“It’s over, isn’t it? Why can’t I move on?” Pearl.
“No it doesn't matter, yeah. It doesn't matter, 'cause nothing lasts forever. 'Cause nothing lasts forever.” Diana Ross
Sometimes I feel too hard. I feel my emotions powerfully and suddenly and intensely. And sometimes it’s the flash flood of sadness that comes from nowhere and leaves just as suddenly, and other times it’s a white hot anger, blooming hot and crimson in my chest. Gritting my teeth. Almost.
It’s the way I make friends so easy, the way I love my friends so easy, the way I make lifelong bonds in the space of a few months.
Most of all it’s the way I love. Like John Green said: slowly, and then all at once. It’s thinking about a boy’s face and imagining our lives together and sharing sweaters and shoes.
The smallest inkling of an interest takes root in my heart, burrowing deep into the ventricles and taking a deep drink. Its branches wind their way up into my mind and its leaves are fixations and in the spring it flowers with obsession. I find myself turning you over and over in my mind.
You’re my best friend. I’m coming out to you in 8th grade—the second person I ever told directly. You’re supportive because in just a few months I’ll be tasting you on the floor of your living room, and years after that we’ll be swapping nudes. One day we’ll hurt each other so badly that the stink of it will never leave our bond.
But between all those chapters are interludes and asides. Ideation. I’m wondering about your body, I’m wanting to talk to you more, I’m getting talked into dangerous adventures and risks just for the chance to share more moments with you.
It ends one day but it doesn’t really. Our sapling rots away in my heart, but rotting isn’t annihilation—just a slow, slow crumbling. The stink doesn’t leave.
Now you’re someone else. Now you’re straight. We’re in high school and we’re close friends. We confide things in each other we’ve never told anyone else. People think you’re my boyfriend because we’re so close. You cross the sea for the military and I stay in our hometown.
The drying roots inside me shape into “what ifs.”
Again, you’re someone else. For now, you’re two someones in two different times. I work with both of you. I feel for both of you. You’ll both see me as that funny, gay coworker, with some expertise. Smart. But not beautiful, and not lovable, and not yours.
I stay up thinking of being yours. I listen to Igor and Lauryn Hill and Sza on loop for an entire summer thinking of being yours.
Now your smile is bigger because you’re a different person. This time an enigma. A dancer and a nervous wreck and a party animal and my age and younger at heart. As always, the feelings are intense. The weed inside me takes root so fucking firmly, especially when I look at you with altered eyes.
But it’s dishonest to address you, as if this is something intentional you’ve done. Really you’re my brain. The relationships and bonds I’ve had with these young men—especially the ones that don’t feel the same way—are mental constructions. Like any narrative, they’re a fiction; but like trauma, they’re painfully, painfully real to me.
When the weed wraps around my mind it turns everything into you. First it’s daydreams of us being together, then it’s daydreams of us breaking up, daydreams of my confession to you, daydreams of you accepting me, daydreams of you rejecting me. I turn the endless scenarios in my mind and I never quite find the answer.
You’re me. You “love” him because he can’t love you back. He draws you because of the intoxicating feeling of living on the knife’s edge—between desire and rejection.
Precarity is comfortable because it elongates time. The anxiety of a slow moving disaster combines with the safety of just barely holding on. That’s what this faux love means to me.
I feel too hard. I get carried away. And worst of all, the smallest slight becomes a condemnation of my very self. And even when I’ve had men in my bed, hands on my body, lips on mine: they’re not you, and they are diminished in turn for that crime.
Recently, I haven’t been feeling much at all. The flash flood despair I touched on earlier has become a full tilt tsunami, drowning everything else. Still, there are echoes of longing for what was, for the feeling of wanting.
I suppose I’ll always be in love with you (and you and you). My mind loves the knife’s edge. Euphoria and precarity. Me and you. And you. And you. And you. And I.
“I was swept away, I was swept away. Swept away, I was swept away with you. Swept away, I was swept away. Swept away, I was swept away with you.” Diana Ross