nephrology2

[nephrology2]

maybe in the next life

once in a room full of people, someone suggested a game

they wanted everyone to go around and say one thing you liked about someone’s physical appearance

they all had such nice things to say about each other until they got to me

the first person said they liked the way I use my hands in a conversation…not a physical feature per se

the second person said “we go way back and I appreciate you”….also not a physical feature

and lastly, a girl said “you’re…” paused “pretty?”

idk why she thought that my transmasc nonbinary self would want to her that

Especially when it’s not true

I am many things but pretty isn’t one of them

I went into college thinking it would be a place for me to love myself and learn to be loved

I am leaving believing I could never be loved

at least not in the body I currently reside, but maybe in the next life?

[nephrology2]

the bloodline

my Nana looks at each of her grandchildren and says “I have such beautiful grandbabies”

But when her eyes land on me last, I realize in that moment she was not making a statement…she was making a wish

my mother often does the same

saying that she has such beautiful daughters in a booth of a restaurant while looking at my sister only

and asking if I want to get extensions so my hair will be longer in the next sentence

and asking why I won’t get my upper lip waxed in the car

and asking why my pajamas are so boyish at home

after my great grandmother’s funeral where I wore a black dress, she sharply said “it was nice to see you look like a girl for once”

and my Nana handed me a $50 bill and whispered to go get my nails done

which one is better?

dying young but having died with everyone in my life happy and proud of me

Or dying old with everyone around me filled with disappointment and disgust

what do I do when I know the news will kill them? how do I apologize for the grandchildren they’ll never have and the daughter they’ll never be proud of and the wedding they’ll never attend?

[nephrology2]

the proverbial treadmill

there’s is no toggle button to modify the speed

there’s only one out

the outlet. in the wall. the power cord has been plugged in for 21 years 4 months and 4 days.

I’ve fallen again. I’m wincing in pain but I’m reaching, reaching for the cord. if only I could just—

[nephrology2]

People see that there is something about me they do not like. They decide that I am neurodivergent and attribute the things they don’t like about me or find off putting to me being neurodivergent. As a result, it allows them to have apathy towards the parts of me they don’t like, but the result is that they end up being apathetic towards all of me. they get to feign ignorance and pretend like they don’t dislike me but it is funneled through their apathy and dislike of my supposed neurodivergence.

[nephrology2]

im struggling to find happiness in the little things

my rose colored glasses aren’t rose colored anymore

not clear either

just a mundane blurry grey

time is standing still but the inside of me is spinning round and round

I’m dizzy and sick with sadness and fear

these are not new emotions but my perception of them is

usually they feel like they hover over me like a cloud and press against my arms like compressed air in a box

it being so internal makes me feel like there’s no way to get rid of it

I’d have to carve out my insides to do that and then I’d be dead

Not sure if I’d mind that today

[nephrology2]

The Poem I’ll Never Send

It’s Valentine’s Day

I admire you but it’s not a secret

I don’t know you well enough to say I’m in love with you

But I like you a lot

More than I’ve ever liked anyone else

In a different way then I’ve ever liked anyone else

My world changed when you came into the picture

Life is hard, and heavy

But you make it feel like it could be easy

There’s a light to you

There’s a warmth

There’s a grounding and an alignment

With you around the world doesn’t feel like it’s spinning, and you are simultaneously the center and the sun

But although they are the same, you represent them differently

Maybe it’s your laugh

Maybe it’s your smile

So effortlessly beautiful

Forever making my heart skip a beat

Maybe it’s all your little cute mannerisms

Like the face you make when someone makes a joke at your expense

Or the way you put your thumbs in the pockets of your jeans

Or the way you are always dancing

Maybe it’s the way you walk

With a suaveness that makes me feel like I could follow you anywhere

It’s definitely partially the way you talk

I still smile when I hear you say “stairs” and “crème brûlée”

The way I could listen to you talk all day about anything

I fear and dread time making me forget it what you sound like

Maybe it’s the way you say my name

It’s always been the way you move

With such purpose and drive

Your energy is so infectious and I’d do anything to make you smile

I think I’ll spend my whole life making comparisons to you

I’ve accepted that as my truth

Even if I never say these words to you aloud,

I’ll carry them with me, quietly, forever proud of you and all you’ll achieve

And grateful I got to have you in my life, even if for only a short amount of time.

To S - Happy Valentines Day ❤️

[nephrology2]

something is so very wrong with me

[nephrology2]

“So I'll love you from afar

'Till you know who you are

Write to you in the dark

Where you'll live forever

I'll still look in your eyes

Maybe not in real-life

But at least in my mind

Maybe one day around”

- Déyyess

[nephrology2]

Can’t Stop Wanting You

constantly craving your attention

but it’s attention you can’t give

always a view

never a like

you say you never think of it

i don’t think that’s true

think you just reserve it for people you think are just as special as you

never me though

I want to stop wanting you

I want to stop day dreaming a future that could never happen

I want to stop hoping you’ll message me out the blue

I want to stop dreaming of a penthouse with you after we both finish medical school and move to Manhattan

You don’t want me

I know that

But finding a way to move on

Is a task too big for me right now

I know you aren’t everything

So why does it feel like illl never like anyone the way I liked you?

Why does this feel like the first and last time?

Why does this feel like this was my only chance?

Why do I still hope in the end it’ll be you?

[nephrology2]

A Note on Being Seen

i found myself in a bit of a predicament

the girl i like knows i like her

she found out the morning of my birthday

i spent my birthday riddled with anxiety

this is funny because on my last birthday, she also was a cause of some anxiety, as i found out she was going abroad for a semester

i have liked many a person in my 21 years of life

but no one as strongly as i have liked her

she is the one i think about when i hear love songs

and because she is in the year above me,

i always viewed her through the lens of the one who got away

we now have a whole month of winter break to mule over the circumstances

i realize now where my fear is coming from

if she were to like me back

she would be my first everything

the first person to express interest, my first date, my first hand hold, my first kiss

i think i always anticipated my firsts being with someone where the stakes felt low

with her, the stakes feel high…too damn high

i don’t want my firsts to be with someone i’m this head over heels for because if and when it ends, it will be too devastating

also people talk

people are judgmental at the college i attend

and i can’t risk being a source of gossip

the idea of people talking about me and my inexperience (if im awkward during a date, or if my kissing is bad?)

makes me want to lock myself in a box and never be seen by the world again

i want to know her

i want to truly see her

but i don’t want to be known

i don’t want to be seen

i don’t know where I go from here

or what the next steps hold

but for now this is where i’m at

[nephrology2]

Knowing that there is something deeply wrong with me but not knowing what is the burden of my existence. All I know is what I see and what I see is how people act towards me versus how they act towards other people. People don’t like me. I can’t fix what they don’t like and I can’t replicate the ways of others that they do. So, now I’m stuck. Stick grieving. Stick being envious. Comparison is a thief of joy but whether I compare myself or not there is no joy. At least when I compare myself, I know why there’s no joy. I can’t actually kill myself so instead I wake up everyday in complete agony hoping and praying that one day I’ll change even though I don’t really know what that means. Something is wrong with me. I can feel it deep in my bones. Need an antidepressant

[nephrology2]

Something I See in You

By KW

I walked into the room

The air stiffened

We both notice the elephant in the room

But we also believe ignorance is bliss

Supposed to be mirror images

I threw a hammer at the mirror

I wanted to watch you shatter because the pieces wouldn’t align anyways

You are yelling at me like there’s anything I can do now

There’s nothing left for me to do now

The damage is done

I apologized a hundred times

You’re still throwing rocks and kicking me till I bruise

I’m on my knees begging you to forgive me and tell me what I can do to fix this

You hand me a gun and tell me I know what to do

I put the barrel under my chin and you put out your hand

I ask why you are giving me matches

You tell me to light it

I put the gun on the floor

Strike a match

Let the gun burn

We watch the flames rise

You take my hand

Call me your handsome arsonist

I’m sobbing and whispering more apologies

You tell me it’s ok and that I’m still your sunshine and that sometimes the sun burns

By the time the flames reach us

I’ve come to peace and we smile

We die but so do all our mistakes

[nephrology2]

want to cut off all my hair

want to peel the skin off my face

want to burn the clothes off my body

want to unattach my limbs and reattach them so that they feel better

forced to just sit

forced to feel an never ending amount of restlessness

forced to wait until this feeling passes

knowing it’ll come back

because it always comes back

[nephrology2]

suicide note of a former suburban Midwest black queer who couldn’t find community no matter where they went

[nephrology2]

even if I knew how to tie a noose

Idk how to slip myself in it

never been good at the logistics

[nephrology2]

the part when your head makes impact with the concrete

you can hear your skull crack open before your brain gets whiplash and throws you into unconsciousness (maybe death?)

feel like I’m reliving the skull crack moment over and over everyday waiting for the day I just simply fall out of consciousness (maybe into death?)

[nephrology2]

To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.