Can I tell y’all a secret? Oh God, I don’t know if I actually should tell you this secret. I think this might be the one that forces me to change my username just in case any future student or employer were to find this… You know, I actually tried just now, but I can’t. I am not techy enough to know how to put my blog under a pseudonym now that it’s up and running with my name already on it. I figured out how to change the author name, but I don’t think that would make it disappear from any search results with my full name because of my email. And, anyways, I think that would defeat the point of what I’ve been trying to do here if I changed it now. So, here we are again. I’m here and you’re reading me, and I have something disgusting to say. Hello! I hope you all are well.
I am on my balcony right now, recently furnished (thank you, Dad) with an outdoor glass table and two iron chairs. Not quite so far off of the Call Me by Your Name fantasy I told Maizey about earlier this week, the one where I sit outside in the sticky heat and eat a soft boiled egg at my wrought iron table. It’s hot and sticky with that late-summer Virginian humidity; I am in a flannel because it was already dirty and I didn’t particularly want any mosquito bites, although they mostly go for my legs more anyway (less hair). There are also no soft boiled eggs, only my nearly finished Raspberry Rose Poppi and my lit “Coastal Linen” candle that I bought about a week ago because it reminded me of Eden. It smells just right outside… too concentrated inside but out here on the balcony, in the open air, it is perfect. Il est parfait. I don’t know if that’s right actually, I just know that “imperfect” is imparfait, so I kind of guessed.
Oh secret, my secret. Dear God. Do I want to be that real on the internet? Melissa Broder has been. Melissa Broder taught me things about myself that I would have never stopped to ask.
I would have never known I could even think the things Melissa Broder showed me.
That person that I love, I had to chuckle at myself today on my walk, he is so incredibly like the other person I’ve loved before. Not in the way he talks or how he looks or the things he likes. Only in his patterns and the very weird, very slippery role that silence plays in time with his body. Only this time, I stopped walking along the path that led me to dying the last time. I haven’t spoken to him in probably a month. I think about him now and then, but, like I said, the love was normal, and it was first platonic before anything. You’re probably wondering where he came from in all of this, and I am thinking about him now because even he knew about Melissa Broder. She’s one of those people whereby knowing me, people come to know her in small capacities. One day earlier this year he had asked me what the craziest kink was that I knew of. I said some people like to vomit or make other people vomit, and, sometimes, they like to eat it… he didn’t ever really let that one go. I think it’s funny how I love him and yet, the person that I loved before, the one that I still have nightmares about, both bear so many resemblances to one another. Neither one of them are or were even real. I couldn’t see it up close because dans le vue petit there were living, breathing bodies in front of me with working eyes and mouths. But now, the further back I look, I just have to wonder… there were living bodies, but such false, grandiose ideas of futurity, coupled with distorted, exaggerated lies of the present… and all for what? Why did one do that and why did one start to do that; the latter of the two just decided to spare me at nearly the last moment? I don’t know. I’m just glad that nothing ever came of it. I am giving myself grace in the same way that I have had to give myself grace for all of those other decisions I made with no foresight for myself or my life. I love, and I don’t think that my love has broken the same pattern that my brain and my body has. And that’s okay. My brain is striding out toward the finish line, my body is close to out of the woods, and my heart will continue to find the cracks of light little by little.
OKAY, THE SECRET. It’s kind of like that Gracie Abrams album. Something about a secret. What’s it called… “The Secret of Us.” I shared a playlist on Snapchat earlier this week that I was pretty excited about. Actually, this will take us right up to the secret, I’m not even kidding. Okay, anyways, I made this playlist last November… somewhere around when I wrote that post on here about November. I think something about the month really just struck me. The playlist is one of my best creations of alt-fall-whiny-longing and also orange leaves-close-to-Christmas-stuck-in-a-college-town-that-feels-nostalgic-(homecoming pain)-even-though-you’re-still-in-the-middle-of-it. Jesse Rutherford’s on the TV right now: “Baby Came Home 2 / Valentines” from the playlist. Anyway, I’ll link it here in case anyone wants to listen. At least one person saved it from my Snapchat.
My secret actually comes from that exact time last year, just after Halloween when it was basically too late to wear a costume, but people hesitated to call it November. I wrote about it on here before, the night the clocks changed. I’m getting ahead of myself.
Here is the preamble:
Today I watched an interview of Lena Dunham from about 4 months ago where she talks about her memoir Famesick that came out recently. She said:
“One of the many contradictions of my life is that I like to express myself in totality… I was born with such a healthy dose of guilt, shame, [and] self-hatred, which is almost in direct contrast with my pathological need to express myself.”
I resonated a lot with this part of the interview, her talking about the dissonance between the guilt and shame she experiences while also needing to create and express herself fully. To experience this almost feels like some cosmic joke of nature because it fundamentally does not make sense why, simultaneously, as one achieves their most authentic representation of self – whether it’s through film or art or poetry or narrative – there is also a nagging self-loathing that almost makes the act seem deplorable, a humiliation at best. That is, in essence, me as a writer. When I reread my words on the “About” tab that I wrote almost a year ago now, that’s what I see – someone who understood that writing candidly and earnestly was her lifeline, even when it felt like the biggest joke and most nonsensical word vomit on the planet. At that point I just didn’t have the language to explain those thoughts in the way I do now. I was digging in all of the soil around the idea, never quite landing on why or what felt like it needed to be explained away. And there, in Lena Dunham’s words, is what it is. That’s the explanation. It’s the shame and the embarrassment that lives uninvited and unnecessarily in my experiences and subsequently my words, as they take shape, about those experiences.
Over the past year I’ve come to understand even more that most writers, save the pompous self-important assholes, all experience this and, in some form, are engaged in a practice that is actively self-mutilating by writing, reliving, and understanding those experiences through every angle, every style, every aphorism that comes from living as a person stripped of a filter and seeking out the fullness of life. That understanding can be applied pretty liberally with this secret too because, despite how I said I will change my name (I’m not), I do want it to be out there. I want it to be out there, and I want it to be in my words because it’s real. It’s probably one of the realer moments of this past year.
I think that some of the shame exists, in part, out of fear that some may read it and not understand it. You might understand it if you’re still here or if you’re the same type of sick as me. But that’s also one of those sticky things about being a writer, I’m not going to tell you what you’re supposed to get from it. I write it, I hold tight to my meaning of it, and then I let it go. So, I am letting it go. Hear me out in totality. I had forgotten about this small 3 minute duration of my life and, as I stumbled upon it in my notebook today, my mouth fell open and a laugh escaped from deep inside my chest. I hate it, but I want to tell it to you.
“My heart is run ragged. His eyes, oh my God his eyes. I wanted so badly to tell him when I first saw him. But then he knew. He knew where I was from. Preemptive measures were taken – questions must have been asked. I wanted to know where he was from too. Who made you? What house did you live in when you first rode a bike? What do your shoes smell like when you take them off at night? And still, his eyes. I could not look at them. I never do that. I never look away, but I had to. He knew too. His fucking smile and that thing he was saying with his eyes: Yield to me. Do you want to breathe me in?
“So, you’re from Indiana?”
So, I did breathe him in, the closest I will ever get. Burned into my brain his scent, touched it to my mouth. I hope he wouldn’t mind; he would. That stays with me. Playing with his handcuffs, looking at me like he had something to say. I had something to say… Oh, he plays guitar – I’ll ignore that. I can’t help but notice some resemblances – No, he’s not. He’s… well, there were a lot. His shower, his room, his beanie. No, most of all though, striking in its difference – his voice. I have never heard a man’s voice like that before. Sit there and just talk, I’ll lay my head on your chest and just listen. And in the bathroom when I put the Old Spice in my mouth and touched it to my teeth, wanting to be close to you, let that die with me – but if you’d ask, I’d tell you.”
Totality, totality. There she is and that’s what I did. I’d probably do it again too.
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