tinybirdsupporter

[tinybirdsupporter]

I have done so many things wrong but people still meet me with kindness. There is no exhaustion with the genuine.

[tinybirdsupporter]

Feeling empty

I wonder if it's a sign I should never be up by this time of night. There's a feeling of wrongness inhabiting my cranium.

It's ineffable. I can't seem to get on with it. I do some cognitive reframing to try and reframe it out of my mind, yet it's still there, it's still throbbing. It's the feeling after an empty day. The sitting undertone that you've ignored a piece of your humanity, and it's unhappy to be that way. I take pieces from the air with my fingers, try to tease it out from over me. It works sometimes, and it's working now. Perhaps it is a sitting energy; an energy that sits on mine. An energy that only has purpose to sit and sit, disturb and perturb, controversialize and dysregulate. Something to put down, not to feed. Something that doesn't define me. Perhaps it's the rainy day. Perhaps the weight of my wet leather jacket is getting to me.

[tinybirdsupporter]

Montaigne, "OF FRIENDSHIP," essay 28.

"In the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again."

[tinybirdsupporter]

Sometimes I forget I am human: subject to the same whims, wills, quotas, and wiles that everybody else is too.

[tinybirdsupporter]

I want for a perfect thing for my perfect love.

I wish for a bassinette of pink and gold to comfort our love.

I wish to know every language, to whisper sweetly their own.

I want to know everything, to make I a home.

I want the perfect pallette in the perfect shades

to brush true their cheeks with age.

I want fine mohair bristles,

to dot their face with perfect dimples:

I need a canvas that knows

where everything ought to go.

I don't know

where everything ought to go.

I wish my hand would find a way

to fill in space on the page

to color in that which only the brain can see,

that which only exists in memory.

Shade it in for me

that perfect glassy face.

My eyes in deference

of the art I'd reverence;

red blush mapping currents

of tangled bloody resonance;

for this is love, and I need no reference.

for this is love, and I need no reference.

----------------------------------------------------

Desiring for a feeling

My hands desire to know an art most impressive, most creative, most masterly, to articulate the feeling I'm feeling.

They bounce around the keyboard and around my bed, unable to fully grasp the measures at hand.

They know they are capable, but the mind is unwilling.

They know they are capable, but the mind is unwilling.

[tinybirdsupporter]

Desiring for a feeling

My hands desire to know an art most impressive, most creative, most masterly, to articulate the feeling I'm feeling.

They bounce around the keyboard and around my bed, unable to fully grasp the measures at hand.

They know they are capable, but the mind is unwilling.

They know they are capable, but the mind is unwilling.

[tinybirdsupporter]

@tinybirdsupporter, me, i.e., my little stupid blog, turns one today. This is cute--- fitting--- a forgotten Christmas birthday. It's a gift to myself, I guess. It's the idiom where if you don't start, it'll never happen, or something like that. It's not that my blog carries much weight, no, it's not significant in that regard; it's the meaning behind it, which is that it persists through its own insignificance. Happy Birthday to this tiny, stupid, lovely blog! Merry Christmas, and all happy holidays!

XX, Author!

[tinybirdsupporter]

Into December

It's now winter, and everything has died or hidden itself away. I do too, but I have the privilege of snowy gloves and warm scarves. I still walk outside, and I hear a quietness that invigorates me. I sense the down which precedes every up, and I sit obediently, while my face grows tighter. The life has disintegrated, and passed without meaning. But the fact is that it will all come back--- all of the pulsing, flourishing and breaking--- all things desperate to claim that bright hungry sunlight. All creatures will birth again, just to swim this cool blue water, and all the buzzing will return, bugs and frogs filling space with their symphony. It is empty now, but emptiness is in part a natural state of things. It's empty now, but it brings a heightened sensitivity for fullness. I have gloves, and it is beautiful outside.

End of September

and I have been catching the sunset every day. I have forced myself to appreciate that which will be gone, soon: this time of solstice death approaches way too quick, and disintegrates with passé, without meaning.

I stick myself in the sunlight and let myself pretend to feel something off of it: animal blood receiving vitamins, human mind receiving pleasure. I sit with the trees and I listen.

I see chipmunks, and squirrels, and beavers, and eagles, and herons, and egrets, and turtles, and fish, all of the above usually alive. The occasional inanimate body of one of them is still beautiful— just still (for you to look at).

Sunset is coming soon, but I have an assignment due. Wish me Godspeed~

[tinybirdsupporter]

The inherent illusion of cinema

Cinema is a breakage of natural time, and a reconstruction of it through surgical precision. It is an imitation of that which exists, cursed inherently by the principle of mimicry. Cinema pretends: it cuts between angles from different takes, it jumps through manicured choreographies like a trained dancer, it brings itself closer to you in moments of fragility, and it widens itself in moments of expansiveness. Cinema studies time and narrative, and populates space with the representation of it. People, place, and thing converge to dance around an illusion. Editors polish the jumps in time and space, between take one and take two, to recreate natural space, to recreate populated time. Because that's all that narrative is: populated time, tempora populis.

This is why I like writing--- not in digital, but in script--- the experience is truthfully linear, in both writer and reader. Inscribing then is a true regalia of time's natural progression, and something about that makes it special, sacred in ways that may not exist elsewhere.

Cinema pretends, and it pretends beautifully well. Cinema is our Narcissus pond, and we can only fight it so hard.

[tinybirdsupporter]

I wonder if you think about me

Is it okay to think about you?

My new lover has brown eyes, better than yours. My new lover loves me well, sweet and kindly. I think of you in passing— a passive thought that arises and passes as quickly as it comes— I would kill to know what you’re up to, but I’ll never speak to you again.

I wonder if you’d be impressed with the person I am now, or if you’d look at me with the same scorn, reserved for me when I doubled down and fractured our hearts into little tiny pieces. I wonder if you’ve moved on. I wonder what treatment I get in your brain, when no one’s there to correct it. Mine is more gentle than you’d think.

I wonder how you talk about me (I can’t help it). I am over you by millennia, and yet the fascination remains. I know how you talked about others, so I think I can see it: the clamming of lips, a tightened jaw— your stiff resolve and an unwillingness to engage, past formalities and loose generalities. You won’t mention the specifics of me, or give me that due diligence. You’ll wince and squint when the idea of me perturbs your smooth-running brain. You’ll wince and whine about the girlfriend who broke your heart— forever unnamed, forever narrativised.

My new lover is kind to me, inside and outside the autonomy of their mind. My new lover loves me, and when they sleep, they hold me tight. Their brain is kind, their self is safe.

[tinybirdsupporter]

The semester is almost over, and December dutifully begins.

What will it take to surrender?

[tinybirdsupporter]

Roman Holiday-- Fontaines D.C.

An earworm from August.

[tinybirdsupporter]

I hate to be loved

because it enquires someone looking at you.

I hate to be perceived. I hate to be captured in a singular form, a form unreal to my multiplicity under the surface. The image in your head will always be flawed in that it is an image only. Remember this and we could live!

To be looked at is to be amputated into singularity. Is it too much to ask? To avoid this fate of augmentation? Could you treat me in this way? An acknowledgement of my solipsism?

Could you not punish me when the action deviates from the image? When my ephemerality comes to the surface, and perturbs an image of stability? When I get sick, and when I die? When the perfectness of it is punctured, will you still want me in the morning?

Will you see how difficult it all is? Could you meet me with a kinder fist? All this harm based on a narrative from an image?

I hate to be loved, in this way, because it divorces the autonomy I have over the narrative written unto me. More of myself is seen: more to judge. More unattractive bits, more breakages at the seems.

I hate to be loved in this way, and I will always be afraid that it becomes that way again. I will note, for positivity purposes, that I do find love beyond and above this guaranteed imperfection anyway-- that is, in fact, the existence of love the first place-- but it disturbs me how deep the schisms that can form are. In such a small gap between reality and perception, an infinity of shit can get piled up. No thanks.

However I engaged in love nevertheless.

X

[tinybirdsupporter]

And again,

I am met with my inability to sit with myself. This is the most frightening part of the day— the anterograde amnesia induced by content, remembered the instant it is absent.

[tinybirdsupporter]

And suddenly I was facing you, and you were looking through me. Suddenly, you had already crawled into me— you had finished parsing and weaving through the thickness of it all, long before I recognized it had all begun. I was face to face with you, and in the depth of your reflection, I saw myself in your contemporary. I saw myself, and I didn’t know what to say.

Dear Love, I love you. I do!

[tinybirdsupporter]

Journal entry from January:

Same shit, different day.

God, I wish I was a boy. Yeah, I got the penis envy well enough. Yeah, I wish I was muscular all around, like some guys tend to be. Yeah, I wish guys would see me as a guy. Yeah, whatever.

I attended a [CENSORED] hockey game tonight. My father's school friends were there— I think when he says "daughter", they expect a "girl"— not exactly whatever the fuck I am.

I see the cheerleaders, first— all young blondes in cleavage-cropped tops— they are there just to be looked at. They barely cheer— just some vague arm gestures to the newest Olivia Rodrigo song— cheering is not the point of them anymore. They are to be pleasing, to be looked at. To be so feminine, you harmoniously succeed at the task of being a woman.

I see the boys, second— the hockey players, the fast, highly able boys — they're meant to be looked at, too, but only by merit of their skill. Only by the jerseys on their backs, & how fast they strip the puck from one another. To be so skilled that people value you for that in itself. To be so domineering in competition, that you've made it here— to Princeton, to Quinnipiac— to D1, to a contract, to a spectacle on the big screen. To be so able— to be so masculine.

& I sit there, an odd duck out. I remember how I loved to play ice hockey. I remember how good it felt to be good at it. I wonder why God did not make me a boy— it would've been so easy to keep up.

& I think about how boys love each other. I think about being on an ice hockey team— 15 boys, sweating, turned on and ready to go. I think of how divine it would be, to be a pretty boy surrounded by other pretty boys. I think of how they smack their heads together— I think of the unexpected closeness had when the person next to you scores a goal— when both of you have nothing else to do but swing into each other, invading breaths and tossing arms around in celebration. To be a boy, able to invade a boy's space.

To not be a girl— to not be treated with difference or fragility. To be a boy— where you both freely, languidely wrestle with each other— to be evenly matched, to feel the tension of competition surging within you. To feel that animal inside of you dominate, just for a split second. To transmute that beast into tension, into connection, into action.

& I sit here wondering why this is not me. Perhaps it would all be too simple— no grievances are afforded to this class of person in America— and where there is no struggle, there is no depth. Perhaps this was all masterfully orchestrated, to become me.

To be Achilles as well as Patroclus. To be wholly, divinely even.

That's the thing though! We've enscribed these preconceived notions of our gender onto ourselves, and onto our bodies; men have the privilege of being the "normal" body, & so their internal connections and their external actions are not scrutinized in the way that women, or the woman-adjacent person is. A man has a penis, and if you don't have it, you're not quite a man. Whatever you are, you have a vagina! A weaker body; tits for the looking; butt for the grabbing. When men have tits, they don't have tits. When a boy touches a boy, it is acceptable. When whatever I am does anything, I am immediately evaluated in phenotype to be determined as a vagina-haver; a woman-adjacent; a "whatever," with a vagina; a "whatever" that is at least, certainly not an actual man.

& so all my interactions are contextualized as such. & so my life is determined by that which none of us can adequately control, that actively misrepresents.

The boy's club, the Quinnipiac boy's hockey team. I know in soberation that it is not a club I genuinely would or should miss being in: it is all a façade in the face of patriarchy, an elaborate show borne from 5,000 years of atrocious normativity. The boys are no longer pretty when a slur slips from their mouth— they are not pretty when one sweet-talks assault— they are not pretty when they don't like you, when they reject what they see. A boy's club nine times out of ten deals with the imperial overpresence of patriarchal-induced misogyny (and one must add in some white supremacy if it's a white-boy's-club). These are not spaces I should feel drawn to, because the fantasy is absolutely not real.

Why does the fantasy persist then? Probably just because of what we've already discussed— a man is the fixed status of normalcy, of indifference, of congruency. To be a man is to be nothing at all. To have a penis is to be a man, which is the standard of individually recognized human. To have a vagina is to be exactly inverse— you are then other, differentiated, and something. And when you are something, you are to be seen. When you are nothing, there is nothing TO see.

What the forg. Moving on, I must go wash my face. Goodnight all, I hope you said it back.

[tinybirdsupporter]

End of September

and I have been catching the sunset every day. I have forced myself to appreciate that which will be gone, soon: this time of solstice death approaches way too quick, and disintegrates with passé, without meaning.

I stick myself in the sunlight and let myself pretend to feel something off of it: animal blood receiving vitamins, human mind receiving pleasure. I sit with the trees and I listen.

I see chipmunks, and squirrels, and beavers, and eagles, and herons, and egrets, and turtles, and fish, all of the above usually alive. The occasional inanimate body of one of them is still beautiful— just still (for you to look at).

Sunset is coming soon, but I have an assignment due. Wish me Godspeed~