upthetracks

[upthetracks]

1/1/24 - After June

June I was sitting with her watching her childhood cat take its last breath and crying and loving her just as much as always. Eating a can of mandarins by the river with the gnats crowding in, quickest thing I could grab out the pantry after I heard her laughing with someone I once hoped to love, delirious in the heat and the hunger. Sitting in one of the back pews of a tiny church, white in all black in a sea of black family in baby blue - they'd invited me but I didn't hear about the dress code - wiping tears and snot on my sleeve after seeing my full-of-life friend dead and still in the casket.

And June is the month I met my friend from Georgia who I been clinging to ever since. We started feeding people on a hot August day and haven't stopped. Made a pot of stew just two days ago to hand out. Same month I had a 3 day romance, last week back home for christmas I had my first gay hookup. In October, went to a trans celebration and won a vial of T, saw my friend's set up for diy hormones, tried dmt. Made a couple things I'm proud of - big back patch for a Palestine march, a t-shirt design to fund raise for the Atlanta community bail fund, 100 stickers against the cpc up the street. I've been learning how to be a better listener and friend to the kids at work. I've been laughing often. My weeks are often full. I sat in on a mutual aid teach in recently, and met a black organizer who makes me feel like there's work in this city that is actually meaningful and direct. There are some folks around me with passion who I feel I could learn from. A friend saved up a whole pile of bread tags for me and gave em to me as a Hanukkah gift, one of the sweetest things someone's done for me in a while. I feel like I'm better with people than I used to be, like I can sit and chat with anyone if I gotta. Makes me less scared to be around new folks. Watched some John Waters movies with my ex-lover. We spend a lot of time together still, I'm grateful there's still love and friendship between us. I think I've learned how to be there better for my friend that has panic attacks and spirals. I feel like I'm a better cook than I used to be. I feel a little older, a little more steady on my feet. Mostly I am ashamed of myself, but sometimes I catch a facet of myself reflecting some light back. I stand taller. The fog is less constant. There is more sharpness and motion and change. The months do not bleed into each other so much. I feel more. I think more, want more. I feel like I am living a sad small life, but a life.

This year I want to be more dependable, committed, autonomous, skilled. I want to build this distro up strong and right, I want to grow bolder and less afraid. I want to make art, read, learn, be curious, be spontaneous, fluid, quick to spring and do on a whim. Less lethargic, less trapped by inertia, indecision, comforting numbness. I want to laugh with friends, grow closer, kiss lovers, text back, climb trees, get hurt, get up, get to work. Be honest, be blunt, be open. Desire, want, hunger, plan, enact. Stick with it. More life, more life.

You will be ashamed, you will feel alone, you will feel lost, impotent, cowardly, stupid, stuck, stagnant. And you will wake up. And you will try just a little bit, and it will feel like an unfurling. And you will forget again, and when you feel it again it will be familiar. And then more familiar, less impossible, more reflexive, more matter of habit. Maybe one day you will have teeth and be free. More life, more life.

[upthetracks]

1/1/24

I think maybe this is a diary for myself. Not a good or useful one. I never write here and I never remember to read these a second time. But I did just now, and everything is coming back bitter, and I'm standing in my kitchen not eating with an old familiar feeling in my chest and I don't want to write in a useful or good way I just want to talk to someone and I can't. So I come crawling back to this time capsule. A whole year since the last time, a year and change. And I have things to grieve that I haven't let myself, lonely things so I'm sorry for the length.

I'm not calling myself Isaac. But recently I mustered the will to start letting people call me by a new name, instead of calling to myself quiet in phone notes and a hidden tumblr. When new people ask my name I tell them I'm Ira. Ira. I think for now I like it. It felt really stupid the first few times. It did feel forced like I expected. But I was sick of caring whether it felt stupid. It is a name that sounds a bit like my first name. It's a name that I feel could belong to a man or a woman. I like how it sounds, I am taking a liking to being Ira.

I spent about a year loving, and half-loving, and trapped with, and happily bound up with one of the dearest friends I've ever had. In the spring when it was still cold, we left thesis early. We met later on our apartment balcony in the dark, smoked. It is so distant now, but she asked if she could kiss me. It was a moment of honesty and it felt surreal. Still, she is gorgeous and enigmatic and I could hardly believe her when she told me how she felt. She kissed me so gentle and sweet. I wasn't scared, she held me and went slow. It was soft, my first kiss. And then it was hard and hungry. We had been joined at the hip all the last year of school. One day she cut herself too deep and I dropped everything and rushed home. I called a medic friend who helped patch her up. We went to the hospital together and sat through the doctor's questions, silent and refusing to tell him the truth. I took a leap of faith. I thought, I love her already, I've loved her at her worst days, I'll always be there. I'm ready for us to be us together. That year was hard for her. Often she was sunk into depression. She flayed herself with her own words. I wish I could say I was only loving, but it made me angry to watch. Time expanded around me. I worked. I drifted through weeks and months and months. I was aimless, I fell apart from friends, I did not read, I did not create, I did not set out into the world. I distracted myself, I grew numb, the days grew monotonous, I didn't have words, I felt dull and half awake. I starved myself and then forgot how to even feel hungry. I can barely remember that year. I remember a smothering closeness that was heaven and hell, not so dramatic as that I suppose. But she became the only sweetness in my life, and I watched her hate herself so loudly, and I didn't love her well because I didn't know how, or I was scared, or I was too numb. We lost the closeness we used to have, the passion. When the next spring came, she told me she had fallen out of love. I was still clinging.

June was hard. I watched her laugh on the balcony with new flings, new friends, and then fall in love while I still had flashes of seeing her and being bowled over by affection. I got a call someday that month that a friend had been found lying dead somewhere on the south side. Mell. If anyone finds this, you didn't know him. My friends didn't know him. Now I am the only one in my life who did, and what do I do to honor his memory except be haunted by his name now and then at work, at the bus stop, in the stairwell, looking up at the old window to his room on the corner. When I met him, it was the spring of 22 I think. I was wearing a new shirt and shoes, and he was outside of Koppa's asking for ten bucks. I told him I'd run home since I live so close, never done that for someone before. Kept seeing him around, then he moved into the white house on the corner. Used to be a squat house and subsidized living way back then, before they flipped it and kicked everyone poor and struggling back on the streets. That whole forgotten year, that whole span of numbness and barely living I'd sit on his porch and talk a while, or he'd invite me over. Used to make me nervous because who was I to be there in folks' space. Grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth, who was I. It's ugly and it kills me now but I'd avoid him. Walk away from being roped into conversation, take a different street. His requests for cash would grate on me. But when he had me over, it was always warm, and I always warmed up. He could make anyone laugh, could crack a smile on anyone' s face. He was living ok there, had his bed and some food and a stove to cook on. Made me fried steak once, spaghetti another time. We'd walk sometimes. Once in the summer he stopped me from running into a pole, and then stopped me from walking in front of a car - he said watching me walk I'd always be looking up in the trees, everywhere I didn't need to. Now I try to walk and keep my eyes around me, be a little less airheaded. I can't help but think I coulda saved him if I did more, gave more, actually cared enough to do what needed doing and really sacrifice something for once. The last time we talked, it was sunny out. We sat on the bench outside, the painted-blue one. I ran him some deodorant I had in my bathroom. He showed me a flyer for a place he might be able to get, asked if I could help with part of the down payment I said yeah I think so. Never crossed my mind there'd be a last time I saw him. I always saw him, he always came around. I think it was a comfort to him to have something of a friend in me. He was a balm in all that lonely emptiness too. He was life itself, endless energy, endless jokes. I told myself after his funeral, remember that. Keep him alive by being some sunlight for whoever around you needs some. I don't know if I been practicing that. I mostly been trying to avoid the grief, but maybe that can be part of this new year.

[upthetracks]

10) read Alyson escalate’s ‘Gender Nihilism, A Manifesto’ or something like that. Remember being overcome with joy once when I realized I had the choice not to be a girl. It felt like a rebellion and assertion. 11) Would sit on those for a while. Started introducing myself at iwoc meetings as using ‘she/her pronouns I guess’. I’d never been regularly asked my pronouns before. A year or two later, I’d say ‘any’, then realizing she and he seemed strange stuck with ‘they’ feeling it was as close to nondescript nothing as possible. 12) Regularly bind now. But I‘be never felt real masculine, and masculinity feels like a performance as femininity might. I live with a transmasc and transfemme roomate now and it is really nice. I love trans people. My cos friends still see me as a girl I’m pretty sure. Sometimes I’m not sure what I am. What I’d want to be I guess. I don’t much care. I want the lack of gender more than anything but idk how to be a negation. I think I’m read as vaguely queer by people maybe? Maybe a lesbian. I feel like I’m mostly attracted to boys, but I’m not sure that’s the whole picture. Now I am attracted most of all to gender nonconformity and transness maybe. I can’t contemplate how I would fit with a straight cis man all that well - I know he’d see me as a butchy woman or something. And then what, what blooms from that? Probably the same resentment from highschool. I feel like a fraud, like someone who’s barely un-cis or being dramatic or putting on airs. So I try not to make too big a deal about my gender or pronouns or to correct anyone - doesn’t necessarily hurt more than a feeling of disconnect anyways and that’s nothing to the pain my dysphoric friends feel. But I get the feeling I won’t be able to step into myself without letting myself be louder and more curious about my desires.

[upthetracks]

I had a coworker years back named Isaac and thought about stealing the name ever since. I knew an Eli last summer who I took to go look at crayfish by the lake and never saw after that and that name is stuck in my head now too. When did this gender shit start? Idk if I can even say. I didn’t feel like I wasn’t a girl growing up, but then what is being a girl supposed to feel like? A girl isn’t a real thing maybe. Nah they’re real but how many people live their lives or childhoods as people and children and accept the name girl or boy because it’s frictionless enough, sure fine, and anyways that’s what they say you are so that’s what you are. I cast my memory back and remember a history of small things and mold it into the shape of discomfort but maybe that’s a fiction. But then we’re all of us stories we tell ourselves huh? So humor me, because this is how I’ve been saying it to myself, lined up in a row chronological like: 1) Kindergarten I always wanted to seem ‘cool’ which I distinguished in my head from the way other girls wanted to seem cute or pretty. I wanted to be a fast runner and an artist and an enigma. 2) Second grade a new girl moved into the neighborhood and she wore a purple jacket and I was real viscerally off-put by her. I had something against what I called girly girls and femininity. In Highschool I’d come to understand this as internalized misogyny, but now I think it points to some desire to avoid being understood a certain way. 3) Up into fifth grade I had a sorta peculiar way of dressing. I wanted to avoid dressing girly, but I wasn’t trying to dress like a boy. Didn’t know I could. I never wore skirts or dresses and I didn’t like graphic tees or cute stuff. I guess I liked colors and how they paired - I wore plain long sleeve colored shirts with a plain colored short sleeve over top a lot, mix and match. I liked to look cool the way I understood it, before I realized how strange I looked most of the time. 4) in sixth grade I because self conscious and found my style of dress immature, conflated femininity of a certain caliber with maturity and fitting in. Obsessed with fitting in from then on - started trying to be pretty and presentable and wore shirts with lower necklines and learned not to use low pony tails. 5) Seventh grade started shaving, extremely self conscious about body hair. Legs and pits and by the grace of god I never tried for my arms. Dressed more feminine but was still not drawn to very feminine things, still no dresses, no skirts, no pink. Still wanted to look ‘cool’ before pretty. 6) Highschool started a Make-up routine and Never left Home without light foundation, and for a good while, some eyeliner. 7) when boys would like me, it would bring up feelings of disgust, fear, or anger. I remember thinking to myself ‘they only like me because they see me as a girl and make assumptions, I wish they could see me as me’. I like boys, but I’d later think this was a sign I was a lesbian. 8) after senior year I stopped wearing makeup and started shaving less. I came to like a moderate amount of hair on my legs and pits, eventually I stopped all together. 9) my college was full of gay people. Not many from Highschool, or not out, especially in my grade. Made and appreciated gay and lesbian and trans friends, felt comfortable with them, more at ease. Throughout college I dropped more and more female signifiers - tight tops and pants, low necklines, my long hair, eventually started binding and wearing almost exclusively men’s clothes. Started wearing a longer dress and skirt now and then, once I admitted I wanted to wear them in the way a boy might…

[upthetracks]

Wait no one’ll ever see this if I don’t tag it huh. Is that how it works? Always and forever been hiding my face and hiding something and being a bit lonely and inert and feeling more enlightened for it. And being stupid for it, really, and more alone. That’s what being lonely gets you - lonesome. It’s 4am again and today going home the light was cast on everything and everyone stood out on street corners because it was the first warm one and the first bright one in a while. A girl told me she liked my shirt, and it felt flattering to be looked at. One day I want to hold someone in the night, and one day I want to get bruised and bloody, and be brave until it feels worse to deprive myself of life than to live it. I want to dissolve out of sight and become a new face in a new home far away and be so raw and scared it hurts and claw my way into being something with claws and teeth and hunger. But for now I gotta sleep. Good night and I love you if this ever makes it out of the little digital no space I cast it into. Dream yourself an archway and walk through it