes since lockdown and probably because I’m fat and most of my clothes fit this way anyway. Today I crave a discipline my body and mind cannot give, and this desire makes me melancholy and agitated. I keep thinking about this boy - or man, because he’s over 25 and at this stage even if we don’t feel like adults we are still deemed thus by society - who sent me a link to a tumblr page at 4 in the morning last night. I had been asleep, going to bed as early as 6 or 7 these days with little energy spent, but had woken up to the link and a casual text forewarning of nudity. The post, titled “why chloe moretz eating spaghetti from wooden boxes? why everyone lookin in the camera?? WHY SOME DUDE SUCKIN DICK???” (linked) had several comments below the picture (which showed exactly what was titled - Chloe Moretz eating spaghetti, several people in the room looking directly at the camera, and two dudes in the back, with their pants down, glimpsing over their shoulders at the camera while one of them received oral stimulation by another man). The comments all posed questions about the absurdity of this picture, revealing pieces of it to be false or photoshopped, and finally presenting the “legitimate” picture of the two men receiving blow jobs, that culminated in a scene with a large black bear walking casually by as they did. I’m confused by this, and if I’m honest, I’m also disturbed. It’s not that I’m without a sense of humor. Most of the time I believe my humor to be flexible and sarcastic, as long as it’s not offensive or insensitive. But like most of the absurdities of men, I’m confounded as to where the humor of such a post lies. Is it the homosexual blow job itself? Is it the actress consuming a meal in public? Or the fact that someone decided to photoshop such random components together in an attempt towards the casualness of such absurdity? Clearly there is something humorous about this, otherwise it wouldn’t have received such attention (241,846 notes on tumblr), and I’m left thinking that maybe I’m more ordinary and less obscene in my character after all. But beyond that, I wonder why this man decided to send me this at the time that he did. How did he come upon the link? And why, at a time when you can presume a stranger to be asleep, did he think of me and decide to send it? 

We had met only once before, and had been talking casually for the last couple of weeks. This mostly consisted of me listening to him talk about how tired, stressed and hopeless he was about the current state of his life and the world in general. It has not been an unusual connection; most of my intimate interactions with men have been like this - men needing to be heard and I playing the role of a vessel to be poured into. It’s only lately that I’ve found the act of “making space” rudimentarily extractive and imbalanced. And a lie to myself. There have been these small ways in which I’ve consented to this “extractive” practice, you see. Listening endlessly to men talk about their unloving fathers, their insecurities around mediocre sexual performance, their lack of careers or intelligence, any culmination of experiences that they deem traumatic, etc., This willingness towards extraction on my end has come about from a configuration of ideas I’ve put together in order to convince myself that this is the ultimate level of intimacy, and thus one I’ve been craving all along (to know what is not knowable to others, to know what hurts or is tender or needs healing). 

In other ways I’ve not consented to what’s been extracted - my body, my emotional entanglements, my intelligence, my victimhood that comes along with the rage of my own vulnerability. Tumblr-man is not different or far from this pattern of giving and taking, of capturing both the spaces available and the spaces I wish to be beyond grasp. I considered a series of actions to acknowledge the text he sent me, to reduce awkwardness and thus affirm that he was not wrong in sending me adult porn unsolicited or without evidence of past history of such behavior being acceptable. I considered creating further space through question and curiosity, to let him know that while I might not have appreciated it, nothing was off limits when he deemed it actionable. But as of now I can only muster enough energy to think about my own psychological patterns. My contract with this phenomenon (the “rudimentary extractive” one) makes me want to dig deeper into the superficial agreement of our relationship, to a place where I reach farther then surface level grief or joy. I want to hear, and have heard, deeper sensory, sensational information that at once makes me feel as much as the person is feeling by telling me something they’ve never considered uttering to a stranger before. I know this is just my own lack of experience around me. I am bored and perhaps numb from the lackluster stimuli that is at my disposal, and thus I want to find it in others - in men - so that it can replace my sense of unworthiness in myself with a false, brief sense of importance to someone else.  

I’ve lived in the South almost all my life. I’m more regionally Southern then most of my current peers, and yet, the culture of ‘Southern living’ did not meet me until I moved to rural Tennessee. Here we eat boiled peanuts (a practice I learned came from the dietary patterns of civil war soldiers) and biscuits with gravy and sometimes fried chicken. Here the tea is sweetened unbearably so, and moonshine is a thing, although never anywhere authentically anymore. More then anything my fat body despairs at these dietary rituals. I feel alienated from my own practices and find it hard to enjoy things. It’s really not that uncommon, however. As a millennial, feelings of alienation and displacement are common.

Tumblr-man (which previously I’d deemed LARPeg - since he both enjoys this strange phenomenon called live action role playing, and being pegged) tells me he is jealous of my ability to enjoy reading. He, in a bizarre series of events, is a Creative Writings major at an obscure liberal arts college in Asheville, NC (the same one, he informs me, that James Franco went to). He tells me that he really “likes the idea of dropping a big plot piece...” and that “writing a big, long, cheeky complaint with lots of pith is very attractive” to him. He recommends I read ‘Consider the Lobster’ by David Foster Wallace, and I do, mostly because I’ve read everything he’s sent my way thus far, and I wasn’t going to prove my own behavioral patterns wrong that day. He sends me memes about Dungeons and Dragons and LARPing that I assume I’m suppose to understand but I do not, although by his own admission, an immigrant like me is not meant to, and is hardly to blame for not understanding “cultural references.” I don’t get it, either LARPing or D&D, but I read both essay assignments he wrote for the semester around a fictional LARPing scenario. I do this because he’s a socialist, and half Venezuelan, and because I can’t help my own internal desire to show a man that I am fully engulfed in his own preferences and passions. I am not entirely foolish, I express my own passions and desires, and hardly authentically adopt theirs, but if he does not ask I do not say, because it’s always easier to listen and be seen listening, then to explain and feel the potential signs of disinterest and boredom. I am not boring. But men can be, and I do not wish to engage with bored men. Anyways, I read ‘Consider the Lobster’, the essay in the book titled the same, and it was, surprisingly, spectacular. How thrilling that something, anything, this particular man had suggested spoke to me in such a way. I preceded to read reviews and an excerpt from a New York Times article titled “How Should a Book Sound? And What About Footnotes?” in where DFW says “Most poetry is written to ride on the breath, and getting to hear the poet read it is kind of a revelation and makes the poetry more alive. But with certain literary narrative writers like me, we want the writing to sound like a brain voice, like the sound of the voice inside of the head, and the brain voice is faster, is absent any breath, and it holds together grammatically rather than sonically." I find this beyond interesting - it jolts me deep down where I safe keep my ideas around literature and its realities. I want to send it to Tumblr-man because it reminded me so specifically of what he had said right before recommending DFW: “I only recently have come to understand that the real sort of fingerprint of a writer can be where they place periods and commas. Because “She left, yesterday.” And “She left. Yesterday.” Sound similar if read aloud but read differently.” I wonder now if he, too, read this quote and had his sense of literature jolted in an inexplicable, but concrete way. 

I’ve once again picked up ‘Normal People’ by Sally Rooney. Thus far, my favorite lines are as follows (of the first U.S edition by Hogarth publishing group):

“This “what?” Question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silence that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for real communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them” (pg 26);

“One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma when it seems like Mr. Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation. He’s amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it “the pleasure of being touched by great art.” In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr. Knightley kisses Emma’s hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is indirect. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them” (pg 72);

“Connell paused and took another drag on his cigarette. This was probably the most horrifying thing Eric could have said to him, not because it ended his life, but because it didn’t. He knew then that the secret for which he had sacrificed his own happiness and the happiness of another person had been trivial all along, and worthless” (pg 80);

“He kisses her closed eyelids. It’s not like this with other people, she says. Yea, he says. I know. She senses there are things he isn’t saying to her. She can’t tell whether he’s holding back a desire to pull away from her, or a desire to make himself more vulnerable somehow” (pg 96).

I am struck by the way the book’s composition demonstrates a realness unfamiliar to the readings I often take on. The book reads the way people speak, and cares very little about the grammatical composition of words/sentences. Instead, characters and their thoughts and the narrators own mind speak the way one speaks in ones mind, unfiltered, scattered with anxiety and directness, with an approach to ones own truth above all else. ‘Normal People’ reads almost opposite to the narrative guidelines David Foster Wallace deems necessary, and yet, it embodies his sentiment almost as if the two had been birthed from one another. I wish I and those around me were as brave and as vulnerable as the compilation of sentences in this book. And yet, we’d all fall apart doing so. I want to recommend ‘Normal People’ to Tumblr-man, along with a series of other writings I have not yet finished but have found impactful nonetheless. I know, ultimately, that I won’t, in the same way I won’t send the NYT’s article. Maybe this is an inability to be seen on my end, or a foolish willingness to be something for somebody else without being an actual something to that somebody. Or maybe it’s too much labor and I’m satisfied with thinking through these things on my own, knowing the depth of my own thoughts without needing them to be seen or understood. In the same way my ears strain and struggle to hear noise while wearing my noise canceling headphones while no music plays, my body strains and struggles, leaping for noise and yet feeling bound by the confines the lack of it creates. 

I think about my own mortality often, and wonder whether this existence, this very moment even, I am dead or dying, with only a delusion of existence playing forth in my mind. These thoughts cause congruent sensations in me - anxiety, because of the potential of this reality that has not been proven incorrect or impossible in my mind, and strangely, a dissociation that elevates me beyond that anxiety. I think to myself, and know deep in my bones, that it is true, that it turns out I’ve been dead all along, and that my body has just been decomposing in motion this whole time, waiting for my bones to turn to ash.