#kingja'mie

[yesmyhotself]

don’t you see how magnificent you are?

i am the walking embodiment of god’s consciousness

(this new solange album is clearly lighting me UP)

[yesmyhotself]

6, slightly overwhelmed

i am sweaty, in the same clothes i’ve been wearing all day, and i am surrounded by drunk, equally sweaty people in a thumping club basement. it is far past my bedtime, i do not feel my best.

i dance with my friends anyway. abba comes on, and i start to recharge. i like to lose myself in these places with people i love, feel the communion of a heavy bass line and catch people smiling as they dance with eyes closed.

i’m picked out of the crowd--a tall guy with thick eyebrows is too shy to approach me, so his raging drunk friend asks me for my number for him. he tells me i’m cute, i give him a kiss on the cheek and blend back into the roiling crowd. 

his drunk friend dances with me too, so forcefully that i demand he stop, and he scurries away.

it’s almost time to go, till i spot a beard and a baseball cap that i like. i give my friends ten minutes--if this doesn’t go well we’ll leave--and i approach him. i make the first move, and it catches. we make out, i’m dizzy, he tenderly kisses me goodbye, and i’m off. 

i can catch attention, even when i’m not working for it. i can leave an impression, i can say no, i have the confidence to chase after what i want. i have total mastery over my body and my night. i surprise myself.

i am more powerful than i thought. 

[yesmyhotself]

boys should wear makeup but more specifically this boy should wear makeup

[yesmyhotself]

really trying to do it

i may not be so sure of myself a lot of the time, but i ALWAYS express love and gratitude. i am quick to love and full of appreciation, with this i bring light to others.

[yesmyhotself]

4, honestly? good

i rode a bike this weekend.

it took me a while to get started, wobbly and unstable on my first couple of goes—

dodging obstacles (the elderly, skittish dogs, children also learning to ride bikes) that seemed to occupy ten times more space than they actually did,

playing the self-assuredness mind game that determines balance,

but in time i was coasting solidly up and down hills and weaving between cars and traffic signs with a precarious but radiant confidence.

i am awed by ability to learn new things.

for years i have nurtured a fixed identity for myself:

“i am someone who listens to high-brow experimental electronica,”

“i am not someone who can handle spicy food,”

“i am someone who wears secondhand sweaters,”

“i am not someone who rides bikes.”

but recently i have learned to surprise myself.

i have learned to take risks,

to use these risks to mold a new, more fluid self-image:

i am that type of guy who rides bikes,

or gets tattoos, or watches shit tv,

or feels comfortable not particularly being anything at all.

more largely,

i can be literally whatever i want.

so, for today, i am a bike rider.

[yesmyhotself]

3, disappointed, hesitant

i love going to the movies.

i like to imagine that i am in a movie, sitting there in front of the enormous screen, camera point-blank at my face, watching the light bounce off my eyes and the colors shift abruptly, myself transfixed. 

or else, a wide shot of the theater, empty save me, sitting way in the back, the weightless height of the room dwarfing me in the last rows, a beam projecting way above my head.

i love going to the movies when im the only one there, as if each step of the film-making process—writing, editing, filming, producing, projecting—were done entirely so that i could savor a single moment.

i love going to the movies when the theater is jam-packed, hearing the laughs and gasps of others ripple across the room, filling me with a sense of communal experience, of feelings shared between me and strangers.

i can talk about movies too—

this is pretty cool.

and i can appreciate them for their aesthetic value, for form and “plasticity”;

i love being in spaces where they’re called films.

of my many pretentious interests, this may be the most insufferable.

but i treasure my own ability to be so moved by movies, to see in them a peek—even in the most brief instant—into something spiritual.

those sacred moments that affirm my human capacity for awe, when light bends and twists across a screen, and my heart skips.

[yesmyhotself]

5, sunny, bumping

my body is like a well-worked canvas, struck with thousands of little black brushstrokes, like the work of a agitated modernist, kinetic and unplanned. 

letting my body hair grow out is freeing, a feeling both natural and primitive. 

i love my furry legs--something i would have been ashamed of as a kid--when i climb dripping out of a pool or lie stinging with salt at the beach, watching the hairs flow and slide like little rivulets, or smooth streams of ink.

i lie in bed with the lights on, talking on the phone, dreaming, staring at the ceiling and run my fingers through the hair on my belly or on my chest, soft and somehow comforting.

i love to scratch my beard, hearing the way it prickles, feeling the sharp ends of trimmed-down whiskers and rejoicing in the fact that i can grow a beard in the first place.

and when i do shave, i like to feel the short, piercing stubble and hear its texture like sandpaper, knowing it’ll all grow back out again just to be shaved, short to long and back once more, like an undulating ocean, or a chest rising and falling as it breathes.

[yesmyhotself]

2, stressed but relaxing

sometimes when im on the metro, i dance

not like a real dance, but in the presence of something percussive and bassy i’ll bob my head, rock my shoulders, sway my hips subtly. there are songs like this that know how to compel, marionnette-style, my entire body to move.

when im working or driving, i turn on something extremely singable. something erratic, baroque, or infectiously sunny. i like to sing timidly when i know other people can hear me, or with all my forces—a veritable performance—when i know they can’t.

when im walking like i have somewhere to be (whether or not i do), i put on my sunglasses and earbuds and play something that thumps like hard footsteps and scowl at people passing by, a soundtrack to a manufactured resting bitch face.

and sometimes when im home, in bed, with nothing to focus on, i listen to something sad, something sombre and quiet, hushed, slow. i never cry, instead i feel empty and light, like passing through a memory.

these are some of my favorite versions of myself.

the one who carefully curates his itunes library with songs ripped from youtube,

the one who reads to chopped up jazz age tunes only to be distracted by them,

the one who goes to concerts in basements, warehouses, churches, floating dutch concert halls, standing right in the front of the crowd, taken hold of by a too-powerful edible and imagining he’s witnessing rapture.

and when its really late and im in just the right kind of mood, ill play something extremely powerful, something aggressive and terrifying, and with every crash and cry i feel a deep inner relief, an exhalation.

[yesmyhotself]

1, hopeful

hey, ——

you (friend, parent, lover, stranger),

you call my name,

and my eyebrows shoot way up.

big brown eyes, wide and attentive,

deep enough to fall right in.

i don’t quite understand what you’re telling me:

one eyebrow up, the other furrowed,

arched, tapering, asymmetric.

its rather impressive that i can do this.

it makes me laugh, doing these faces in the mirror,

bouncing my eyebrows around like shrugging shoulders,

like trampoline jumpers, or undulating waves.

“eyes are the windows to the soul” is a terrible cliche that i really do believe in,

and mine are pried wide open,

inviting, engaged, and—honestly—cute as hell.

my dad’s ringtone for my mom is that song brown-eyed girl

(her eyes really are wonderful),

and i hope that i’ll find someone that appreciates mine like he does hers.

but for now i’ll treasure these eyes myself,

catching my own furtive glances in the mirror.

my gaze is for no one but me.