On loneliness and automation
A fancy coffeemaker is a good replacement for companionship. At night, when you are getting ready for another workday, you can gently place coffee grounds into the filter using the specially-made tablespoon (that clicks into the side of the machine, of course) and you can hit that "delay" button like this is not a gift from current you to future you, a gift for tomorrow you to thank past you for. You can erase that memory for eight hours.
If you time it just right, coffee will be ready before you yourself are ready to get up and you will smell it from upstairs and it will almost feel like someone else made it for you. You can imagine that maybe someone crawled out of your bed before you and before the alarm and made you a cup of coffee. It will be a communal coffee experience! Even if you must go to your job, someone made you coffee!
You can venture downstairs with a self-deluded optimism about what you will find. Sadly, what you find will just be your coffeemaker. This will not actually be a surprise. You know you slept alone and that you only have Last Night You to thank. But you also have your fancy, automated coffeemaker. And that's as good companionship as most people ever get.
Pandemic Revelations of Young Queerness
Last night, somewhere around midnight, I came across a TikTok of a Tweet. I won't take this time to develop the intricacies of this format, mostly because nothing in the video mattered to me except the tweet and that someone else thought it relevant. But it is interesting that this is the way I am consuming media now, like all the methods of social media are rivers that somehow end up in the ocean of an app for Zoomers.
This was the tweet:
This was the tweet:
I get a lot of #lgbtq content on TikTok, because the algorithm is infamously clairvoyant, but this post was so absolutely meaningful to me because it took something very personal, very unresolved in me, and condensed it into approximately twenty words. I have tried periodically to write about this part of my life, when I was living it and in the five years since, but it's not easy to write about something that is still so confusing, that hasn't gained any clarity in my heart.
I had a very real and very complicated homo-erotic friendship in my freshman year of high school. It was so gay, in fact, that I wrote endless pieces of heartfelt poetry about it and once, in 2017 on a bus in China, a very long journal entry. I have a computer documents folder named "Some Gay Shit From 2012" that contains this poetry, which I leave here for your viewing pleasure. 
I checked the date on this. May 5th, 2012, 1:58 am. I actually remember this night distinctly because I had gone to see her boyfriend's composition premiere. She had sat between us in the audience, holding both of our hands at once. Believe me when I say that I do not demonize her for that.
Clearly, past writing projects (2012-present) have not resolved any of it within me. It is still so significant to me that after reading the tweet, I looked through the depths of Facebook to find a photo that would prove that this relationship was as gay as I remembered. I couldn't find it, but I know there exists a photo of me and this girl holding hands in the hallway. The photo is taken from behind, mostly overstuffed backpack. It was friendship in the loosest sense, meaning the tightest sense, the closest one.
I have often thought that this was one of the purest loves I have ever felt, despite its confusion and complexities. This friendship ended for unknown reasons, although I can say that I know it had something to do with an abusive relationship I was in. I think she chose him over me, but I never can be sure. It is a conversation we have never had. I do not resent anything before this and this betrayal is somehow less important to me than demystifying the four years before it. When all of us are trapped in our homes, worrying about people we haven't spoken to in years, I am thinking of her. And I do wish I could talk to her.
Period Drama, Period Drama, and Everything I Have Worried About Today
I have recently been in a period drama phase. I have watched nearly two seasons of "When Calls The Heart," a Hallmark Channel TV show about early twentieth century Canada, a coal mining town, and a wealthy heiress-turned-schoolteacher. It is a very bad show that I have enjoyed very much. There is a "handsome" Mountie in it, which my mother noted has the potential for endless jokes. Before I found this show, I was watching "Anne With An E" because of my love of Anne of Green Gables. I'm reading Emma (sort of). I believe I am trying to escape my current living situation by thrusting myself into various foreign eras. So far it has worked marvelously.
The second section of this blog post is supposed to be about my menstrual period drama, which to be frank is neatly non-existent, but I thought it would make a good title.
The second section of this blog post is supposed to be about my menstrual period drama, which to be frank is neatly non-existent, but I thought it would make a good title.
Break-ups
On the day of my first real break-up, I went to a tea party for local people who had applied to Smith College. I wore a little skirt and didn't really cry. I was ready for sexual liberation. I tried on a corset and let a man spank me in his old car in a parking lot. My mother sometimes asks me what I did as a teenager that she does not know about, but I do not think she would be surprised by this one. We are all eighteen at some point.
In the next significant relationship, there were two break-ups. All I remember about the first was him trying to slash my tires and me yelling, "suck a dog dick" out the window at him. He never spoke to me again, so I infiltrated his online chat group and pretended to be named Robin. The second time we dated I broke up with him when he told me he was seeing a 17-year-old. He was 23.
In the aftermath of that relationship, I immediately started dating a man who was horribly swept up in my psyche of that era. He wouldn't want me to talk to him, but I wish I could apologize. When he broke up with me, I was devastated for weeks. I asked him to have a conversation with me. I told him I could've loved him and he told me his friends said he seemed much happier without me. I have no doubt about that. I shouldn't have been dating.
This time around I know I made the right decision. No one deserves a relationship with someone they cannot trust not to disappear at random. No one deserves someone who says they're not sure they can love you with their whole heart and then continues to date you for three more months in a half-assed manner because you were too loving to let them fuck off. It was a lot like waiting for my dog to die. I feared it for years and by the time it happened I was relieved. And I came home to her absence and I cried. But I was glad we were all cut loose.
In the next significant relationship, there were two break-ups. All I remember about the first was him trying to slash my tires and me yelling, "suck a dog dick" out the window at him. He never spoke to me again, so I infiltrated his online chat group and pretended to be named Robin. The second time we dated I broke up with him when he told me he was seeing a 17-year-old. He was 23.
In the aftermath of that relationship, I immediately started dating a man who was horribly swept up in my psyche of that era. He wouldn't want me to talk to him, but I wish I could apologize. When he broke up with me, I was devastated for weeks. I asked him to have a conversation with me. I told him I could've loved him and he told me his friends said he seemed much happier without me. I have no doubt about that. I shouldn't have been dating.
This time around I know I made the right decision. No one deserves a relationship with someone they cannot trust not to disappear at random. No one deserves someone who says they're not sure they can love you with their whole heart and then continues to date you for three more months in a half-assed manner because you were too loving to let them fuck off. It was a lot like waiting for my dog to die. I feared it for years and by the time it happened I was relieved. And I came home to her absence and I cried. But I was glad we were all cut loose.