sapphireluminescence

[sapphireluminescence]

Graduation is tomorrow. It is not my graduation, only one that marks the scattering of half the people I love across the country. I know it should be a joyous day; I know it will be a day of many goodbyes.

Three years. Three years with sand passing from one chamber to another, and now the last grain falls.

To lose is the price of having loved. To love was made easy.

Some I have known since day one; some I met too recently. All I wish I had more time with. These brilliant, passionate, wonderful people I've had the honor and privilege of calling friends. I could write each one a declaration of my love and it would not do them justice.

You, I hope, I will see tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Neither of us can promise it.

I will miss you.

But oh, do not let my grief hold you back. Fly high, my friends.

May your days be filled with more laughter than tears; may you look forward to what comes next and think fondly of what you leave behind. May the wind always be in your favor, may there always be friends at your side. May looking down never scare you, only remind you of how far you have come.

When you return, know that I will be waiting here for you. I keep my eyes locked to the sky for the first sign of it. Until then, know that I love you.

[sapphireluminescence]

Oh, I know this is just how the world turns. We will drift, moment to moment, ever-aware of the time falling away and ever-unable to stop it. There is nothing to be done.

But still, let me linger a few moments longer. Caught in this warm afterglow, this vacuum of a moment where everything falls into place just before it all shifts again. It is so beautiful here. Lovelier things have passed already and lovelier things are yet to be, but this one is… different. (As was the last one, and as the next one will be.)

You and I, friend, will be here but briefly. I spend most of my days caught in a whirlwind—always moving twice as fast and always still a step behind, a storm of motion trapped in place. I know, already, that each second is so painfully finite, so terribly ready to fall among the sands of days that have gone.

And yet, this one feels like it might grant us a little bit more, might pause before fading into memory. And so, please, will you let me stay? Long enough to bid my farewells. Will you wait for me?

I wish I had more time to spend, more lifetimes to give.

Beyond the infinities of what might be, I keep falling in love with the here and now, longing to stay for small eternities.

I’d like to keep a handful tucked away, to leave in places at will. One in the peace of a quiet evening shared, another amidst raucous laughter and friendly barbs, a third in fascination of a conversation between those whose ins and outs I am still mapping.

Each would be a lifetime well spent, but none could exist without the expense of the others. And still, were I to spill the blood of all other possibilities at the altar of one, the sacrifice would not suffice. Nothing stays as it is. Time cannot be suspended.

It is the double-bladed cruelty of living in an ephemeral world: to live is to mourn the loss of what cannot remain, while to mourn is to prove it was worth holding on to.

[sapphireluminescence]

Amatonormative Invective

I'm so tired of love.

Please don't say that there are other kinds of love. I know, okay? I've written an ode to a best friend and an elegy to an interest and called it love both times—I know. But the rest of the world doesn't seem to. Any kind of "love" I might deign to describe will be assumed romantic, and my own arcing terms will be turned against me to hold romance aloft as the all-encompassing, end-all-be-all singular thing to die for. And so, I am tired of love. Spare me the lecture.

But at the same time, this ire is not against the idea of intimacy; I have no quarrel with connection. Romance is not inherent to either, and though it still feels like a betrayal of the sentiment, I do not want to brave the world on my own.

I want to know the quiet of companionship. Not silence—not the frigid abyss of an empty house, where every sound is startling in its foreignness, nor the tightrope tension of tripping over porcelain, reading someone else's anger into the brittle air—just, quiet. Mornings in a light-flooded bedroom, waking up slow and watching someone else blink themselves out of sleep. Inane musings over separate tasks, paper-airplane banter tossed and caught from room to room with ease. Afternoons sprawled on the living room floor, watching sunlight slant through the windows to illuminate their face, eyes molten in the glow. A study of peace, curled up in office chairs listening to rustling pages and the breath of another. Lofty midnight ramblings, hands a flurry of motion and still failing to keep pace with a brain sparking ahead, but content in the knowledge of a mind to match.

I want the warmth of someone else's presence. A partner, I guess, in the purest sense of the word. "A person who shares or is associated with another in some action or endeavor," if the action is living and the endeavor is the building of a future. The promise of an ally. Steady at one shoulder, solid back-to-back. The assurance of a crewmate through storm and smooth sailing alike, over the ceaseless seas of this life.

But the world has agreed that these things are reserved, that they are romantic at their core.

I don't—have never—seen why.

They require trust, and understanding, and dedication, and a thousand other things, but none of them are love.

And I know it's a teenage cliche, to fear a future spent unlovable, but this is not quite that, twists around it and never quite aligns. I would have been happy piecing together an existence with friends, laughter rising through the rafters of a shared house and life, would have found joy, and warmth, and peace. I could have found myself a family—fuck what the world thinks love should be—and settled comfortably into my own skin.

Could have.

Could have, and cannot.

There is no future I can see where my friends stay, where they don't fly from my side like swallows in winter wind. Each disperses after the other, seeking warmer shores, absorbed into insular units of nuclear family to leave me, drifting unmoored and compassless, searching the skies for a sign of their soaring. The thought of a life without them makes me ache to the bone, an endless march of cold mornings in an echoing house. Their absence turns the future bleak and desolate, frost creeping over my brightest dreams.

How could they stay? You've seen what the world says:

My mother tells me to be careful about whom I marry. My father tells me to start a family early. I have expressed nothing but disinterest in either, but the advice persists, because surely it will be relevant one day, because I am young and minds change, because of course I will get married in the end.

I tell someone in a moment of confiding that I don't want kids, not really, would be satisfied with a cat or dog and a space of my own. They say, "Yeah, that's what I thought when I was like, eight."

The sentiment is passed over school tables and internet cables, words not meant to be sharp, but regardless, they find a mark.

"Reasons to stay alive," and a future marriage is at the top, followed directly by starting a family.

"Don't worry," someone consoles. "It's alright to take things slow, you'll find someone!"

"Friends don't cancel other plans" for each other the way lovers do, the song insists.

"True love," someone proclaims, like romance is the only kind that counts.

"I don't want to die alone" equates to needing to get married.

"Friendship doesn't count, doesn't last, isn't enough."

After all, your spouse is supposed to be

"The most important person,"

"Your other half,"

"Soulmate,"

"The one."

Under this barrage, who is meant to resist? Who would think to stray from the concrete course laid before them? When it's held up as the pinnacle and standard, the ultimate goal, who would dare to question?

To leave the expected trajectory—never as simple as stepping sideways, all bitter fury and disillusionment. Half the songs I once loved are tainted now, innuendo and implication mocking from the shadows. It tears cruel thorns through the fabric of this world, seeps through the cracks, into tropes and stories and conversations, desecrating spaces I once called holy.

For those who do not stray, these are words and nothing more, harmless briar in places they need not tread. They have been spared this casual clawing at my heart, and though I cannot begrudge the ones I care for their immunity, I seethe with a soundless envy.

Two roads diverge in a yellow wood—one a barely-there footpath through the trees, unnoticeable from the main route unless you're looking for a way out, mist-shrouded and dense with bramble, the other, a well-trodden trail through open fields that stretch, uninterrupted to where the waving grass meets the horizon. This one leads where I cannot follow, so I have taken the one less traveled by.

I trust that it will get easier. The slope will even out and the path will open up, mist and bristling vines alike will recede. I know this. But for now, this is an aimless trek through unforgiving and unmapped wilds, and the journey before me has never looked so long or so lonely.

[sapphireluminescence]

I should know how this goes.

Best foot forward now. Light up the room, hope that you'll see, keep glancing sideways just to check. Be brighter, bolder, sharper, anything to earn that smile.

Walk you to your next class for an extra two minutes, linger outside the door as long as I can justify. No, I wasn't planning to go, but if you'll be there I just might, too.

Blush at your praise, turn the words over and over on the bus ride home. Gush to my friends about how passionately brilliant you are, how funny, how well we get along.

The signs should be clear. This giddy flutter, these shared looks across the room, the gravitational tug of your presence.

Everything accelerates when you're around, words tripping trying to keep up with 100mph thoughts, this traitor of a metronome heart setting the pace.

It's stock and standard, and yet...I missed something. I want your quips and your time, not your lips pressed to mine. I'd listen to you for a lifetime, of course—how could I not?—but I'd take no tokens of romance from you, dream of no grand, cinematic confession.

So then, if all these things are true, if I long for your company, keep trying to win your favor, but not your love, then—

Tell me again how a crush should feel?

Inspired by Sara Farizan

[sapphireluminescence]

crisis.txt

*click*

Hello World.

It's an old story. Or, not old, but retold. Computer gains sentience. AI decides it can run the world better, takes over and tries to build anew. Robot turns human. Man-made machine becomes man.

Let’s tell it in reverse.

Girl turns around, keeps being surprised to find veins and sinew under her skin instead of wires and steel. 

It’s a funny thing, to be human and not feel it.

But False feels True and True feels False, like someone passed self.humanity through not().

Not that it makes all that much difference, when you break it down. I mean, sentience, natural or otherwise, is all electricity anyway. The flickering and sparking of neurons and wires alike, nothing more than sequenced pulses of bright energy. 

An AI learns to write. Okay, zoom in. What is it doing? It’s predicting the next letter, maybe the next word, from what has come before. It’s a calculation of probability, the algorithm at the heart of what appears to be creativity. Dissect it another step and it’s ones and zeroes, one step further and it’s just that—a well-timed current.

Nothing exists as a pure abstract.

Human consciousness is not exempt. Each thought is a series of reactions across axons, chemicals transmitted across from terminal to dendrite. Refine the level of observation once more, and it is all a product of the same forces that govern the rest of the world, a chain effect driven by crackling electricity. Remove the molecules and the cognition stops.

It’s the synergistic effect. Things become more than the sum of their parts—bits and bytes wake up, atoms form life—the microscopically inanimate performs macroscopic sentience. The miracle of thought is an illusion of simpler, more predictable parts and that much more wondrous for its explicability.

And so, when every semblance of sentience can be teased apart to atoms and electricity, particles and energy bound by the same forces that govern the rest of the observable universe, the distinction between organic and mechanical fades. Both create conclusions from past patterns; both follow prescribed routes at a small enough scale. Perhaps, then, to say that my own brain was programmed, some artificial, indistinguishable form of intelligence, would not be so wrong. And anyway, that’s the trope, isn’t it? Code wakes up and has an identity crisis?

And it would make sense.

The mimicry’s not quite right. Too many days there are things that don’t quite line up, small glitches, bugs in the program, patches someone meant to roll out and never quite got around to.

Like, I told someone at age 12 that I wished people gave off error messages and they laughed and I was only half-joking.

Like, I failed Captchas because the edge of an object was technically in the square, or because I wasn’t quite sure what did and didn’t constitute a tractor, or because 9 and g look about the same in some fonts.

Like, I could probably fail a Turing test. I stammer my way through social graces with a charmless—some might call it robotic—monotone, falling back on awkward smiles and pre-rehearsed niceties.

You see, programmed doesn’t mean perfect, only rigid.

And maybe I noticed something was off! Noticed and went looking for the source code, started parsing backwards through nested loops, trying to find the root of the irregularities. Maybe all I got was Permission denied.

So then, if the source cannot be found, an attempt at reconstruction, how I think my synapse-circuitry must have been hard-wired:

if self.understands(code){  feel(“strange kinship”);} else{  feel(“lost”);} //not that humanity is *wrong* for what I feel, but the computer always made more sense.

Hello World, a human tradition.

Hello World.

Every programmer’s first words.

Hello World //the program’s first words too?

[sapphireluminescence]

See, the trick is to wait until after six.

Dismissal is four, most activities end by five, but six is when the change starts. Late buses leave, and no one’s staying who won’t be there for a while. ‘Course, it doesn’t quite work if your group’s large enough, but you get the feeling, if you slip far enough away.

4:00pm and everything’s a whirl, setting up: posting signs, missing documents, thirty people packed in a room meant to hold half that number.

5:00 and it’s still chaos, shoving desks around, “Does anyone need anything? Is this room okay?”

And then, six. I run into a friend who’s just shown up, and it’s a thirty-second oasis of a smile and a greeting before someone shoves laminated rolls at us. We talk as we work, all perfect tandem and affectionate teasing, an exaggerated eye roll and a light-hearted head shake.

Six-thirty. Dinner with another friend. Half an hour and then the pressure’s back on, we have a good showing to make and something to prove. In some other part of the school, the chaos has not slowed, but for now, it’s just the two of us, legs outstretched in an empty hallway. Though normally it echoes with footsteps and an ever-bouncing ping pong ball, the only sound now is the hum of the barely functional air conditioning.

I linger, hesitant to break the peace that’s settled upon us. I know this cannot last—we have somewhere to be by seven and a whole building to sprint across, but we’ve perfected the timing of this journey, and I can't bring myself to leave until absolutely necessary.

It lasts no more than twenty minutes. Our team captain is still missing in action, carrying half the convention on his shoulders, and we have his role to fill.

The rest of the night passes in a rush of questions and adrenaline, but it’s that moment that stands out in my memory:

Away from the pull of competition and the allure of victory, two girls in the quiet of an empty school hall.

after hours | august 2022 | @nosebleedclub

[sapphireluminescence]

I still can't quite shake the urge to run.

It went dormant for a season, leaving me nothing but the ache of it. But these days it kicks up more and more, whispers into the spaces where silence follows stork, keeps fluttering in the back of my throat with every word I choke back.

All rivers run to the sea, and I am tempted to follow. I've considered mountains and forests and endless plains, lonely and lovely places to wander, but there is always further to run, and this soul could never settle. Where the sea strands and cliffs find relentless waves, the land's farthest extent, is the only place the urge falls away.

There is something about the ocean that quiets the static in my head—it seems safe in a way so few spaces do. The surf’s rush and crash hushes all other sounds, and the vast expanse of it seems to curl itself around me, quieting and comforting.

The shoreline exists as the border between two paradoxes: one which varies hour to hour but never in its core nature, the other which seems rock-solid and steady, but grain-by-grain changes beyond recognition. That, that contradiction—that might be what I’m chasing.

Don’t you feel the call?

That siren-song tug, the allure of tranquility.

Spend the day afloat when everything known feels poised to crumble, and trust that in all its fluidity, the water will not. There is no being set adrift from here, already half-lost and out of reach.

Watch the sunset glint golden through the waves. The warmth of the last light drenches tidepools and veins alike, and calm slips its way into uneasy minds.

Follow the evening tide to home, to some sequestered corner. Whatever it weathers, it’s anchored here.

That is the ocean’s appeal. There’s an illusory, ever-shifting quality to sate this restless heart, but an underlying stability enough to promise peace.

Oh, all my dreams are filled with salt and spray and cerulean sea.

to the sea | july 2022 | @nosebleedclub

[sapphireluminescence]

It’s a Latin convention, of course. Half my best memories from the last year have been.

Somewhere in the midst of the chaos and the crowds and the contests, I slip off to have dinner with a friend. I unclasp the mantle of responsibility and run, a little guilty but more giddy, fueled more on adrenaline than proper sleep. We get strange looks—two people leaving their group to share a meal in some secluded corner—but they make me bold, and so we go. The building goes quiet. Every sound fades until it’s just us and the muffle of distant laughter, and I’d swear we’re the only ones left in the building. Time seems to slow, then hang still in our own little world of peace.

We almost miss the awards ceremony. Well, we do miss the start of it and have to wend our way  through the stands breathlessly, searching for the motley gaggle we’d left two hours ago. In this stadium of two thousand, there’s no more than ten people who recognize my name, but their cheers are sweeter than the applause of the whole crowd. I steal my ribbons from a friend who’s been co-opted into handing them out, share a moment of trivial victory with a rival-turned-teammate, and congratulate the people I’ve come to know. At some point in the list of names, the sky darkened to a purple dusk, and my friends shifted from discussing the awards to the nature of love. I add in the odd word, but they’re doing alright, so I am content to lean against the wall between them and focus on the rising wind, awash in the melancholy that accompanies the evening of a day worth remembering.

Eventually, before I am ready, the spell breaks, and we laugh through our goodbyes. It’s a long ride home, and in the quiet of nightfall, I text them my affection. They hold my heart so easily, and their light suffuses my memories with a soft glow.

Tell me a soft memory

[sapphireluminescence]

It’s June and I’m thinking about what pride means. Or, what it is when it’s not the gemstone brilliance of people in love when the world might try to shut it down at a moment’s notice, when it's not the steady defiance that comes from being honest to the world about who you are.

I can claim neither kind. It took me a week to stop hiding Loveless in the closet and place it on my bookshelf, and another two to stop angling it so that the spine couldn't be read. I got a black dragon-wing ring and some days that feels a bit like pride, but it comes off before I come home and my heartrate doubles if anyone steps too close to where it rests.

Half of my queer experience has been fear and mourning futures I never had. Living with a lack of attraction when so much is built around experiencing it—sometimes it's lonely, y'know? But somehow, in a world where it feels like we are few and far between, we gravitated towards each other. Our little trio of disaster aspecs, in various stages of questioning and "out," built ourselves a safe haven.

And so, maybe pride can be something quieter, tucked carefully under curled fingers, joy appearing in bright flashes like a magician's coin. Maybe pride is no grand gesture, just the mundanities of knowing and acceptance.

"Fuck you" gets instantly met with "nah" and "please don't" before we all dissolve into giggles—it's a joke that will never grow old.

Someone is telling us how love is the most important thing in the world, at an academic ceremony, of all places; I'm raising my eyebrows at her while she shakes her head back over a sea of intent faces.

I flip through a deck of cards, muttering about how there are no aces, and without missing a beat, he tells me that there are two already in the room.

I think that's all it is, really: the three of us sat on a bedroom floor, debating attraction and playing card games. She’s showing us memes, he’s cracking anti-sex jokes, and I’m making terrible terrible puns. Something warm uncurls itself in my chest, and it is the closest to home I've ever known.

pride | jun 2022 | @nosebleedclub ​

[sapphireluminescence]

I wish I had more time to spend, more lifetimes to give.

Beyond the infinities of what might be, I keep falling in love with the here and now, longing to stay for small eternities.

I'd like to keep a handful tucked away, to leave in places at will. One in the peace of a quiet evening shared, another amidst raucous laughter and friendly barbs, a third in fascination of a conversation between those whose ins and outs I am still mapping.

Each would be a lifetime well spent, but none could exist without the expense of the others. And still, were I to spill the blood of all other possibilities at the altar of one, the sacrifice would not suffice. Nothing stays as it is. Time cannot be suspended.

It is the double-bladed cruelty of living in an ephemeral world: to live is to mourn the loss of what cannot remain, while to mourn is to prove it was worth holding on to.