How do you make a girl know she’s beautiful? What is the system for that, what do you show her, how do you give her a new set of eyes and turn her face back to the mirror?
There is a huge difference between writing a book, which is a private activity I engage in with myself, and wanting to engage in overly intimate personal conversations with strangers, which I pretty much never want to do.
This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible.
I drank some coffee and my outlook improved immensely. I was ready to write some poems and, I don’t know, get drunk, run around, take my shirt off and get kicked out of someplace. You know, live a little.
There are a lot of queers starved for entertainment from their own community.
The horror of knowing someone and living with them and even thinking you’re lucky and then wham and now you know that every person is really two people and how can you ever know what the other half is up to.
Maybe if everyone walked around being in touch with each other’s hidden pain it could work out and even be beautiful, but it doesn’t feel safe to be the only compassionate person on the planet.
Maybe we could all take care of each other, I dreamed.
You try to be good, to be good and loving and nice and not hard, not tough, a sweet nice girl, not ugly, not full of ugliness, but people make it impossible.
She didn’t know that my heart was a sandstorm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn’t know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her, my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful.
She broke my heart, so now I have to write about her forever. It made everything different. It’s something that can only happen once.
So I kept talking because nothing gets me going like knowing I should shut up. Oh, I should be quiet and full of potential like all those still flowers, but I know I am a weed and I’ve got to blow my seeds around the garden.
Being cast out of society early on made you see civilization for the farce it was, a theater of cruelty you were free to drop out of. Instead of playing along you became a fuckup. It was a political statement and a survival skill.
I felt pure the way you feel after you vomit, kind of light and strangely holy, like having taken a sauna in hell.
I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn’t everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse.
The worst thing about depression is how true your vision seems, like misery is the only correct perspective and everything you think when you’re happy is a sham. I didn’t even want to be happy anymore because I’d rather live in honest misery than fake bliss. I.
You can’t let the apocalypse rule your life.
In Buddhism, when you have a problem, YOU have a problem. It’s yours. When you get over the tantrum you inevitably throw about the injustice of this, it’s actually quite nice. If YOU have the problem, you also have the ability to solve it.
They were living exciting, crazy, queer lives full of poetry and camaraderie and heart-seizing crushes. I mean, not that night, but generally. That night they were bored.
Our lives make awesome stories, especially if you don’t get too attached to the thread of your own narrative.