You know what would be gay as hell?

Ice cream sandwiches, in the back of a pickup truck, in a rainstorm, hitchhiking from Boston, Massachusetts to New Port, Oregon. Only one person is allowed to wear a button down. Rock, paper, scissors tournaments are involved in deciding which one. Two out of three. Let’s go.

You know what else, though –

A hypothetical space in which nobody had to be made invisible, or make themselves invisible, if they didn’t want to be.

A space where nobody ever had to tell anyone that they were valid because the concept of a lack of validity didn’t exist.

A space in which people approached one another with curiosity instead of expectations.

A space where nobody had to come out, because y’all had never made the assumption that existing in any particular fashion is a deviatation from the norm.

Purely hypothetically, I think this would be wonderful, and I kind of want to go and physically build places like this with my own bare hands.

I’m saying this because I am very good at making myself invisible. I didn’t even get to be that way on purpose. It’s just a habit. Being a pathological liar is a habit. So is not ever saying certain things out loud.

And sometimes it hurts.

So it would be fucking beautiful for nobody to ever have to feel that way. Not if I could help it.

I hope it’s a solid Wednesday and I love you.

• I can drink coffee again
• This week I’m learning about the birth of stars, and it’s lovely
• I found a fidget cube in my house and it’s keeping me sane
• Boots
• The immediate relief from the pain that is so constant that I don’t notice it anymore, when I found some aloe vera gel and put in on the evil daemon acne from hell
• Muffins. Banana walnut, specifically
• Suez canal shenanigans. The memes have been truly excellent.
• The existence of little people
• Neurodivergence in all of its forms, because the world would be a flat and colorless place if it weren’t for the people who were born to see things differently.
• German past participle words. Those are nifty
• Water pressure in the shower
• Walks with my dad
• House
• Radio broadcasts
• Spiders who don’t mind taking a short trip from the ceiling over my bed to the outdoors
• Beeswax candles
• Every person who has ever taken the time to make a text post about the way mental illness shows up in their life and makes things difficult, because that little bit of “ah, okay, this is a thing that happens to other people” is insanely reassuring
• The friend who doesn’t mind when I send dozens of memes at a time
• The friend who doesn’t judge when I talk about stealing plastic turtles from a gift shop, multiple years ago, in a different state
• My phone. This place to go and rest and watch TV or look at cute things that make me laugh at 3AM when everything seems bleak
• This space to write
• The sound of birds outside
• A place to rest in the sunlight
• Did I mention this fidget cube? It clicks and makes other satisfying noises
• Daffodills
• Cats

I was a small person

When my head got stuck in the back of a chair
Don’t know how, I guess I was talented.

I still remember the feeling
Fragile bones, soft flesh
Trapped between two metal bars
Screaming for what felt like hours
Because I couldn’t move
I couldn’t get out
And nobody was around
To hear me crying
For I can’t remember how long

Eventually, my father found me
Had to go get an electric drill
And take the screws out of the chair
Inches away from my face and ears
And then I was free, but still shaking

Ever since then I’ve hated the sensation
of not being able to move
Of being stuck in tight places
Anything wrapped around my neck
Pushing down on the back of my head

When I walk on cold days without a scarf
My neck feels vulnerable and fragile
When I drive in a car
I imagine unexpected collisions
At every intersection
I anticipate the snap
Then nothingness.

If past lives exist, I wonder if
Maybe, I wonder if
I was hung from a tree
I wonder, was I
French aristocracy

And sometimes I throw up
Just thinking about it.

And so, now
When I think about
Knees and necks
Uniforms and innocents
When I think about
Eight mins and 46 sec’s
When I think about
Running out of breath
It gets to me.

And eight fucking minutes & 46 sec’s
Was a long fucking time to kneel on his neck
It’s a long time to watch the light fade from his eyes
It’s too long not to move while an innocent dies

And it hurts.

And I remember the feeling, from back in the day
Fragile bones, baby flesh, a cold, red, metal cage
Could not fucking move. It was sort of absurd.
But then what would have happened if nobody heard

And the child whose breath comes in sharp little gasps and cries

Reaches out to the man who can’t breathe, while he dies

Breakable, fragile bodies in similar places

Empathy is stronger than race, gender, age based expectations

My fingers fly to my throat, and that’s probably why

It still gets me this much, thinking of how he died.

House. That’s all I’ve ever called you.

Buttercup was never long on imagination.

Patchwork white and crumbling shingles
Beside newer white siding
Keeping out the rain
Periodically interrupted
By a plethora of windows
Letting in the light

Uneven white paint on old, old walls
Sun through wide kitchen windows
Barn roof shingles on the grass after wind
Cobwebs in living room corners
Textured blue plastic porch floor
Expanse of deck, with a barbecue smell
On the warm, windy days.

French glass doors covered in
Smudges of dog nose prints
Only one door ever opens
Except at Christmas
When we bring in the tree.

Heavy iron pellet stove
Chipped red painted floor
Adjacent scratched cherry floorboards
Peeling white painted door frames
Mismatched light fixtures
(especially the round one in the middle of the ceiling that the youngest daughter unabashedly refers to as the ceiling titty)
Threadbare grey love seat, and crocheted blankets, for naps
Television, in the evenings
Doctor Who, Marvel
Shrek, The Matrix,
Scrooge, It’s A Wonderful Life.

Piano that nobody knows how to play
Globe on top of one bookshelf
(the one with the sliding glass door)
Old clock on the armoir with the blankets And the dusty games, the wooden chess set
With the green velvet lining
Losing horribly to cousins
Every time.

Dark, wood grainy kitchen cupboards
With the mismatched set of dishes
Thick white plates with pink rose pattern
Around the edges
Thick white counter top
Coffee maker, toaster, clutter, sink
With two taps, one with softer water
A small black handle, older than me.
Stainless steel pots in the corner cuppboard
The one with the hinged door that bends
My older sister crawled inside once
In the very beginning
Cranked linoleum kitchen floor
That sags in the middle
And looks like woven white and brown square tiles, arranged in a simple pattern
That repeats, over and over again

White Christmas lights over the windows
The BOSE radio on top of the microwave
The stack of CD’s
Listening to Live From Here
Coloring at the kitchen table
Baking cookies and cutting them out
Doing math homework
Prisms and knickknacks by the windows
Casting rainbows on the floor and walls
When there is bright sun in the morning

The door to the creepy stone basement with the cobwebs and the untrustworthy stairs
The door to the pantry
The mudroom
The room with the sink
And the room where the cats sleep
And the room to the rest of the house.

The steep wooden stairwell
We keep the door closed because of the cats.
Painted insane pink, because my mother
Let five year old me choose the color
The plaster lump in the stairway wall
That looks like a monster lives inside
Breathing slowly

Uneven wooden floorboards, rickety railing

Downstairs, again
The wooden statue of a heron
With its head high and its wings folded
By the windows
The rickety table
Doing homework
Under the roof
In the shade of the big pine tree
Strumming guitar on the porch steps
Cradling stray kittens in our arms
Sitting in Hammock chairs and reading

And always the unpaved road
Running north to south
Across from the driveway
Mailbox across the street
The unpaved road with the bend in it
And the creek, and the fields, and the woods
Endless walks, every day, forever
Not really ours, but as much part of home
As any of the rest of everything

The row of maple trees, the pines, the cherry tree, the tree house tree with white blossoms, the linden tree which we planted, the apple trees, the peach trees, and the gardens

And the views of blue hills
Fields and hedgerows, watertowers
The stillness and the quiet
That everyone noticed
Whenever they visited
They always noticed the quiet

And the fire pit that I build and dug with my own hands and a shovel, “all by myself”
(But not really, I had help)

And the stone covered grave
Where we buried my girl
My sweet, black lab, coonhound baby
The one they adopted
The summer the year I was born

And the one who is still with us
Who has terrible arthritis
But still loves to go for walks

And all of the cats, so many, over the years.

I don’t want to leave this place.
I don’t want any of this to ever change.
I don’t want to lose this, I don’t want to have to give it up.

But mostly, I want to remember.
So I make it into words.

Happy Sunday.

cats, the peepers in the hollow, the storm coming over the valley, daffodils opening, boots, mud, driving with the windows down, songs from that old mix tape from when I was fifteen, the MCU, getting caught outside when it’s raining, noodles, home, pants that fit, perspective, water & candles when the power goes out, crocuses, three days of t-shirt weather, an entire day of eating popcorn and watching anime, the option to cry when I need to, my folks, my little sister’s stick & poke tattoo, dogs, a place to sleep, the handful of safe things in this world that is very hard to live in and be a part of.

Things that I want to be:

Grounded, instead of trembling
Competent, instead of flying by the seat of my pants all the time.
More skilled at regulating my feelings, and infinitely more graceful when communicating about them
Connected, instead of attached
Confident, instead of hot and bothered Courageous, instead of frozen
Wise, instead of perpetually confused
Unfuckwithable, instead of delicate
Laughing uproarious, instead of offended
Discerning, instead of judgemental
Capable, instead of fumbling
Comfortable in my own skin
Content, instead of always in pain
Chill, instead of jealous
Patient, instead of restless
Present, instead of distracted
Conscientious, instead of prejudiced
Honest, instead of pathologically not

Soft and warm, instead of carrying this impossible awkwardness that feels like the wall of a glass honey jar between me and the rest of the world

I’m trying to learn how to love imperfect people, because if I don’t I will never know love. And I’ll never be safe in my own skin, if I don’t learn how to get by with the having of the faults.

It’s easy to say I love you anyway to everyone but myself. I’m trying so hard to learn, but it’s difficult.

I love you in spite of all of the things that are uncomfy. Perhaps even because of them.

I can give you this one gift when I can’t give very much of anything else. It isn’t much, but it’s all that I have.

I hope it’s a very good Thursday.

This one is going to be a doozy.

To the best of my understanding at this time, eight people were murdered in Atlanta, Georgia, last Tuesday. Seven of them were women, and six of them were Asian women. If I’m wrong about this, I’ll try to put out corrections in a future post.

Hello, friend. I need a moment to breathe.

I want to take a moment to think about death. To think about what that means. To think about the absence of life.

And then I want to take a moment to think about dying. About the last moments of a life. About how most of us want to go out – safe, surrounded by loved ones, or nuzzled one last time by a familiar snout of a cat or a dog, or sleeping.

I want to take the moment and think about what it must be like for the last moments of a life to be filled with confusion, shock, fear, pain, horror. The last moments of the first person perspective experience of this world, spent like this.

I want to take a moment to think about what it must feel like to get up in the morning and not know that this was going to be your last day alive.

Grief. I want to talk about grief.

I want to think about that phone call. The first moment you hear that news. The immediate need to find somewhere to sit down. The tears. The attempt to remember the last time you spoke with them.

Think about times when we’ve all lived through the rest of that day, after hearing the news. And that week, and that month, and that year.

I don’t know what it’s like to loose someone like this. Not in this specifically horrible way. And I don’t mind saying that I hope I never know this pain. I hope I never inflict this pain on others. I would not wish this on anyone.

I have met death in other ways. I’ve lost creatures and people whom I knew or loved in violent unexpected ways, and long, drawn out, and tired ways. But it was never like this.

My heart goes out to the people in the lives of these eight people who were killed.

As for the person who did this – I felt shaken when I realized that he is the same age as me. Maybe even younger.

We talked about him in philosophy class, yesterday. One classmate says he ought to be tortured, slowly, for the rest of his days, because death is too good for him. One classmate says he does deserve to die.

I would rather not kill anyone at all, actually. I don’t know that it would make any difference. Those eight people would still be gone. And I don’t want to deprive him of all of the time he could spend alive in the knowledge of what he has done. All those sleepless nights. Honestly, I don’t want him to deprive of the pain of remorse.

That felt cold. I’m not often cold, but sometimes I can be.

That’s enough for right now.

I think this individual is one manifestation of a problem that runs deep and very wide and right now it’s growing. I’m specifically referring to rise in hate crimes directed towards Asian folks since the beginning of the pandemic, because… well. People wanted somebody to blame for their problems, a scapegoat for all of the hurt. And it’s wrong. It’s exactly what happened to Jewish folk in Germany. And look what happened then.

It makes sense to look for a reason to explain why the world hurts so much. I get it. I understand the impulse. But please, not like this. Please don’t make it the fault of people who seem different on the outside. Please. There’s so much diversity among us, within us, between us, and it’s a beautiful thing. We don’t have to be afraid of it. We don’t have to shove the others to the edges, like they’re somehow less. Because they’re not. Nobody is.

Maybe there’s something that all of us can do to keep things like this from happening. Maybe. I don’t know.

Because… yeah.

I need to breathe.

I want to think about what it means to a person to know that they are especially at risk. And to never feel truly safe, anywhere. I want to think about what it means for many different people who share a similar burden to speak up and say, “we don’t feel safe,” and for nobody to listen. Until it was too fucking late, for some of them.

When a person or a group of people is telling you that they’re being targeted, that they’re in danger and that they need help…

Fucking listen.

The Chinese food place in town burned down at the beginning of the pandemic. There’s another place a little bit south of us, and one near the college that I’m currently attending. I want to go to them and give them my patronage. I don’t know how they’re faring in this place and during this time, but I want them to still be here and be doing okay once we get through all of this. I’ve been peripherally aware of this since a friend invited me to do something similar at the very beginning of all of this, a year ago. I haven’t been very good about doing this, but right now seems like a good time.

It seems like a small thing, but I think it matters. This is something which I can do, even in the middle of everything. Because sometimes engaging with community in a bunch of little ways on a very local level is the best that anyone can do, especially during the hard times.

These are hard times. I’m beginning to wonder if this is just how the world is, if my expectations of ease are naive. If that is the case, I think I’m going to need a thicker skin.

Writing helps me, like it always does.

Thank you for reading. I hope you’re alright, today.

Every once in a while I sit down and write down things which, to me, are some combination of satisfying or funny or comforting or grounding or lovely or beautiful and strange.

I need to do this. I think it pulls everything back into balance. When I leave my brain to its own devices, it will spend too much time in the dark.

Also these things are wonderful and deserve to be noticed, in their own right. I am surrounded by these things, all the time. They’re right fucking there. What kind of person would I be if I couldn’t see them?

Maybe you can see them, too.

Here are some good things:

• really good storytelling
• affectionate cats
• also, less affectionate cats who need a little time to feel comfortable
• cats who are absolutely terrible
• shoes that fit
• every crocheted blanket anywhere
• radio stations with long stretches of uninterrupted familiar songs
• sharpened pencils and pens that have enough ink in them
• filters available on smart phone cameras which make pictures look so much prettier
• my voice. singing in the car, alone, badly, to keep the darkness away and keep me from feeling nauseous
• the German poem which I read in its entirety this week
• interesting astronomy observations
• (Parallax is fucking fascinating. So are the stars and all the ways we learn things about them.)
• long rambling talks about Ethics
• Vincent van Gogh
• Skepticism
• The friend who helped me build a schedule for this semester which is actually working beautifully
• The Last Podcast on the Left
• all this time I have before my term papers are due
• the birds, who are coming back
• whoever set me on the path of looking for nuance and presupposing complexity and thinking outside of the boxes and outside of binaries. Thank you.
• the book that taught me that it’s not what things seem like, it’s what things are like. (A Wrinkle in Time)
• whoever taught me how to listen.
• whoever set me on the path of reflection; (Hello!!)
• the professor who told me that there’s hope for a growing acceptance of different kinds of people, because he’s seen it grow so much in just the space of one lifetime
• the recent aspiration to pack my bags and head south and become a sort of homeless boondocking nomad. This has actually been very fun to think about.
• online learning.
• the capacity to pause or rewatch lectures and walk away from them when I get tired, or if I need to write something down
• the capacity to watch lectures on 1.5x playback speed, because it helps me focus
• learning from my bed, my couch, my place at the kitchen table
• memes and funny posts that make me laugh inside. I have officially hacked my Instagram algorithm and now this is it, that is all there is. Just memes
• and sometimes pictures of the night sky from very dark places.
• the first time I was able to drink coffee in several weeks
• boxer shorts
• cool glasses of water
• the MCU
• Friends
• You.

I hope it’s a solid Wednesday.

Small things