To AT

Thank you for the sweet taste of what it's like to be loved, if only for a little bit and if only for a little while. I'm placing our beautiful moments in a box labeled A in my head... like that one kiss, right after we watched Paris is Burning, the fire and passion and obsession on your lips and the way you held me, I could've stayed there forever. Thank you for holding my hand and staying by my bedside through one of the worst nights of my life. Thank you for the smiles, the pleasure, the conversations, the check-ins, the adoration, as short-lived and inconstant as it was.

But this ugly seed of anger and jealousy sprouted and flourished over the past month and it bloomed last night as you held her; I was so frustrated to see you so out of control -- what were you trying to prove? -- and you tore my fraying heart to pieces when you pushed me away, not violently but forcefully, definitively, with finality. You didn't want my lips on yours, my hips against yours, my hand in yours, it was what I finally needed to leave, I suppose, to wipe my hands clean of the mess that was us, that is everything that I wanted from you and everything that you wouldn't or couldn't give me.

I knew from the beginning, of course, how things would turn out, that I'd be the one to get hurt ... it's the slow-motion train wreck, the banana-peel trip in the slapstick comedy of young adult life, I could see it coming all along. I don't know why I dared to hope, to dream. I'm a dreamer, still, but at least I'm done dreaming about you, as I whisper Crystal Castles' plaintive refrain ... I'm not in love, I'm not in love, I'm not in love. I'm not. I don't know what love means. But now at least I know what it's like to be made love to, and I have you to thank for that.

Why'd I let you do this to me? Why had I let you turn me into a bottle-breaking, plate-throwing tangle of insanity last night as I told PM how utterly exhausted I was of this life, when what I really meant was that I was utterly exhausted of life as some confused little boy's plaything. He said my problem was that I didn't know what I wanted...well, I do. I want you. The problem is that you don't know what you want, that all you know is that I'm not exactly what you want, and you're too fucking proud/scared/nice/whatever to tell me so.

So I suppose I'll have to be the one to leave, to wipe my hands clean, once and for all, of the messiness that is unrequited devotion. I meant to tell you during that last intimate conversation that I'd be there to listen if you needed someone to rant, vent, complain to, that I'd be there for you. I meant to tell you that one thing I love about you is that you seem so straight-laced but you're not at all. I never said those things...the same way I didn't say so, so many other things because I didn't want to smother you with my vulnerability and neediness. Now I'm done needing you, and I'm just going to sit back and let my brain process you out of my system. I'll wait as long as it takes.

I'm leaving Wilde to you. You deserve the dirty mess, the brokenness that is her, that sodden house of misfits and outcasts, those three entire floors of broken people. I was one of them once. Enjoy it. I know you all kind of fix each other and you all kind of break each other apart, too. I'm done with the finger-painting upon each other's lives. I'm wiping this broken heart of mine clean and vacuum-sealing this box labeled A. I'll miss you. I miss you already. But next week, I'll miss you a little less, and maybe in a few months, I'll rummage through the memories some sunny afternoon when I have little else to do, just for fun, and savor the honey-sweetness of having once been held by you.

Good-bye.

FemSex body image project, script

My body is not my own.

It belongs to the makers, the producers, of the images that I eat.

It belongs to the friends I imitate, the loved ones I emulate, the people I respect, and admire, and to those I love. Above all, it belongs to them.

It belongs to all who’ve touched me (it doesn’t matter where: my heart, my mind, body and soul). It belongs to the lovers I’ve taken or, me, like meat, those who’ve taken without asking.

It is built upon the stories and memories I treasure and despise, cemented by careless compliments, loose lips sinking ships, careless criticisms, cutting.

--

What’d I’d like to do, then, in this space, in this moment, is to create a new body, with you, a fictional one only insofar as it’s a composite and couldn’t possibly exist outside of this chance, beautiful gathering but as real as each of our bodies are. And I think, I hope, it’ll be clearer at the end what I mean.

I’ll start, and I invite you to join me in sharing the stories and feelings I know all of you have rattling around inside of you, about individual body parts.

Anyway, I’ll start. This is how I feel about my neck:

My Neck

Striations, stretch marks, like chokers around my neck, the necklaces I don’t want to wear and can’t take off, imprints of weight gain from puberty and binge eating and stress.

But that’s when I look at it as an object, when the truth is, I like it better as a subject, the recipient of gentle pecking kisses or violent, needy lip-caresses. I love that it feels so intensely and allows my head to turn to take in the world, that I can dress it up with necklaces of my choosing, even though the necklaces that are not, are there, too.

In reference to the body outline, now covered with arrows and associations

This is a person, not just complete but whole. Whole because it’s brimming with life: It is the intersection of and accumulation of unique and beautiful and beautifully unique experiences, and that’s what each of our bodies is, what this community is. It’s whole in a way even the disabled or the limbless can be whole, because wholeness has nothing to do with the physical: Each of us is so much greater than the sum of our parts.

I am more whole than the parts of me that I hate. I am me and I am more than me and I want to make a promise to you, to myself, today and I’m going to ask you to make the some promise to me, to yourself, today, that you will stop letting the marketing managers, your partners, your friends, or parents, your enemies, strangers and strange men, make you any less than what you are, because right now, you’re already, have always been, and will always be just perfect.

I started Google-ing people to put off doing my Physics hw

OH. MY. GOD.

That's all I have to say.

I know it isn't anything, but I'm so used to nothing, to believing in nothing, that I am nothing.

But, I'm coming to realize, to re-realize, that nothingness aside, I can spend hours upon hours writing and enjoy it but hours upon hours doing anything else and not.

Nov. 2, 2008: 1

He resembled a goat as he bleated, "Fuuuuuck, fuuuuck...fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck." He was a middle-aged goat, scruffy dirty blonde hair encircling his head, his face, the back of his hands. With his neck stretched forwards above the steering wheel, he squinted at the road, but despite the squinting and the bleating, our headlights continued to dim as the car trundled and sputtered south down I-5.

It was almost midnight, and we were still two hours outside of Sacramento. We had been driving for over 14 hours on a trip that ought to have taken 8. It was no longer possible to find a comfortable sitting position in my seat.

When, having finished telling our entire life stories, having finished sitting in tranquil silence, he had begun asking strange questions, I started to think (I couldn't help but think), I should have known. All those signs--there were so many signs--I should have known.


"Okay, so suppose angels turn into chocolate when they die," he began. Then he paused, thinking, and added, "Don't ask me why they turn into chocolate, or how they die, or why they died, but anyway, suppose that's what happens, and you walked into a dead chocolate angel, would you eat it?"

"No."

"Oh, 'cause, you know, I would," he continued, "Okay, here's another one: If you had to choose between punching your mom in the nose and eating an entire horse, which one would you choose?"

I was tempted just to say, again, "No," but we had many more hours in a small confined space together, so instead I asked, "Is the horse still alive when I'm eating it?"

"Yes."

"That's easy, then, I would punch my mom."

"Really? 'Cause I could never imagine doing that, punching my mom in the nose. I can just picture her face. I could never do that to her."

That was when the speedometer needled began crawling towards zero and the headlights started to fade and the strange goat-man beside me began to bleat.

Aug. 14, 2010: S?

He was panicking.

"Shit, shit, I can't believe I just did that." Turning away from me, he buried his face in his hands. "I spend so much time making sure I don't demean women and I just did that to you. I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

Well, it goes both ways, babe, I didn't say aloud. I held him against my chest, his head beneath my chin, and I wanted to squeeze all the fear out of the room, shove it back and out and away into the chilly deep-blue early morning air that I could see through the windows.

I couldn't tell him--I didn't dare and anyway I didn't know how--that I wanted his child. That I felt he'd given me something that I wanted--that I needed--to keep. Later, days after Plan B, it was as if something valuable were bleeding out of me, as if it were something real and important being flushed down the toilet. You're sick to be thinking like this, you freak. Stop it. I was angry at myself because I wasn't angry at him; I couldn't hold him responsible.