I don’t know why I’m frightened. I know my way around here – the cardboard trees, finger painted seas, the aforementioned enlightening and storms of overdosed pleas.
The early morning slurry and late evening scares. I’ve spent dawns trying to ignore fantasy and dusks painting new realities. Reassuring myself with touching toes and successful stranger conversations. I’m coming home to stability wanting to stretch to feel my silenced being.
This world has waited long enough, it begs me to come home and break my thirsting fast. Can I stop my hand from shaking? Can I run away and expect my things to stay? Maybe they watch over my things expecting me to return with new things, tools or bangs.
Women who run like the wolves and stretch their chest to escape moonlight tides or banging tools. I’ve felt eaten by emotion, magic in the making, a life I’ve dreamed of creating. Has there ever been a moment when I stopped thinking of goodbye?
Maybe now it will be as if I never knew goodbye. The handshake can be firm. The familiar blue of the sea found in similar hue of our morning sky. My legs can cross without feeling constricting,
My arms can hold without convincing, my eyes can speak things without stating meaning.
You can me fly without any fear of my weight failing, watch me cry without fear of my joy weaning, watch me fall and cry and snort and laugh. Maybe succumbing is just practice for numbing that running feeling.
I’ve tried to look beyond the clouds, up and down, and all I’ve learned is that I don’t know clouds at all. I’ve rushed love, when tough or neatly bound, and all I’ve learned is that I don’t know love in it’s all.
I will buy the nice blender just to continue twisting our tongues and words together. I will work the mean thoughts apart just to buy more time forever.
Help me! There’s no comprehending just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes and the lips you can get;
And still feel so alone in this generational class,
And still feel related in past life.
I’m not a hit and run driver. I’m not sure of being hit by red lights, running past green lights and feeling safe in the driver seat.
Help – I held the deer right in its conscious lights, detected its emotion, its nativity reminding me of you. Maybe you should drive, I’ll be the deer. Be totally smacked with love by you, picked up by you, taken care by you. I can tell stories of how I could run, it the disillusion of finger paintings and crafts.
Smell the dust of what I left. Lay my head. Recite echos of old insane melting the dark crevices of flesh brain. Pick apart the same ending from dead meaning. Same meaning to the dead end. Melting rain and embrace your never-end always going.
Pre-meditated rehearsals of competency and my cat is scratching the gray walls like he’s found the princess blue beneath, the mint that once woken me. Stare into the lighter part of shadows and expect figures to come running after me.
Find that under layers of paint, I’m made of projections. About thirty percent of those are white-gripped etchings of shit pre-teen poetry I wrote not expecting to be seen, except by my mother.
I could’ve been just thirteen.
Maybe twelve.
Smash my feet between the recycled mattress and painted yellow pine.
In another world, I’m my own daughter. I don’t even recognize her. If I were her, I wouldn’t be me. Maybe similar tragedies. Sparkles and hurricanes. Smoke weed because it pisses his mom off but it’s fine now. We learned better. Punch the door behind me, when he was looking at me, still a few inches shorter than me. Still young, like now. Flapping hair slapping on the window, creased ponytail on the come down. Minor drunkenness, not the kind I learned. My sister cried because she didn’t recognize me. I test the drywall, and ask how to cry again?
To be soft and defined again?
You cracked your lips just to feel alone again?
Tarnish my memory with provocativeness. More makeup, a push-up and a sports and a pinch and a cinch. Bounce and move, tumble and run. Gossip and text and smack, they’re having sex. Distaste for lunch. The mirror looks different. Streaking away from headlights on an abandoned road, dark of course. Secret footage, of course. There’s an innate swollen energy, a foreign body chewing on my inside. I ran, because it’s not the kind that’s learned. We kind of just do. I wear silver.
I don’t know what to do with my hands anymore. My feet feel too free. Wiggled toes to find a grip on the leather curved seat. See my digits and their stick on the dashboard glass plastic. Comfort is temporary, it’s all overcoming. Eat it to release.
I want to change. I want to grow. It’s impossible not to question what I know, the things I want but never fully get, seek attention until it’s critical. I lose myself and find her when I finally let ego go. A different sort of glow coming from the shadows when hiding below.
What if it was all my fault?
What if I drove you to it?
I’m guilty, aren’t you?
I look so much like my mother.
I absorb people’s hardness. I wake up greasy. I’m not nice to myself, the plush femininity my soul finds easy to give to mouths with rotten breath. The smoothness of innocence, all that I have learned and figuring out what’s left. I forget to breathe when I run. It’s never been this easy before.
Grind my mouth bones for hours, swallowing their dust. Gather the dust and fold them into a pretty stomach box.
Southerners know the smell of rain like the cedar they splinted with a kindergarten foot. My bedroom drywall that I crushed in my teens. Between my white four corners, I found a perching window for my bent legs to find held. When I jump, I crash through the branches just to land among the roots of my childhood backyard tree.
In the way the morning sky reflects on water, I lay amongst my disposition to find the moon highlights my smile. Darkness surrounds me; light always finds me. When it rains, her smile captures the tears from the sky. She swallows them whole and her pores melt away heaven’s pollution in the clear, green mass. One day, I will become the soil; reflect the darkness of the old splintered cedar and heirloom my brightness to the remaining. So many elements in this world for us to experience and then set free.
I’d pick a story to picture for myself at night, most of the time manifesting an adulthood of living alright. Going to the grocery store or putting off dirty laundry while my REM eyes roll in circles left to right. My hair sprawled between four pillows, never comfortable enough to complete the holes in the tight fibers making up my cheap sheets. Staring at the ceiling fan, hoping it falls down for a story about overcoming the maybes from a might. I pictured this life so much that living now is sleeping between silent daydreams and being awake for most the night.
I want to lay in the warm rain to watch the nightmarish shadows thin to an equal gray. Now that I’m older, I can turn her blemished, teenage chin to the other shoulder. Still laying amongst southeast trees, I found years later that the grass where I laid left a bed in your shape. I now wake up in my mass of pillows wondering why my dreams are better when I’m awake, staring through your eyes deciphering your cultivating grace.
My bedroom was a bunch of colors. They started as yellow, and now they’re gray. I moved into this new place where the walls are white. Encountering people who grew up on different advice, the boys who aren’t nice. My dad hated recitals but loved when my front-middle spot was in the light. The addictive nostalgia I find in center-stage, looking for my dad in the priority seating but totally out of my sight. I picked people beyond the spotlight, waiting in the shadows to lure me with monochrome flowers and an after-show soliloquy fight. I love my dad, men who provide soft rain turning into sunlight.
Sometimes I’m convinced that he waits for the sun to rise just so he could hand it to me. I could wrap my arms around the warmth and melt in the staring sweetness, completing the holes between his sheet fibers. It’s easy to become dizzy from his brightness, even his silver chain flickers in the darkness. His grace keeps me from fighting gravity; I find myself floating towards him closer than my allowing physicality. My dirty shirt smells like cologne and his kindness and my spirituality. I find this to be the easiest difficulty: allowing myself a life full of emotional luxury. I whispered a sweet nothing from across the room while he was already smiling at me.
As much as he is the sunshine, I crave the rain. Jumping in oceans just to find his fingers already reaching for my waist. I sense my younger self wanting to drink his pouring love until my drunken teenage addictions wane. I wish summer could end sooner just so I could admire the breath he sighs in full winter clarity. I found that my love grows among the roots of the tree in the place where it never snows. He whispers sweet nothing in his sleep, and I get sleepy goosebumps from the glow of his sincerity. His empty cup sits next to the one completely filled. I fell asleep, so I spill mine to make his half empty. Our parent’s advice stem from neighboring trees.
Emotions reveal themselves to us in the way devoted artists place their destiny’s work against a glass picture frame. I’ll sit to watch his video game, comment things just to hear how his laugh sounds when I hide myself behind a provocative screen name. All of my dreams are movies that he has already seen. We argue about what we’re going to wear on Halloween. I know I’m in Heaven, because hands make Hell seem cold and life alone seem Purgatory. Hell froze over in the three days I spent away. I drifted through people getting off the plane just so my world can begin again after the cold delay. There’s a piece of me melted on the left side of his neck, and I smelled his cologne and his kindness and whispered sweet nothings like ‘i wrote so much; this is the best day.’
I’ve lost so many free days to simple growing pains; time has become a delicacy. My body is older and alcohol is poison and balancing emotions becomes my winning game and legacy. My aching feet are a sign of a relentless spirit – well, I fell in the parking garage doing a one-handed cartwheel. I tell time to slow down while I stand to watch the ticker match twelve. I mark my calendar by the days where time stood still, and by the sunrises spent looking out from someone else’s, his, windowsill.
In the staring whiteness, I assume these past emotions as something to let free. Accepting my boyish treat in this world as a treaty from the universe regarding the girl who once laid on the ground burning her eyes, wondering when her time will be. I wonder about the last time we existed as just friends, now whispering sweet nothing in between sweet everything for everyone to notice and believe. When I jump and allow life to be, I hope to fall through the branches in southeast trees. Always only a few minutes away from me: in a house, by a car, pull me away from the inside of the street, in the apartment a block away from 24th Street. Two planets maintaining magnetizing gravity, illuminating each other in shared brightness for all darkness to see.
When you’re young, you can easily recall where you first learned something. Now that I’m older, there are some things I wish I could forget.
When I was little, I had a list of people I prayed for every night. I would run through it, mention world peace, and blanket statement friends and family if not already covered. I did the father, son, and Holy Spirit three times. Said amen three times. Said I loved him, and I hoped he forgave me maybe once. That was on me, I guess.
He punched the wall behind me. Somehow I felt always stronger, even when I acted weak. I ran into the bathroom and locked myself within. I imagine his dad patching up his son’s wooden bruise that night, thinking about how he hoped better for his own daughter.
He loved my body. The way I could slump into a seat and disappear. Sometimes, I feel like I’m still tucked away between impounded feathers and thick brown strands of hair. When you find a penny in the couch, do you throw it away or put it in a jar? Donate a dirty dime to penance and act as though your hands are clean.
We rode to Louisiana in a top-down Porsche and I thought about flying away, landing in the brown bayou. My mom makes the best gumbo when come running for her comfort. No matter the season, she makes me feel better.
He drove the same car my dad does, only black. When I gave him love, he would lose it and beg to find it in the backseat. I sat in the passenger seat, happily willing to let him steer.
When God made Eve using Adam’s rib, did he intend on men to lose themselves constantly and find primal comfort in my female shape? I make eye contact for too long, and I realize they wants to tear me apart until I’m in loose limbs.
They talk through sharp teeth, using soft words like “slow burn” and “sexy” to get to know the parts of myself that I reveal alone in pity. If people confess their sins when they feel guilty, why has no man begged for my mercy?
I’m not sure why when I feel overwhelmed by masculinity, I question God and his plan for me. I ask why he gave his only son instead of a girl, realizing that our existence in outlined by convincing the human world his mother is not a whore. Maybe I ask should ask her what was I made for. If not to be loved, then maybe to be worshipped.
Words from a woman, so controversial it seems. Not one word from a woman in any religious text, and maybe that’s why they are easier for me to trust. Hide from male pride until they recognize my femininity as divinity.
Maybe god is a woman. I was taught to forgive men easily. We would sit in a pew, during silent arguments, and hold hands for Our Father. He never forgave me too easily, even when I asked. I looked at the priest who knew all of our sins, and his eyes told me that it would be over soon. I prayed the rosary as penance, and asked Mary if she loved me too.
She never told me, but I always knew.
Roses follow women, the same way men do.
He punched the wall behind me. I imagine his dad patching up his son’s wooden bruise, thinking about how his son would become a martyr for his own failed lessons.
I only want to leave when I’m comfortable. What does that say about me? I get in my bed and imagine my life better overseas. I leave my peace in a room with two queens thinking that my bed is a better place to sleep.
I found familiarity in a stranger today. I wondered if the area was safe and she interrupted my thought to say that this was her favorite place. They have one back in Austin, but I guess I wanted to see what the difference would be. The difference is a girl who doesn’t know me yet looks like someone I might have seen. I bet she wore ribbons in her hair. I wear them still. Maybe that’s the thing that ties us together.
I met a few more people today. I rode in a car with a stranger and turned out okay. I find that I’ll find my way when I push myself to resolve future problems today. Get that thinking shit out of the way so I can stare blankly and not be filled with constant dismay. I stood outside of a Walgreens and this guy told me he liked my headphones and if I was gay. He didn’t say that exactly, but I knew if I laughed too hard or smiled too big he could either take me or make my day. He skated off, (of course he did) and my ride arrived asking for my name.
He looked back at me. I only know because I was waiting to see if he was looking at me like a feen. Dirty boys are kind of like my nicotine. Dirty like slept in sheets or stomping cigarettes out on the street. Fingerprints left on an almost empty cologne bottle and hugs that feel like a stolen heartbeat. We can share clothes and toothbrushes and stare at the same screen. Feel the same depressions and raise each other up like a late sunrise in the spring. Just a little fling, make myself a bit dirty until I think it’s time I get clean.
What does that say about me?
I like the way clothes feel on me when I’m clean. Swimming in bubbles, my namesake. It’s like no one has seen me naked and my car muffles the sound of my scream. It’s like no one has seen me at my worst and I’m worthy of bigger dreams. I’ll scape my skin dry and slather myself in anti-aging cream.
I want things so opposite of me.
I just hope that we can all get along. I look over my shoulder cause I hear her singing my favorite song. Scream at the same sun asking some god if he has a place for my mom. If god was a girl, she would remind me of where I came from. It’s not like I forget anyway. It follows me like a shadow, because I only notice it when the sun is too bright and I turn around.
Just because I can, I buy a teddy bear and say it’s to socialize my katze. I only know a single Germans phrase, and I repeat it over when I get really tipsy. I’ve only been to Germany once. I never left, and now I only listen to hard techno when I get a little boozy. My mind goes crazy when my body is lazy. Easy rhyme, falls off the tongue reasonably like clothes to a sleazy. I forget that my mind and body are a single entity responding through millions of filled or occupied capacities.
Nothing bad is going to happen to me. It’s all in good time. Something bad is going to happen to me, but it’ll end up fine. One day, I’ll respect my time. I get scared when I realize everything is safe. I’m in a perfectly fine place, most of the time. When I rest my head, I think about how privileged I am to be paranoid about losing my peace when the only thing that leaves me is time and that guy who wanted to look at me twice – one first and last for the last time.
When I get scared on the plane, I picture my neighbor being you. I prop my shoes on the bag you bought me when I turned twenty two.
The media is fucked up for selling me this idea of being okay before letting someone play with your emotions. I want to boundlessly skip in the field of someone else’s mind, let them push me on the swings for me to fall into and follow through with abnormal motions of attraction. Spreading lies like that across social media and shit as if you’re the Buddha of being the babygirl, when I haven’t found a match, makes me believe that I’m not okay. That the universe rewards false sense self-healing with a … man. I look around the playground and hope that the old boys will stay because if they leave that means the influencer girls consider me to not be okay and do tenfold more healing just to say on another day that I’m in fact not gay. Whose place is it to determine my relationship status based on my psychological status. The fact is you lack the authority to assume my aura’s attractiveness. I believe life is a journey of constant healing from past mistakes and accepting your future as fate and understanding that mistakes aren’t real unless they create pain. The idea that a partner will come when I’m perfectly perfect is imperfect because i wouldn’t want a partner who wanted me at my perfection. I still wake up and add to my to do’s in case the next morning I forget to be the better image of my reflection. If that’s the case, my heart will never be enough and they’re always in advantage to take advantage of my heart. In my divinity, I’ll only know love and until then I’ll be enough for myself to judge.
I think it happens when you are just okay, not the best or worse on a given day but just fine enough to be normal enough to give enough of a chance on destiny’s date. Not with a guy who calls you strong because he values strength and knows your weaknesses better than your deepest passions. I’ve been thinking about strength lately. Let me be weak and have the privilege to find strength in love, as it was meant to be, as if there aren’t multiple forms of love in a relationship. Maybe I love myself too much for a funny man to be confident he can match it. Maybe they get jealous of how i sit on my couch without grace and I tell group stories about how a strong woman acts. They invented the definition of strength, so they know when you’re being it or not. I’m tired of being strong, so I’ll be gentle. At least to myself and others. Emotions have grown capital, the corporations are mining humans for their gold. Let it be your own, and evaluate what things you classify as reward.
I’m just over it is all. It seems like life has become a monopoly and romantic love is an asset reserved for the emotionally wealthy. It’s weird because I don’t necessarily think about a relationship, but I do think about my emotional wealth and how it can be perceived as a threat. Funny thought.
In the most recent episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the queens were presented with a main stage challenge of holding a panel discussion about men. I sort of found it robust, people (mostly male identifying people) dressed in a feminine illusion discussing toxic masculinity.
The Gloria’s explain that racism and sexism are intertwined and both issues can’t be uprooted without the healing of the other. They’re engrained between the black and white lines we base our legislative proceedings on, highlighted in the new contracts from employers that make inclusivity a priority, and are rehearsed by politicians trying to snag the minority votes that distinguish the general population from white men. In regard to the relationship of toxic masculinity and empowered femininity, black women are more easy aware of bullshit in one form, and are able to identify it again in a different experience or event. Gay men and Trans women are more easily aware of bullshit in one form, and are able to identify it again in a different context. The issue is the bullshit, not the people experiencing it or speaking on it, unless it is socially determined that you have and will never experience such a thing because your birth rite contributes to the bullshit. It’s just the facts.
According to a Google search, “The woman performs the role of wife, partner, organizer, administrator, director, re-creator, disburser, economist, mother, disciplinarian, teacher, health officer, artist and queen in the family at the same time. Apart from it, women play a key role in the socio-economic development of the society.” I mean, this literally took one second and my first question is why are women defined by Google, the other gender, and the state government, by their fertility? Before being an administrator, artist, or economist, you’re telling me that my purpose is to be a mother, wife, and partner first? In this context, women aren’t even considered to be creators but instead re-creators of (let me guess) male creations? If we’re stemming our purpose based on reproductivity, wouldn’t women be considered the hosts of the most valuable creation? This is an overwritten argument that requires more attention. I’ve allowed the space here for it, because the current state legislature ran out of it.
Jules in a conversation with her therapist explains that she wants to get off her hormones because of the intensified gaze between both (and other) sexes. The men stare longer, and the women stare deeper, wanting to study the parts of her that make her more qualified to distract the male gaze from themselves. I like this plotline in Euphoria, because women are often held against each other like pageant contestants for male judges to look at and competitors to compare themselves to. Cassie manipulates this gaze that Jules speaks of by stealing her best friend’s appearance to win Nate’s affection more, when Maddy was the only one who understood his attraction to her to be rooted in trauma-induced narcissism and masculine dominance. Maddy also understands Cassie’s trauma-induced insecurity and need to use feminine submission to receive validation. He doesn’t like Cassie because of how easy the chase was, but he likes Cassie because the psychotic spiral to replicate femininity in a way that he historically supported boosts his ego. She doesn’t like Nate because of how hard he was to get- that would make his abusive language and behavior a reward- but because she correlates his attraction as validation. Pageant Princess Maddy understands the gazes- the one that comes from both spectrums.
I am a woman, and I don’t often think about my position until it’s questioned or manipulated. I would love to share all of the bullshit I have heard trying to pave my way through work opportunities independently, yet I fear retribution this very day for it. Phrases that are etched into my brain, such as “Women don’t know how to ask for raises” (gaslighting) and “This job is homework for marrying a man in the same profession” (narcissism) are simply examples of said bullshit. I thought, since I live in Austin, it wouldn’t be as black and white as back home where men wear blue collars and women have done their homework to stay at home with the kids. Instead, it is behind a computer screen through Teams calls, or worse, in his new house on Lake Travis sipping wine and getting a tour of his racecar garage. Sexism in the workplace is very real and valid, and I shouldn’t have to dump my face in ice water to feel confident enough to speak up for myself during meetings where I have to defend my value.
This may be controversial, but I think back to my psychology classes when discussing minorities. I’m in a unique position of experiencing high privilege being white and high disrespect being woman, and I often don’t know the routes to overcome conversations that require me to announce my obvious identities to avoid any assumed biases that my accent may carry. At necessary times, my womanhood was strung as a complementary adjective. At the worst times, I treated my femininity as such.
I’ve always been a complex paradigm of hyper-feminine and tomboy. Practicing winged liner as if the post-pubescent boys on the field may notice it instead of my thigh-cutting varsity cheerleading mini skirt. Wearing a real bra during practices so no one would notice my obvious developmental delay in growth (I’m still waiting). Purchasing a longboard and sometimes riding it home from school in checkered vans and big t-shirts. Talking to dudes about UFC and how I was raised falling asleep to fight nights at my dad’s friend’s house and Bruce Buffer’s voice. Being cool enough for the guys to be a friend and taking care of myself enough – catching them off guard sometimes – so that foundational chemistry may turn me into some dream girl who straddles many images. Look I washed and folded your clothes! Yeah, I don’t mind hanging with your friends tonight… they like me right? Look at me, I put makeup on today! My favorite beer is Michelob or Dos Equis. This is the male gaze Jules talks about, it’s the behavior Cassie portrays, and it was the male-aligned femininity confused my identity as an empowered woman.
An unevolved woman finds value through male validation. An unevolved woman finds value through female validation. What’s really sexy and attractive is being your own validation. Picking out clothes that remind you of yourself. Allowing your coworkers to see the person behind the corporate signature. Being an ally to others and yourself. Being nurturing, but being understanding that it’s not your position to be a mother to others. Buying flowers, wearing denim, being strong, and speaking up even if your face is dripping wet from ice water. Looking people in their eyes when they’re telling you a story you connect with. Doing things … while you’re bleeding! Writing notes to yourself and romanticizing your masculine handwriting. Seeing the paycheck come in and realizing that women (specifically, this one) knows how to ask for raises. Not marrying a lawyer just because you did your homework, or becoming the lawyer, or not marrying at all. Not hanging out with people you’re uncomfortable with. Drinking beer because you like beer and also tequila and white wine. All that matters is that my clothes are cleaned, my bills are paid, my cat is cared for, and my goals are being met without the validation from other genders. Owning your womanhood is the most validating thing you can do for yourself, and I think the women are catching onto this. Let’s see how long it takes the men.
I feel more supported by the women in my life now rather compared to when we were lining up on the football field fighting for a look from number whatever, eagerly arriving to dance practice early to see what role you may have landed in the winter recital, or in between competitive conversations with orientation friends who came to college with titles hanging from their Kendra Scott earrings. Not that those were necessarily bad experiences, but we have to understand that sexism and toxic femininity are institutionalized. When we become cognitively aware of social cues in our development, we are subject to following the status quo. What they don’t tell you is that it is equally as dangerous to our development when we become cognitively unaware to disrespect.
The Champagne Soapbox 