God is holding it out in front of me, pulling it away when I reach out to grab it. And I need to be grateful, I need to understand that I can't be there
yet, contentedness is what killed me in
Portland, contentedness is why I moved, I need to be scrambling, frantically writing as if my body is about to
pull apart and I just need to
get this out, get out of this, I need to be in pain right now for anything to make sense later.
I'm grateful that I'm in love, I'm grateful it's unrequited, I'm grateful I'm in this obsessive and delusional state, because I've never been here before.
I've been listening to the first
Soccer Mommy album,
Wasting all my time wondering if you really love me
I was wasting all my time thinking about the way you treat me
Wasting all my time on someone who didn't know me
I was wasting all my time on someone who couldn't love me
And I knew when I met you
I'm not the one you want to be with
Because I can't see you blossom
In the future that I'm dreaming
I love my painful love arc, I love feeling so deeply for someone else and being completely crushed with understanding that they simply don't care about me. Because
it's so fascinating, it's teaching me so much about myself, I never thought I could feel like this, love so intensely, I almost missed it too, I think about
people who are settled with their partner, the way M and I were in Portland, I think about people never getting to feel the intensity of love we are capable of,
it's like I'm accessing a secret vault, the same one accessed by so many writers or whoever the fuck before, all these people before me have eventually
come to the magical and moonlit
pond of unrequited love. I'm so happy I'm here, my hands grabbing at the water that will always and inevitably fall through my
fingers, someday when this is all finished and my feelings are burnt out, when I finally move on and accept that I don't want this intensity anymore I'll look
back at these weeks and months that I sat by the pool, I'll remember the beauty of each day being truly new, because I don't know myself like this, each day I
surprise myself, because I never thought this experience was possible.
Their face is removed from the backdrop, removed from the room, they are in focus and the world is blurred, when they speak I hear their voice as my own,
I hear their thoughts in my inner world turned out, when they say maybe we should have some distance, I have the initial jolt of pain, I'm acting like T,
I need to be normal, I need to have self-respect, but when we stand at the street corner, talking fast past 1 am and my cold jacket is blown open and I'm
caught in the February wind, when I can't catch my bus even though it's passed twice, when I know we're talking in circles, but I can't stand to see their face
disappear, I'm so grateful for the pain I know is rising in my body, the pain about to burst tomorrow into this, and my thoughts for the rest of the day, and a
thousand other words I'll write someday.
I think of Marlowe and Alec, these two trans men I've been jealous of forever, today Marlowe posted, 'I'm so grateful to be able to love and be loved' and
it's so obvious, they complete each other, they see the world the same way, I think of the intensity of finding someone like that, who you believe sees the
world the exact same way as you. Then to have them pull away from you, not seem to understand, not agree, when they see you you're just another face in their
day, they think of your name in passing, they look away, when you speak you're just a voice to them, someone else standing there on the sidewalk. I think about
if this had happened to Marlowe and Alec, how beautiful that would have been, how much more interesting.
Life isn't supposed to work, life is supposed to be
walking back home alone, life is supposed to be waking up and deciding who you are, without someone else to tell you or show you that you even make sense, life
is supposed to be constantly speaking into the closed circles of their ears and knowing you won't be understood, life is supposed to be
speaking and never getting
there.
I sit by the pond at night, the water blue-black and rippling, I'm here, feeling my own body as I sit at the bank, my hands over my legs, feeling each
brown hair sprouting from my skin, pulling at the follicles and finding the pattern of their interlocking threads, the hair is thinning, my scar, I'm
running my finger down the beautiful white stripe, healed now from the surgeons knife and the weeks of dressing changes,
pressing my finger along the skin and remembering, the once red and bloody opening above my thigh where the green and yellow pus was pulled from my body,
the opening to my inner world and the flesh-eating bacteria within. I smile, see my torso, see my back, beautiful in the white light reflecting from the
moon and the ache of the water,
I write about myself the way I wish they would write about me, I see each burning irritation on my skin, I track the
lines of my muscles and I watch my necklace tear pink swaths into my neck, I stop by the neighbor's window to look into my own eyes, imagining what it must
be like to be them, to be seen by these eyes in such excruciating detail.