Red Blood, Black Ink

sometimes when they ask you how did you know you were gay, there's a long list of ways that the truth presented itself. this makes it feel like there's a beginning and an end, some kind of dawn that burned into you. as if you walked through the door and were a changed person, a split that happened where once you were straight.

when you were six or maybe seven, you realized the game of pretend you'd been playing would resolve in two princesses kissing. you had a strange and distorted sensation then, something akin to panic, as if you'd been caught doing something terrible. you forced a response to the idea: i am not supposed to do that yet, and shivered the thought into the abyss. in your house, did you even really know the term queer? somehow you already knew it wasn't right of you. it was something for adults, the way that kissing boys wasn't. kissing boys was acceptable, even cute.

in the books you read - and you read so many of them, were particularly fond of ones with dragons or cats or wolves in them - sometimes you'd be taken aback by certain instances of "romance." all of a sudden, the girl and the boy would end up together, and it was almost as if you'd somehow missed a chapter. in one book, the girl had been bullied by this boy, had to cut off her precious hair (that he stuck gum into!), had professed repeatedly to hating him - and still, the two of them were together in the last few pages. you'd flipped back and forth a few times, scanning for something you'd just missed, some reason that was evidently subvocal or understood. for a long time you avoided realistic fiction after that, annoyed by plots that resolved with but then he realized he loved her.

this was not an outlier, but a commonality. this of course was the 90's and the early aughts. women would roll their eyes and stay with their cheating partner. often two people would wind up together that you felt had no purpose to love each other. you watched the female main character disappoint the female best friend - over and over - just for the sake of a boy that wasn't even interesting. you learned that sisterhood was maybe fickle and fragile - that the desire for a boy should conquer all. you couldn't help that it all felt - even then - somehow distant and somewhat wrong.

a long time from now, tracing patterns on the tattooed leg of a beautiful woman, you'll both be talking about how neither of you really understood why everyone was obsessed with justin beiber. so that was a sign, you both laugh. you'd both feigned interest in some boyband or another. coming out was a long process for both of you: both the slow realization as well as the eternal again-and-again cycle of admitting it eventually to friends and family and the workforce. both of you have been asked - when did you know?

technically you didn't "know" until you were 28. these days, though - looking back at the little girl you were - you think to yourself i was trying to tell myself something and i couldn't listen. this breaks your heart a lot of the time, but some part of that is actually very warm to you - you carried your past self all this way. she always knew. you got her here so she could see the comfort of the morning you're in bed with a beautiful girl. so that you could know, too. you, antlered and stable now - you saved that timid, shaking foal.

how beautiful to think some part of you has always been like this. that you've always been whole.

actually trauma did make me a little funnier but it's because i'm an overfunctioning people-pleaser now and endlessly fawning because if everyone in the room doesn't love me i am in danger. i am hypervigilant and endlessly scanning everyone's emotions so yes i guess i'm quick-witted. i can't have serious adult conversations without feeling like i'm on fire and i always feel like i'm at fault for things i didn't even do. i need every difficult thing to be resolved right now immediately, i can't stand conflict, i am endlessly needy and anxious. i will cling to bad people even after i've been hurt continuously and i'm in a constant battle with my body to just rest instead of reacting. but yeah it. i guess. silver linings or whatever. it did make me funny

when i was younger i loved the blade and the hook and the tear of a tendon. for a long time i was feeding myself on pain alone. it felt like a needlepointed symmetry: internal anguish can be expressed in external injury. everything had to be hard and loud and fast and violent. i drove erratically and had rough sex with the wrong people and made terrible friends and let people feed from my bloodstream. the only way i knew how to handle the rot was with violence, to rip it out of me, to put my body down like a sick dog. in some mental quarry of self-hatred i'd try to blunt-force pickaxe out the misery from my brainstem; as if i could drown what was already underwater. i was perpetually disgusted by my own failure to comply. no matter how many bitemarks or burnt bridges or bloodstains or bruises or bad nights; i was still me. i was still hurting.

so who am i, then, to speak about softness. it's been years since i touched a blade like that, but i still wear the scars in the summer. i know i could get in my car and drive off the face of the map but instead i get in my car and i visit my friends. i could kill myself i suppose but how could i ever explain that absence to my dog, and besides - i haven't been to my own wedding yet.

all i know about softness i learned from the bottom of a sharp pit. there's a younger, hungry version of me, a growling tiger still unsated. every gentle thing is still alien to her. she doesn't understand the concept; it is abhorrent. she thinks it's boring. she thinks it's letting go. she snarls: i made a promise. we would rather burn out than go quiet, remember? i made a promise i would rip all the meaning from this life like a peach pit.

this is the meaning, beloved: today there are cherries waiting for me to eat them. i put my hand on warm moss while on the phone with shannon. i made a new matcha recipe today, and it's quite delicious. tomorrow i'm going to get in my car and instead of screaming or crashing it or disappearing, i am going to go visit my cousin.

in my youth i think i wanted to be loved like a bent needle - under the skin, permanent, an emotional scarification. i have been in the middle of broken glass my whole life. i think i replaced the concept of peace with the numb fear at the edge of a knife.

i know now i can only be loved as far as the sound travels, otherwise it's all just echo. i want to be loved like a purring cat, quiet and gentle. although she's still romanceable, i generally steer clear of blue-winged strife. she sits in the dark corners of my room, pouting, and i teach her how to do the laundry and get to work on time.

i open the curtains. i want to let in the light.

i'm tired so i say i will just handle it tomorrow but then it is tomorrow and there's another thing i have to do today so now i have two things to handle (today and yesterday's burdens) so now i'm stressed about doing both and then i spend an hour thinking about how both of these things are going to take up so much time and energy and i should have done that other thing yesterday and it's not even that hard and i get stuck doomscrolling or whatever so now i have to mentally make rules to combat the procrastination because i really do need to get at least one thing done today so i don't let myself eat or sleep or enjoy things until one thing gets done but despite the rules i still can't make myself just get up and start so i get locked for hours in the in-between where my body is frozen and rotting but my mind is on fire in a glass box and honestly in these wasted long hours i don't think i even see the world around me and after a long time eventually if i'm very lucky/have sufficiently punished myself into movement i finally manage to do one or both things on my list and that should be great but instead of feeling proud or relaxed i'm annoyed with myself because i've wasted the day and how can i be exhausted when i literally haven't done anything and literally so many adults have actual lives and problems and meanwhile i can't manage basic fucking tasks and then i realize oh fuck there's a third thing which i forgot about until now and but i really am tired so i say i will just handle it tomorrow but then it is tomorrow

my most ungrounded and unresearched fear is that so many companies are pushing AI in part because it builds them a pathway towards a subscription model for a huge number of things that should not be subscription, but theoretically could be:

do you want a "luxury" experience? well, you'd have to pay for that luxury, and since the company sure doesn't want to pay its employees; the cost would fall to the consumer.

when automation has made every experience unpleasant; the experience of genuine humanity will be commodified.

i was the exception to the rule. i should be the ambassador of the american dream. i did it all right.

we were dirt poor. my parents sacrificed a lot so i could be in an area where the schools were exceptional. we all bootstrapped. i paid my own way through college and grad school. i have student debt, but not a lot of it. it took me a long time and a lot of jobs and working and connections and luck and all of it.

now i make good money at a good (remote!) job with pretty good health insurance. I have vision and dental. they even offer pet insurance and 6 free meetings with a therapist. i work with an exceptionally sweet manager, i like my team, and i don't mind the job. i make much more than some of my friends.

so why the fuck can't i afford to eat.

i looked it up. ten years ago, my current salary would amount to 106 thousand american dollars. it was "well over" median wage.

my position's base salary (according to what i could find) has only increased by about 3 thousand dollars. after all, the work has not changed drastically. estimates say that for me to live "comfortably" in this city, i'd need to be making 139,776 dollars a year, before taxes. i am making half of that.

i always bristle when someone on the other side says something about how we just don't want to work, how it's really about me and my failure to succeed. that i need to be pushier, flashier, better; and then capitalism will work out for me.

in the car yesterday, she said that america is probably fucked. that the amount of damage trump is doing to america is largely permanent. i have difficulty arguing with her. prices went up during the pandemic, and then they just - stayed there. i want to believe in the inevitable rise of the human spirit (you know i'm an optimist) but the truth of the matter feels like a smeared handprint - i have no proof it gets easier.

elon musk becomes or unbecomes a trillionaire. we spend billions of dollars in a pointless war. health insurance companies kill people in cold blood. ai "takes over" jobs; assigns you a random number score for your resume so you are automatically rejected by the system. you're fired to make more profit for the shareholders; they rehire someone else for half of your pay. the government spends millions of dollars to destroy national monuments. the white house needs a ballroom. the fbi just posted that they can preemptively arrest someone for domestic terrorism for "extreme" beliefs about america. when i went to go check my facts about that - i found that the this fucking government website has an email sign-up popup that covers the entire page & i literally could not figure out how to close it.

so yeah, the price of eggs is not going to go down. the cost of RAM is not going to go down. why would it. in the free market, without regulation, all the companies really need to worry about is how else they can bleed a stone.

sometimes when people my age make fun of gen z or gen alpha for being unwilling to work; i think about the lie we've been telling them. because i am not an unusual case. so fucking many of us did it "right". so many of us put our heads down and agreed to the terms and conditions. this was how you do it, right.

almost none of my friends own a house. all of us are in our 30s.

it's apocryphal and likely didn't happen as written, but the myth goes that when Marie Antoinette was told that the general population was starving and had no bread to eat; her chipper reply was so let them eat cake.

there's a 250 foot ferris wheel breaking down on the national mall right now. i can't afford gas, but whatever. our nation's birthday is coming.

i am told to keep trying. do the impossible. solve the puzzle, open the portal. coupon your way to success, high yield savings, skip the coffee break. hustle harder, show up early, leave late. the problem is you, right. it's how you're living life. just keep going!

look forward to the cake.

you figured love was an invention of the movies and the poets and the romantics. in some ways you are a romantic, and certainly you loved your friends and music and the sunrise. but a love like that - the icon - it is as real as a unicorn or a mermaid. sure, maybe in the history of humankind there has been something similar, the way a unicorn was maybe a rhino, or a mermaid was a manatee. over the hands of a real story, the magic had been added in; a fiction. sometimes people seemed very happy, this was an observable fact. but you thought that the statistical likelihood that you could experience such a thing was just not very likely.

sometimes you wondered if you even could. your first "boyfriend" was a spring of a thing. sometimes at night you'd think he's very nice. i should feel more for him. so maybe love was like a birthday: despite all the marketing, it just was never going to be very exciting. you tried love again, of course, you're an optimist and this is what society has told you is best. it all felt sort of fragile and lonely. you loved people because you do love people; you find it easy to do so. you love them like coffee or your cat's soft fur. but when men walked through your life: you never felt that magic. never felt that thing that is the cursed princess's cure. moonstruck. while you do admittedly sometimes want a family - you never found yourself picturing a husband, couldn't understand the allure.

and then the moon split a star into a person. and you finally met her.

i know ai won't win because i broke my favorite mug.

the lines on the bottom say do not microwave but i have been microwaving it for 7 years now. i put it away wet and it must have slid off the counter. it broke into 6 pieces. my girlfriend says this is proof a ghost that lives in my house; particularly because it is a black mug with a ouija board design. i think it is proof that i should dry things before i put them away.

i had superglue from an abandoned art project. it took me four days. inspired by kintsugi, i painted the seams golden. it is my first time doing anything like this, and it was more error than trial. i do not have any fancy materials. there is a thick band of gold across the no, so it reads like a diphthong now, N\O. a part of it broke in an almost-perfect peace sign, oddly round.

it will not be watertight anymore, it cannot be a mug. i'll reuse it as a flower pot. it will go on my back porch. it is kind of ugly, really. i didn't do an excellent job.

i spent every minute of this repair thinking about how often i had used it. how many little rituals it has been a part of. it is a big mug, but not a soup mug, which i loathe. it is perfect for two hands to hold. i have used it almost daily, so often that many of the details have worn off. my own skin did that - almost a decade of shared warmth.

none of the times i have told this story has a single person said what do you mean you have a favorite mug. not a single person who has seen the resulting half-maimed piece has said why would you put that back together? not a single person has said this is a waste of time. not a single person has told me what's the point of this? if you want to find a new mug, just use AI.

somewhere someone is probably using AI to draw an image or write a poem, i know that is true. but i think it is also probably true that most of us are going to write and read and draw and dance just because. that the process of doing so is not for a goal or a specific benefit, but because for thousands of years now - when a piece of pottery breaks, we try to fix it. for thousands of years - long before capitalism had any say in it - humans have been doing things just for the experience of it. for the fuck of it. for the love of the game.

ai is not going to win because i cut my thumb while i did it. ai is not going to win because i kept thinking about my all friends who do ceramics, how they're always asking me if i want to join them for a lesson. i was thinking about every person i've ever shared a coffee with. i was thinking about who i was when i bought this mug (graduate student. could barely afford the off-season thing on clearance). i was thinking about how many hands have held this, how many people i've been since.

ai is not going to win because i didn't do a perfect job of it.

my sister-in-law and i recently had a conversation about how one of her coworkers uses Chat instead of reading self-help books. and we both looked at each other about that, the stunned silence of rabbits. "can you imagine?" we said. what's even the point to it.

did i tell you? i had this dream once. we as the earth decided that for one moment, we'd all go outside and sing. any note we wanted, any way. it could be a howl or a scream or a high c. the noise we made together - it was the most beautiful harmony. this, i thought. this is the natural state of things.

she is a princess and you are a dragon. she will be married tonight. do not keep standing outside of her room like that, go inside. go get her. that is what proper dragons do.

not that you have ever been a good or proper dragon. when you hatched out of your egg, your eggtooth was too smooth. the other dragons were rough with you, put little holes in your wings.

you were not bold. you were odd. you liked rippling water and the shine of chitin when bugs scuttle and of course the movement of the stars. those were all acceptable interests albeit maybe not traditional. perhaps you had inherited these through some great-great-uncle or something. certainly a dragon may be wise, or clever, if they are not bold.

yes, you have been a great deal of a puzzle to the other dragons. your body is smaller and rather more soft than it ought to be. so speed should have been yours, perhaps - your mother said it would be like fighting a shadow. if a dragon is not aggressive, it may instead be cruel, sly; a backstab. but alas your scales - so iridescent that they almost shine like the moon at night, a glow from within - you are not a shadow, you are a beacon like the flash of a knight's blade. your father has said at least you would make a fine egglayer, a nice mate to a good male. a dragon like you may still be a good mother perhaps; and that is a fine thing to be; although of course it would have been better if you'd been a trove-hoarder instead.

what a dragon must not be is kind.

you have watched her now for six moons. what a good and proper dragon would do is to go inside and to snatch her. a very proper dragon would have kidnapped her many times over, but you will be the delight of your brood to princess-snatch even at all. when you catch her in your jaws and bring her home, they will love you, then. they don't think you're capable of it, but you are, because you're a proper dragon. you can show them that. if you go in, now, right now.

you are rather too glossy to hide in the shadows, so instead you have learned how to appear flat and round, a puddle of light. (how your siblings would mock you! a dragon should be matte, to blend with the night). you dapple your flank with mud. you perch in odd angles atop of trees, scuttle like the bugs you love - hither, tither, frantic.

what you must not do is fly with your wings full-out. alight, you will be limned by the moon's corona. you will be a beacon. you must remember this when (not if) you snatch her.

____

you found her because of the lake. this lake in particular was your favorite - nestled deep in the woods, between two mountains. it is very quiet; there is nothing to horde there so no other dragon bothers you. a gentle waterfall spills over into a deep cove, and there are many mossy caves you've spent your afternoons napping in. while it is not proper for a dragon to prefer such things, you like to lay in rolling tenure just under the water. you have become excellent at holding your breath, can do it for hours. it is the easiest way to appear as a patch of sunlight.

she was not sunlight. she was the night's joy. the dark press of water. her face at first concealed by many diaphanous layers. her breathing quick and quiet.

she had pulled them back to drink from her water flask. and there she had been: a princess. your first very-real princess. right there, only the reach of a single talon from you. if you had simply lunged then, you would have been able to take her easily, in one single movement.

but you did not take her.

we need to deplatform ariana grande.

"don't comment on people's bodies!" i wouldn't usually do so, no. however, do not act like what is happening is a usual situation. also, do not gaslight me. i grew up in the 90s-00s. i remember when y'all would comment about how "fat" extremely-thin celebrities were. the push to not comment on people's bodies was, at least in part, to prevent eating disorders. also, this rule only seems to be followed when it is someone hyper-thin - every time a woman on the red carpet is even a little bloated, comments fly.

most importantly: she's a public figure. she is quite literally a model for swarovski. she is currently on tour. she regularly posts pictures of herself in ways that highlight her exposed bones. this is not a private citizen. she is making millions of dollars and is not in any way hiding what we all see to be true. it could also be argued that she is going so far as to highlight and sexualize her current figure.

her PR team - and there is one - obviously knows there is an issue here. they would have most likely released a statement if it was a health issue. they can do so without violating her privacy. so far she is quoted as saying she's "the healthiest" she's ever been. meanwhile her instagram content would have been flagged 5 years ago for being "thinspo."

research shows that exposure to ultra-thin body types does encourage self-image issues in young girls and women. to quote NEDA: "Of American elementary school girls who read magazines, 69% say that the pictures influence their concept of the ideal body shape. 47% say the pictures make them want to lose weight." I cannot even imagine what social media is doing on a much larger scale.

due to social pressures, you can "catch" an eating disorder. eating disorders are also the most deadly mental illness to have.

anecdotally, before i recovered, figures like her would have been extremely triggering for me. most people who have any passing experience with this content will agree: it is becoming harder to fight the internalization of those thoughts.

this is not because i dislike her. i have no opinion on her actually. it literally has nothing to do with her as a performer or as a person. however, there is a reason people fought to deplatform eugenia cooney: it is not because we seek to abandon that person, but instead because their behavior is genuinely concerning and they should not be given massive amounts of access to the public.

if she was self-harming or doing drugs (or god forbid shaving her head), companies would be too "concerned" with their public image to support her as a model. but she is just... too skinny, and it's okay to be skinny, because we as a society hate fatness.

as more and more celebrities follow in her wake, we are beginning to see hyper-thinness as being "normal" or "toned" where it is not normal nor is it toned - it is often extreme thinness.

and no, there is nothing wrong with being skinny. every time i comment on something related to this, some skinny person regales me with times they've been attacked by some kind of pro-fat mafia - as if that makes my point untrue; as if private suffering negates the existence of public research. eating disorders are real, and they are dangerous, and if you feel attacked because i am concerned about the normalization of sick bodies as role models - you need to go outside and talk to any fat person. what i am talking about is more important than your personal validation that your life was hard. if you're thin, you can just be thin, i am not stopping you nor am i judging you. i beg you, please think rationally about what i am actually saying. it is not a reflection on you; nor on your body; nor on your experience. this is about a popular performer displaying signs of an extremely dangerous mental illness.

she has done great work for charities. she's a great singer and actress. i do not know what she went through. my heart hurts for her and the pain she's clearly in. my understanding is that it is not uncommon for victims of sexual assault to develop an eating disorder. whatever is happening to her, i really, really hope she gets the help she so clearly needs.

in the meantime, though. she should not be on billboards. she should not be posting thinspo disguised as normal pictures. she should not be touting her health and wellness. she should not be held up as a paragon of sex and wealth.

she is categorically, visibly unwell.

unfortunately there are like 23 billion other things to worry about right now but just for the record: straight people who are trying to "rebrand" pride month as "national nuclear family month" are so fucking evil. positioning gay pride as antithetical to the concept of a family is evil. doing so in a way that is explicitly white nationalism is evil. acting like queer pride is the thing that destroys families is evil.

we are not just backsliding, we are back at the milquetoast assertation "love is love." for the record: when people ask us why we need pride this is literally fucking why. when other queer people ask me if we really need all the rainbow shit, this is why. when we make a fuss about so many shows not having any positive queer rep: this is why.

it has only been 11 years since it was nationally legal for gay people to get married. homophobia is still very much alive and well - and it is often the thing that ruins a family.

having physical anxiety even when you're actually having a good mental health day is so fucking stupid. mentally i'm like "i'm so grateful for my life and the beauty of this incredible world." however i drank about .002 too many dropulets of coffee so my body is currently home to 23 species of ants as well as 56 different adverbs. like sure i'm out here doing my little gay nature walk and my journaling and my grounding techniques and yet the entire time my skin has been attempting to become a rocketship and it has decided it must do this via stomach-based forbidden torture techniques