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.

Not thinking, still Aug. 31, 2010

I don't even know his last name. He didn't tell me, and I didn't ask. My earliest impression of him was simply that he was kind, later to be appended with "hospitable" and "considerate," then "intelligent" and "articulate," "ambitious," "wise," "honest." It was like blowing up an inflatable doll that just stretched and stretched and stretched until it no longer resembles the sickly, plastic-thin rubber heap it was (and still is, just pumped full of hot air).

Aug. 31, 2010: My future half-Indian mistake

He got out of the car, and I stared at his chest as he spoke because I couldn't see his face. 

"I'm not paying for your services."

"I know," I laughed.

"I'm such a man-whore."

"Good night." I didn't hear a response, just the slam of the car door, so I drove home. Maybe I should have said, "No, you're not. If anyone's a whore here, it's me." I could have said, "No, we're just two very young, commitment-phobic, and oversexed individuals who found each other." But I was exhausted, and I didn't want to think about pre-cum sperm, or being pregnant, or even seeing him again.

I can't tell if I'm awake or still asleep--it's that sort of feeling, except I can't tell if this life is real or the one I see on Community. These tedious moments, the hideous, humorless routine of cycling to campus, sitting through class, taking notes; it is less compelling and surely, by extension, less real than the one I see on my tiny 10" screen. My dearest friends, you see, dear friends that they are, I can call up at any time and will make me laugh, even if they are only a few inches tall.

New beginning #82

Meet Paolo, my alpaca.

Anyway, I'm sorry about the broken promises, the misrepresentations, the truths-at-the-time-but-truths-no-longer (they are a shade of lie, not lies outright). I'm sorry I never wrote about all the things I said I would, that I stopped writing all together. I thought maybe I'd do what all the great writers do (what so many writers, published and unpublished, do): I'd wake up early in the morning, the sky an innocent gray, somber and sobering and quiet, with just a hint of blue, I'd wake up then and write. And I'd write, oh, for an hour or so, pouring forth my brilliance onto a welcoming and hungry page, to a rapt and thirsty audience. The words would come, easily, as they almost never do in reality. The prose would ring strong and true, with just a touch of irony, wit balanced against truth, and I would approach the day strengthened by the exercise, knowing that if I had the discipline to wake and write, I would have the discipline to accomplish anything (everything) that day.

That remains a dream and will remain a dream as long as I sit here and type at this ungodly hour of the night-morning, trying to remember the name of the boy who capped some long-ago, half-forgotten dream, and those were his words, "I hope that was a nice cap to your night."

May 21, 2010: To ZW

I lay in bed beside you, feeling the damp warmth of your breathe on my neck and the weight of your leg, your thigh, heavy across my hips. I hoped you would awaken and move, but I didn't want to wake you; so I didn't move. My pelvic bones hurt a little, but then love-making hurts a little too sometimes; so it was okay.

I don't know what to feel towards you. I want to love you, but I don't (and I don't know how).

It is not quite lust; you are not really my type, and I know I am not yours.

It is not quite liking: I don't know you, and you don't know me. We repeat the same inane things to each other every time we sleep together, the first things that come to our minds. You told me about how you weren't doing well in school, but how if you managed two B's, you could stay. I told you about how I wanted to be different for different's sake until I got tired of that and now cannot figure out what I want to be, or do. Are these fears that we share, our deepest truths, our hidden selves, or are they trivialities that we discard, harmless minutiae laid out for whoever would have them?

Neither is it disliking: I wouldn't have come again, satin sheets or no, if I disliked you, and even though it was unhappy break-up sex for you (I am just "the girl on the side," those are your words, and you were upset about someone else), I could not sense a disliking.

And of course (this is a given), it is not love. It is nothing like love.

So why have you been on my mind? Why you and not someone else? People I'd cared more about and who cared about me. Guys who were better in bed, or with whom I'd had more sexual chemistry, or more sexual tension. They have not been on my mind as much as you have. Why?

I don't want a relationship. I don't know how to care about someone without eventually asking them to leave. Just walk away, I say. Just leave, just stop, don't. I don't want to make this work anymore, I've said. You deserve so much better. Can we just be friends again? Every old, tired line: I've said them all, often in quick succession, because I didn't know what else to say. I never know the right thing to say.

And I know you don't want a relationship with me, because you talk about the other girls in your life when we are in bed, and I don't mind because it makes me feel safe holding you and knowing we won't need to work to make "us" work, because there's no "us" upon which to work, no pain, no tears, no wounded pride, no break-up sorrow, for either of us. We can be happy together when we are together. We can be happy apart when we are apart.

Then I made the mistake of reading your blog. I watched the videos you linked to. I read about your hurts and sorrows. I began to savor your bittersweet prose and poetry. Now I am presumptuous enough to assume I know you, and I am uncomfortable and unsettled that, while I am just another hook-up to you, your writing has made you three-dimensional and real and much more than just another fuck buddy to me.

The more I read what you write, what you wrote for others' eyes, not mine, I realize I would be delighted to get to know you, to really know you (and not in the Biblical sense, because I'm afraid we've taken care of that already). The truth is, I would like it very much if we were buddies more than fuck buddies, "friends with benefits" more than mere "benefits."

Anyway, you stirred, your cherubic face reassembling and readying itself for the heaviness of humanity, the burdens of the day ahead. I had slept little because your clock chimed every hour, and every hour, I would turn in bed to find you asleep, untroubled. When I finally climbed out of bed, my worries flew ahead to a test  later in the day, but all I could recall was the strange disjointed sequence of dreams, that gift of restless nights, incomprehensible images that exhaustion threads together, and our bodies, and our breaths, the primal panting, the heaving, the sighing--that was all my mind could hold. I did poorly on the reporter's test that day, and I couldn't make up my mind if it had been worth it; so I chose to forget about it, and about you.

"Researching" for writing

This is not the time for this. This is not the time. When is it ever the time to be shoved back into the person you were: you mumble an apology (you don't recognize them) and you can't quite look them in the eye because you're ashamed of who you were and ashamed of who you've become. Curse you, brain! Don't do this to me!

I was taking a stroll down memory lane, when I fell down the rabbit hole of recollection, and I'm no longer entirely here (but neither am I entirely--or at all--back there). I was reading through my notes (not scrupulously kept) of my travels, in the name of "research." I needed the scribbles to jog my memory of that odd month in Paris, when I was an impressionable and unripe 18.

I called back the memories because I needed them, but it was too much like waking the dead, or disturbing the dust of many still years. The past now populates my present: I watch the flurries of dust and unwanted ghosts swirl before my watering eyes, of people and conversations and moments I've forgotten (that I needed to forget).

It'll be worth it, though, right? To have something to write about, to talk about, to think or not think about.

First Paris post tomorrow night!

Directional change #1

I've decided I don't want to write about everyday life anymore. It's dull. When it is not dull, it is depressing. When it is neither dull nor depressing, it is radiant and glorious and giving, and I am grateful in ways that I am incapable of describing; so I won't try.

Instead...

I'm going to write about things I've seen, places I've been, people I've met--those pinpoints of wonder and fascination as delicious as the chocolate chips in the chocolate chip cookie that is life (if life were a chocolate chip cookie).

So, coming up...

Strange and romantic happenings in Paris, July 2007
Flying to Vancouver to bus to Seattle to drive to Quincy to attend Sasquatch, May 2008
The escape to Portland, Oct 2008
Rockin' it as an expat in Taiwan, Dec 2008 - June 2009
Random adventures and non-adventures in San Francisco and Berkeley
People (friends, family, chance acquaintances)

Also, I'll be updating my tumblr more often now. :]

I am Sam...

You are cute. I am Sam...I don't know if you saw me, but I was standing near your car in the parking lot. I was the guy in scrubs. (650)362-4172

"But I know Frank is a dream too," AL said about the man she'd been seeing for two years now, "One day, I'll wake up and he won't be there anymore."

A second ago, both of us had been laughing at the note someone left in the car window. Now she slouched with her hands gripping the wheel at 10 and 2, staring intently at the traffic-less late-night N-405.

We had noticed the note fluttering in her window, and she had pulled over to grab it.

"Is it a ticket?"

"It's probably a note telling us not to park there." We had parked in a shopping center a block from where we ended up eating dinner. She kidded, "Maybe it's a love note."

As she re-entered traffic, I opened it and read it to her.

"Did you see them?" I asked, referring to the three men who had been standing, chatting, in the parking lot by her car. I could only recall one--a balding man with a paunch and a tired beige suit and a worn leather briefcase, a professional and the oldest of the three.

"Yeah, the scrubs guy was the cutest."

"So are you going to reply?"

"Yeah, I'll text him later."

We talked about dating, guys, crushes.

She said, "It's good when they're just crushes. Everything's lighthearted."

"Cause they're not real; it's all just a dream."

"But I know Frank is a dream too. One day, I'll wake up and he won't be there anymore."

We sat in silence for a beat.

"Forget Frank! I've got this Indian scrubs guy now."

And we laughed, because there was nothing else we could do.

April 28, 2010: death-sorrow and self-pity

Death-sorrow
He had been crying and I hadn't even noticed.

"My teacher died," he said.

"I'm sorry. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I'm fine."

"It's okay not to be."

"I know it's okay not to be," he said in anger, and left, slamming the door. I never say the right thing.

But death-sorrow is not beyond empathy, and image-memories of death surfaced, uninvited. My grandfather, 阿公, in his icebox. 阿公, bloated and disfigured. 阿公, who was not that bloated, disfigured man in the icebox. But it was, and the image-memories would not stop. My grandmother, wiping the condensation from the tiny window atop the icebox that framed his face, whispering, whispering to the corpse that would not hear. Everyone was in tears. My uncles, standing stoic, guardians of his shrine--they had been there for days, in shifts, honoring the man, my grandfather, who had lived paralyzed on his left side for half a lifetime, who had made a fortune in the plastics industry, who had provided so well for his family that none of his grown children worked, who had stood tall and proud, even pulling off his white-hair comb-over, who had given and given and given until there was nothing left to give. Everyone owed him, and if it was not money that they owed, it was love, or both.

Voids
Death-voids are not so different from friend-voids, those created by people leaving in frustration and slamming the door behind them (the door slam echoes in your heart, and your brain aches and bruises as if it had been hit). Both are mired in regret, all the things one could have said but did not, all the things that one should not have said but did, and then it's too late to say or un-say any of them because they're gone. When CW came in again (the first time, AW had been crying, and I had been mute beside him), it was me that was crying, alone, thinking about how I had failed those who tried befriending me, how people were not encouraged or uplifted the first time or the second time (and they would attempt a second time only if they were particularly hopeful) they talked to me about life-difficulties, because there was nothing I could give, not love, not money (I am not my grandfather's granddaughter). Is anyone so loveless, so self-involved, so useless as I? I crawled beneath my blankets, wrapping myself in the cocoon of soft warmth that would not judge me, and I cried.

On the I-5

It was just me and the asphalt and the cows. The sun was bright enough to make cloud shadows sharp, and even as I drove, I thought I could see them crawl across the hills, across the golden plains and planted fields, these massive masses moving, enshrouding the land only to have it lit up again. It was gorgeous. Everything was gorgeous, even flying by at 80 miles per hour.

How can anyone be unhappy when they're in transit?

Movement--movement--a simulacrum of progress. Progress: forward movement. But any movement at all must be better than none.

In sickness and in health

I do not write things that people want to feel. I do not write things that I want to feel. I don't know how to, but I want to. I do. Honest to God, I do.

I stopped writing because it scared me. These words, these useless memories and wandering thoughts, the melodrama spelled and spilled out in so many words, so many lines of painful, pained text and pages of painfully purple prose.

Was any of it real? Was any of it true?

Well, I've never been so honest before. This is what I saw, and said, and thought. Here it is. Behold my heart upon my sleeve and these tears, still wet, upon my cheeks. Yet I'm convinced I've never written anything falser or more disgusting than all of which I've regurgitated into this virtual space. As if this space were my confessional, my personal urinal, Dump everything that is ugly in life Here, reads a sign in flashing neon (and yes, that is a lot of neon).

I don't believe in it. In any of what I've written. Just as I don't believe in umbrellas and I don't believe in shoes on a warm, dry day and I don't believe in casual sex and I don't believe in me. (That song from Hair plays in the background: "I believe in God, and I believe that God believes in Claude--that's me, that's me, that's me..." but alas! I am not Claude.) This little pet project that involves me being honest feels too much like manually filtering all the sewage flowing from my own house. I must be out my mind.

Tomorrow, I will begin to write things that people want to feel, things that I want to feel, things that I will feel.

How would you like to feel?

Whoosh

Spasms of horror and unstoppable convulsions of disgust--my body that of an epileptic lying in the devil's embrace. I couldn't explain it, not to myself, not to anyone, and that is the frustration of this pain and confusion: it is inexplicable, irrational. It is an obsessive torment that grows with every feeding, every night I lie awake, counting away the minutes, the seconds, of a life I no longer desire to live.

I clutched in the darkness for my bike lights--they were where I had left them, in the top drawer--listening to CW's even, raspy breath, a cold gripping his tired lungs and throat and nose. I tried not to awaken him as I slid our door shut, the wood catching and groaning, and with it, we wake each other in the early hours of the morning, when one or the other steals softly into or out of bed. I do not know if he awoke.

I rode out into the city night, a dark of perpetual light, orange-yellow streetlight illumination on the potholed pavement, and I rode down College Ave., knowing the Rockridge Safeway would be open at two in the morning. There was one pack of Benson & Hedges left, hidden beside boxes of American Spirit, an inappropriate categorization and impossible to find, non-menthols, but I'd promised to wean myself off of menthols anyway, so I savored my unusual morsel of luck.

"Could I get the last pack of Benson & Hedges?"

"Expensive," the clerk grunted as he swiped it across the scanner, almost as an after-thought; I could feel no ill-will nor malice.

The energy to care, just a little bit

I could easily have spent another day in, but CW, before he left, told me to get out; and I'm glad he did--it was the nudge I needed to breathe a bit of fresh air and sun.

I went jogging.

I woke at three in the afternoon. I woke with only four hours left of daylight. That's how much I had slept. That’s the price of partying: losing the moments in life that might ever measure up to something, like church-going and accordion-playing and breakfast- and lunch-eating. I woke with most of the day gone, the promise of fluorescent lights illuminating the rest of my waking hours.

--

At night, MJ asked me to read her letter to CF, and I made the requisite remarks about editing, suggestions about structure and tone--that was familiar, yet the content was alien, unexpected. She is cheerful, except for the moments when pain slides through the cracks, sorrow bubbling up through the crevices, but she mixes the cement to pave over the holes, and there it goes; it vanishes again beneath the youthful pizzazz, the unabashed cursing and enthusiasm.

I hugged her and all I could offer was "I'm sorry you have so much hurt in your life."

She shrugged and flashed a mirthless smile as she looked away, "It happens."

I'm sorry

­­I awoke to find despair had mutated into terror in the hollow dark of night; my familiar bedfellow had grown horns and fangs and claws. I awoke hungover, and the jackhammer in my temples did not relent as I cooked eggs and pumpkin pie pancakes for brunch. I wanted to leave this world, to leave it all, come back or go somewhere else after I'd done my time in a place amongst people I do not know, who do not know me. I could be anyone then, and I suppose that is why I drag my feet everywhere I go: I am trying to run away to a world that I fear (that I know) will be exactly the same, so I move ever onwards, always looking backwards, afraid to be anywhere but exactly where I am, the vastness of the discontent such that it spreads into my past, my future, my termination (it destroys my determination), but I try to pretend I can/will/would-if-I-could outrun it.