all ocs are trans unless i specify otherwise (2/10/25)
NOVEMBER 22, 2023 AT 2:32 AM. NEWPORT NEWS, VA.
Maybe it is not the city. The criss-crossing unprotected intersections, the roaring highway and all the useless derelict parking spaces. They swerve their vehicles into our drive-thru and they refuse to yield. I am terrorized by them. I had thought one would save me. But then she died. I have a train now, and it passes my house by four times a day, shuddering and screaming as it goes, laughing at me as it disappears into the distance. A cruel pitch. God’s funniest joke is to place things just out of reach. And it is so damn sophomoric, but I fall for it every time. What if I die here?
But it is not the city. It was here for centuries before me, it will likely be here for centuries after. Unless the sea should swallow it up. It was not made as some curse for me, even the town in which I was born was not. It is just a place for me to defer my hate onto. It makes me feel better, I get to rest the intangible and incalculable of loneliness on the mantle of something physical, something to personify while I search for some surrogate moth-lamp other town to take me in. There is nothing else to blame. Yes, this city is devoid. Yes, it is boring. But boring alone is not damning. Circumstance is. I got to be here initially by triumph, and I get to languish here by not even cowardice. No, just circumstance. I can stretch my arms forward maybe a foot or so, a mere margin of error in an equation of some five hundred miles. I bought those train tickets to visit back on March Twenty-sixth, and ever since then I have been tortured by that. I had expected the loneliness to follow, but never in such force.
It is scary, because to be alone is not enough. I could not see you. Please, do not fall out of love with me, this distance kills but please, do not abandon me in my absence. I like it neither. So, you got the letter I sent you, and you tell me that it has been taped onto the west wall of your room. I hope it is shown more reverence than the past letters I have sent to past lovers. Who I only hope have thrown out those letters, who I only hope never even read those letters at all. I hope my unsteady cursive was enough for them to give out. If they were my words to give, then they were mine to take back now. I take them back now. I am in love with something real. I hope that when you see it, you have no reason to doubt it. The miles get so rough.
NOW AT 12:37 AM. CAMBRIDGE, MA.
It is a time of death. Evil men flex their hands on levers and sharpen their blades, while my friends mourn and I mourn. I remember where I was, when the love for Newport News died entirely in my heart. Now I look back on photos of it and feel puzzled, unsure how I could ever reserve such strong emotion, one way or the other, for such a blank place. And now, the darkness does not die at the limits of my city. I’ll stand on the BU Bridge at night, in anticipation of cameras for a sort of self-serving cinema, but no such crews ever show. Instead I am alone and cold and I feel a bit dumb for being here so late. I try to think of the words which I could say to death, or of death, and nothing at all crosses my mind. So instead I remember what my girlfriend said so simply: “a year ago I had alive friends who are now dead.” I think of that and cry, because maybe there is nothing more to it. She tells me I am a great writer, but I do not believe her. Because I could never write something so potent, concede in a place where nothing else needs to be said. Where nothing else could even be said at all. It is tragic enough, so why embellish it? I cry, I cry for some time. Her eyes carry something else behind them now when I look at her. It breaks my heart, it reminds me of my place.
It is a time of unfulfilling jobs. When I was leaving my position at Taco Bell to forge north, my assistant manager pulled me aside to talk. There was nothing left to be said, I thought, because I had already tied all conceivable bows, hammered in all applicable nails. I was really only working the final few days as a courtesy. But he needed to tell me one more thing: I was good at my job. And the store manager did not appreciate it yet, but she would once I left, and the store began failing to meet service speed goals, and necessary cleaning began to be neglected. She would realize that I was the best person on the overnight crew. That is what he said. I derived some selfish pride from that. But working as a butcher now, no such payout can be found. Instead I let a thousand strange men and women eye me down and ask me questions about Boston Globe and New Yorker recipes which I do not understand, all the while they attempt to undress me and demystify my gender. Some say “sir.” Some say “ma’am.” All the same, I resent the seconds I can feel myself depositing into the ordeal as I cut open the shoulder of a dead animal and wrap it for my judges. One requests a filet mignon roast, then looks to me to ask “when you cook this at home, do you use garlic butter?” All I can do is laugh, weary, and tell her that I cannot afford such a cut of meat. To which she laughs in turn, shrugs and says, “me neither.” But while walking off, I learn she is speaking a different language from me. Because she leaves her car keys by the scale, and I can see the logo on them. Lexus.
It is a time of the city. When I was very young, I was enamored by cutaway books. Seeing the layers peeled away from such impossibly complex metal structures as subway cars and skyscrapers, I cannot forget that even in my adult age. I can still see it all coming crashing down on top of me whenever I go downtown. And there are more people here than there ever have been, running and walking and driving and sitting there across from me reading a book by Patti Smith, which reminds me of books which I should be reading, which reminds me I am wasting my time waiting for the doors on this train to finally close. It is all a system far bigger than me, which I so selfishly want it to be brought down to my size. But even my own size is so frighteningly complicated, when I sleep on my back I can feel my heart falling through my body toward my spine. It is poised to fail. The employees at this coffeehouse are going to spit in my food because I breathed their air without a determinate gender. “Sir, is your name really Heather?” I can feel that they want to ask. “Fuck you.” I know they want to say. It is a life sentence to have a body at all.
In leaving Virginia, I had demanded Community. It is good to be gone from a place, because you can daydream about the gridlocked highways you will never again be stranded in. But it leaves something to be desired to be somewhere else. Even if we can share money and give refuge to those of us facing homelessness, even if we can hold the worst of us to account — we still cannot avoid death, we still cannot help but be passed by for employment and dignity. There are days where it feels it is not enough that the country wants its working masses to hate and avoid one another, it also wants my specific kind dead and insane. And it has made sickening headway on both. If this is the case, then now comes the time to reckon with the reality of being an assailed minority, really genuinely imperiled, and it demands that we all understand our lives as that of surviving in wartime to a certain extent. A death is not just a death, but a casualty. And all for something we despise in ourselves, anyway. To be trans is to accept that you will be endangered by those within and without your social space to a degree above even the modern extent of it, but not only that, you will be asked to be proud of it all, too. A year ago I had alive friends who are now dead, also, and you do not even get to feel indignant about it. You just want it to stop. You just want to be something else again, something simpler. You just do not want to consider who might be next. You just stare at abandoned social media and wish we all could have flowers to leave around a gravestone engraved with a Real Name instead, at the very least. There is nothing pretty about this, not even in another town. And your camera crews are not even enamored by your tears anymore. It is actually sad now.
community college after an entire year of boston a retrospective (2/6/25)
Yesterday I descended poorly into self-parody. I boarded my very own reviled Orange Line, still so nervous at its personal associations, and I read my very own reviled copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season In Hell. I hadn’t even realized the nature of what I was doing until I was well into making my transfer at Downtown Crossing, weaving through a busy tunnel which I consider, only pass through. And by then it was too late to return, so still far too early to be anything but self-aware in my act of reading. By myself I was again cursed. So unlikely, too, I hadn’t even actually touched the book itself since I bought it last year in Providence, where it had more so been a physical totem reminder of the situation when I actually did read much of Rimbaud’s work: hunched in some forgotten corner of a URI campus library after my very own reviled breakup. And at the station I remembered my thinking at the time, my God, I wish I had been shot. I wish I had been shot by my former lover. That would’ve been so real. But instead I was, as then, only thumbing through the very same words again, now being the things I am made fun of for. Eyes dead-locked on my self and my past and my past-self, knee-deep in all the visual trappings of an English Major, still mired in the same fake battle as I was while visiting URI, and so clearly, so warily, aware of it all. Not that it helped. Now I could make everybody else on that train aware of exactly what I was, too. I was on my way to Community College.
When you get off the train, there is still some doubt about your intentions. Until you take the left turn towards the school, and you remove it all. The normal lesson routines were suspended that day in my Literature And Society course, and in their stead, a guest speaker was brought in. A genuine Vietnam War veteran instructed to inform us about the bona-fide nature of Real, Actual War. This, in preparation for us to begin reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, another entry in the ceaseless liturgy of war-themed literature. I haven’t read a single word of it yet. He spoke to us of war, all wars, the past war and the current war, the one just war and now the unjust wars, sparing no pause to give sympathy for American empire. I was stunned. No soldier had ever come to my high school and decried Nixon, let alone the Cheneys. No, they demanded quarter, asked for respect and took a discount. Community College seems a different thing altogether. Or, different enough. And as well, between his condemning breaths, he spoke of brotherhood. He called it a good thing to die for a good cause, and an even better thing to keep fighting for one, just as he had found after his tour ended with anti-war and environmentalist activism. He spoke of brotherhood. I rode the train back and it was still orange. Brotherhood seemed a depleted resource.
I come back home to the fake war. Lord knows, yes, men and women do still both die and kill, but not here. And triggers are not pulled in Brussels by ex-lover poets named Verlaine, not anymore. Nowadays that manner of sort is reserved for the pages of the Rimbaud chronology that precedes many publishings of his work. No, we can only ever get a hate just as impassioned as the love — so, not very! It follows, then, for myself: Instead of blood or any sort of cacophony, simple evil slander is leveled against me across instant messaging. Thoughtless and crude. Without effort, without weight. These are the dividends I am paid for spending an entire year on Boston — and that the internet is not real. Despite its name, Discord is not real. The people you meet there are not real. All that is real is the ashamedness most associated with these things. And for some people, that is the closest to reality they can get. Beware of them. A girl with whom I did fake polyamory, until I really cheated. We had fake sex, until I really abstained. She told me a fake life story, and I really believed it. Until I could no longer, it bowing under the weight of its own contradictions, which were so obvious in hindsight, weren’t they? These things have all been said, and yet they do not remain buried. Because I am not worth the effort for her to shoot, and I know that her memory is more a symbol for disaster or an albatross to bear than anything resembling a real person, anyway. She is an archetype. Or just a framing device. Those don’t cease, only real things die real deaths. Plastic does not die, and I cannot get over plastic. These things are painfully enduring.
Though, what of the real that I spent? I did still give my months and thousands in my own money to a relationship best described as a particularly involved T4T-themed scam. I get angry at some complicit fraction of myself, and then angry at the skyline of the place which gave her forty thousand dollars on top of my depletions due to some heavenly accident (and I as well got angry at that place’s subway cars, stations, street names, neighborhoods). I am never getting those things back, and now I am nearly twenty-one. The passing time never asked me if it was being wasted or lied to. Nevermind the consequences, which will be rolled over as her soon-to-be exes reach out to me for clarity instead of lies, as I once reached out, forever — or perhaps that itself is the consequence? — I am concerned that I might now never touch the space beyond parody and lies. Perhaps I have no faith in anything. My life is an homage to the wrecked lives of a thousand other girls who could not heed or failed to heed the advice: to stay away from the manipulators, plural-fakers, sex pests and other phenotyped alienated predators of the trans community. My life is a love letter to the genre. Derivative, I hate myself for that.
A year ago I was on a train. February Seventh, Twenty-twenty Four. A thirteen-or-so hour slog from Southern Virginia to Boston. I was kicking my old life aside, I was finding my starry-eyed, capital-C Community. I was so sure of it all. I was going to love the date. I had done everything possible to commemorate the event, marked on my wall and in my journals, I made presents for her never to be reciprocated in kind, I even had meticulously curated an hours-long playlist for it. But the playlist is gone now. The gifts I brought, too. Those things were too Actual for the life I was about to spend the next few months living, before my hasty airlift out. I hope that, if nothing else besides being cause to more loudly ask myself if I am a bad person, this past year makes for a good story. Because it certainly is not a factual account, and I know full well that it makes for very poor poetry. And I cannot yet work my way around a full analysis of these sorts of people. And I am so, so sick to death of it all now.
The first paragraph did not happen. It is mainly fiction I invented. The second, third, and fourth are a bit more reliable. The fifth is pathological. Though I did, in fact, read multiple volumes of Rimbaud in a URI library after a breakup, and so too did I buy a personal copy of A Season In Hell in Providence months later for the very same reasons I gave. I did pull those exact musings about wanting to be shot. But I did not bring the book on the train, I decided it was too much to bear before I even left my apartment. I have never read anything on the subway, ever, lest I be seen as Trying Too Hard. I did not even read the book that day. I only read through Patti Smith’s introduction, repeatedly, wishing I were the boy she described Rimbaud to be. I considered burning every piece of paper I had ever written on. “What he fears most is to be judged a fraud by God” I could say the same of myself, I kept thinking, but I do not even fear God in the first place, do I? I am far too selfish, aren’t I? The closest I am allowed to get, in this present era, is neurotically avoiding six dollars and sixty-six cents. And the closest I am allowed to get to Patti Smith’s depiction of Rimbaud, is in what she says he cries out through his writings: “Think of me!”
By the time Verlaine was released from jail after serving a two-year sentence for the shooting of Rimbaud, his ex-lover had already given up poetry. Maybe he did the smart, reasonable thing. He was gone. I do not think of this everyday, but I do come close.
THE LYDIA CONFESSIONS: a post-facto artist’s statement of intent (1/18/25)
showcase ˀ̣
virginia (10/2/24)
Singer-songwriter David Berman loved to mention places in his songs. Each one given a little love and a little purpose, popular status be damned, each one was perfect for whichever vignette he was portraying. Cleveland is for drinking and Kentucky is for leaving. San Francisco is for seedy men and Manhattan is for hosting strangers. Nashville is for losing love and Dallas is for scoping out your potential oblivions. All given neat and tidy form and function. And then there is another place, stretched thin across his discography: Virginia.
In his songs Virginia lingers, it hangs. It is the expanse in which subjects wander from Kentucky, lost in thought, directions to old farmhouses are followed, phone calls are placed from train stations, "strong young poets" are interned in psychiatric wards, and -- above all else -- the birds of Virginia, they fly within you. It is there, in so many of his lyrics, though not always as stated as other locales. It is instead taken for granted, and why wouldn't it be? Berman himself was born in Williamsburg, a historic city on Virginia's southeast coast, and for a time studied in the foothills at the UVA before being taken on by my now-adoptive Massachusetts in order to study at her UMass (Amherst). When you are from a place, you don't treat it right. This is doubly so for Virginia.
I, for one, could not believe it when I first heard Virginia name-dropped in one of his songs. As a native, I couldn't let myself believe it. We are so undeserving! (With apologies for the reference I am about to make), I recall hearing a fairly accurate description of my very own home state in the podcast Those Good Old Fashioned Values: to paraphrase, Virginia is a crossroads of Northeast and South and Appalachia. And, yes, it distills all the worst of the politics and cultures of each region, the debauched and cold northerner met with the morally bankrupt and seething southerner, mixing with all the runoff backwash coming down from Appalachia and the Blue Ridge Mountains. I hated her, I hated her, and immediately I bought my way out of the Commonwealth when Boston presented herself. As far as I am aware, the rest of my family feels the same. My mother clamors at retirement elsewhere as my brother averts his gaze outward.
But each place is a canvas, sometimes. You don't hate that poor city, it did nothing to you. You hate the people in it and the experiences you had. I hated my childhood and the way I was sent reeling from it for years, all across my home. Virginia did nothing, but Virginia was nothing without a native culture to its name. Virginia has tourist merchandise of our demonic colonial past and Virginia has town centers with parking garages. Nothing there existed to distract me from what was happening, what had happened. A few months removed and I have clearer eyes now, but I still see her in a poor light. Though one a few degrees tilted to the right.
It may as well still be a place for leaving and never going. It is so, so overdone to hate your hometown, though, that even despite my copious reasons to do so, I feel a bit bad about it. That ever-living contrarian in me, in everyone. There are still things to appreciate -- I still remember the electricity I felt when I discovered that my teenage years' idol, Car Seat Headrest, had formed in a town just a few miles over from mine. But those were vapid and fleeting moments. A town a few miles over from mine still looks like my own, and the familiarity didn't bring me any closer to the art. This could be anywhere. The band didn't stick around in Virginia. It had fled west, like I once intended to.
Brightly lit smoke shops on Denbigh still haunt my memories, folded back into an impossible timeline on a single street alongside childhood car accidents on overwide roads and a garish, pathological tangle of hateful houses with hateful families. Things separated once by years now breathlessly play back-to-back when I least want it. I rode my bike drunk at 3 AM on shattered sidewalks in Newport News just after I learned to ride for the very first time down my too-steep, too-steeped driveway in Fairfax. No matter how hard I try, I will never have been born someplace else. Because the truest way to feel about a place is hatred. To hate some place in a certain, delicate semi-paternalistic way is to know that it is where you belong. I didn't formulate that specific that specific shape of hatred for Virginia, but I do at least hate Virginia -- and it is how I know I will always be from there. More so than Boston, yet of which I am still too smitten with the city trappings of the subway and the scene. Though Boston does get there, so slowly. Maybe all places do. Maybe it is right for us to keep moving. Knowing someplace means that on a long enough timeline, you will hate it.
You can leave the state, leave it forever, but Virginia never leaves you. Maybe more than most other places, some of who have the constant din of collective humanity to overwrite the old, Virginia is far too lonely. And so all that nothing she has, only empty strip mall parking lots where the burnout kids did drugs laying on tire skid marks, her hands are damned instead to be full with everything that happened to you. Virginia follows. After you are gone, all the places you signed your name behind bleachers and in wet cement, all the blood you left in the bedding and all the shit you forgot to take, lives forever. Virginia accumulates. It scares me, to know that this is the only way it'll ever be. I do not particularly hate the person I am becoming, but I can so clearly see me becoming that and the process by way this happens terrifies me. Doors are closing to never again be opened, and I think about how thoroughly I set my own path when I first decided to pay any mind to language. Choices made without my consent or with such reckless abandon have now set my life. It can't be helped. Matt Christman, in the October Thirtieth, Twenty-twenty episode of cushvlog, says that he is certain that he will not contract the then-looming COVID-19 virus. Then, for a moment, he pauses, then stutters. Then, he continues. "Until I get it. And then I will have always been destined to get it."
Ryan Walsh, in a piece written for Stereogum on the twentieth anniversary of The Natural Bridge, likens the album to something of a Pan-American road trip, Berman arriving at all these various places across the contiguous forty-eight states, all with something to say. Yet across this extended journey, there exists an overarching piece, the title of the album itself. As a friend of mine shared, The Natural Bridge is in part a reference to Natural Bridge State Park in Massachusetts, just south of the Vermont border. But I only recently discovered that there is another natural bridge which Berman knew of during the album's creation, in fact, the one which played the operative role in naming the album. Southwest of Charlottesville where Berman studied, some ways down I-81, there lies the Natural Bridge State Park of Virginia. Berman told Walsh that he had been in the tourist gift shop when he realized he could hijack all the promotional material there for his own album, in some ways an attempt to claim some helpless piece of Virginia. And all across the album, Virginia stands, from Albemarle Station and more. Virginia lingers, Virginia hangs. Virginia follows, Virginia accumulates. Like it or not, forever.
Last fall, a friend-turned enemy-turned friend in Worcester told me that adulthood was when the homeless ask you for cigarettes. This happens to her all the time, outside train stations and dollar-themed stores, yet even now it has never happened to me -- despite my frequenting of the same places, despite my own habitual carrying of cigarettes. I am left unsatisfied with her answer. And even more so back then, when I first heard it, as I bided my time out in Southern Virginia, when I couldn't stand to hear something that would ask me to leave my room and be in a city that I'd already forsaken. Didn't they know I was meant to be in Boston? Boston, where my love was? Boston, which when I left for, I swore was the end of The Hard Part? Boston, where I would never be asked for cigarettes (but I did not know that back then)? Boston, where I am now?
She would turn enemy soon after she told me the bit about cigarettes, actually. Fate, or my sort-of-girlfriend, would dictate as much. And so too was it fate, or my sort-of-girlfriend, that would drag me up here, to Boston. That's how it felt. I had been entirely sold on the narrative of magic that is so stapled to trans 4 trans styled love, alongside the polyamorous angle which I would later be caught off-guard by, but still choose to accept. I was just that in love. Why not at least try it? I decided as much when I visited my sort-of-girlfriend, then turned girlfriend, in Worcester. I would hitch my proverbial wagon to her. Finally, a reason to save my money for, instead of burning it on whiskey and amarettos bought on my behalf by my coworker. I was becoming tired of messaging him under his Discord screenname of "Mommy's Little Femboy", anyway. I was nineteen and ready to give over my life to this girl I met online. Or, I said I was. And there must've been some truth to it, too, because I was already charting a course for moving in with her as soon as that winter, after her Housing Situation began to fall through in record time.
When you're just starting out in your transition, especially when you are reeling from a broken home, you haven't yet lost the stars in your eyes about The Community. In my case, I hadn't seen a functioning Community to speak of, not even the small-scale sharehousing that is the nuclear family, no, that all imploded a long time ago. Human beings are social creatures! We haven't had our hearts ripped out by capital, we couldn't! Or, at least not us, not us on the fringes of society. We know better by necessity. It happens back when the internet is a tool for organizing and not mass alienation, when the girl calling herself an angel is doing so with all the earnest of a real poet. You hear murmurs of these stories about exploded queer homes and other high dysfunction and tell yourself that they are edge cases, that you will learn and do things differently. Again, I was nineteen then.
And I am twenty now. In the very same Raising Cane's as the one I went to with my now ex-girlfriend after I first moved into what was our slapshod basement apartment in Roslindale, I would celebrate with my friends my moving in to a new apartment (namely one without her in it). Only six months later. Which, perhaps to my own credit, is longer than she lasted with her then girlfriend and friends at their place in Worcester. We would all reach back out to each other in the wake of my breakup, rebuild burnt bridges and thank God for that. Because now the facts of the matter are cleared in my own mind, and private. I am not here to re-air grievances, as much as I think that'd be cathartic. Instead, only to corner myself: how did I make this mistake? How did I fall for her? In the months after, during my interim exile in Waltham, I would find out a crucial detail that only confounded me further. It is not that she is so special, so alluring that I dropped all my knowing-better for her sake. No, the sort of person she is, is in fact very common in The Community. And I fell all the same. How?
I think I at least scratch at something when I talk about stars in my eyes. Living in a state of depression and a Commonwealth of Virginia, I didn't get the chance to steep myself in the incredibly boutique inner politics of The Community. I wasn't inside something enough to be able to do that, not even with my participation in the internet, because whenever I stepped outside to go to work or bike half-drunk to a Target, I was very much on the outside still. The world I was still a part of spoke louder than any capital-D Discourse or horror story I could hear online, it spoke louder with a voice between the disphit U.S. Navy tranny chasers and their dipshit Trump 2024 flags. I did not recognize the type of person she was. Now I do, and so do the people who ask me to relay my recent life to them. Their eyes light up with recognition as they immediately incorporate her with whatever avatar for this certain type in The Community they were unlucky enough to know. And they tell me: "She accused you of cheating when you decided she shouldn't be the only one to sleep with other people, too? She threatened to kill herself when you left, too? She tried to make a callout post about you afterwards, too?" Even more granular things: "She called herself plural, too? She tried turning your longtime friends on you, too?" But these aren't things I knew at the time, it was not an archetype I could've yet been familiar with even as I was warned of it by her exes. I was ready to engage with her in her world, instead. Because she had one thing that the TV static monotony around me didn't -- a narrative.
But, it's such a plastic way of interacting with the world. Because, like we all learn as we get older, life isn't a story being told with neat plots and defined character traits. Things meander on and we act at the whims of our inscrutable unconscious. In order to convince yourself it is all a part of a plot, you need to cut various events out and invent entirely new ones, write your own fiction and come down with a bedridden case of "Storyline Fever", as David Berman once put it. It was a way of living I wanted to try with her. Because this goes deeper than luring in trans girls from shattered homes and exes they aren't really yet over, this exploits some deep hole with the way we are made to live in twenty twenty four. Absent any Gods or real communities to give ourselves over to, we have to fold back inward, develop some narcissistic cult of ourselves. She had done it so well, so well that she very well might believe it all. But I was too much the skeptic for it to work. I suspect most people would be. She invited me to live with her in a world of shonen-influenced make-believe, and so I came with her to Boston and it instantly began to fail. Like it always would. Quickly, neatly, I would be shunted into antagonist to whatever faux-religious holy war she is convinced her life's story is.
Engaging with it all set back further still whatever maturity I had been cultivating. Maybe even more so than when I plunged into drinking in the latter half of twenty twenty three. I still don't adequately grasp why I ended up making the mistakes I did, and so I cannot trust myself again after it. I'm keeping a close eye on myself as things develop again. The war-weariness of right now might do me some good when it comes to growing up, anyway. Being out of that awful apartment, too. I can do all the things I wanted to, but couldn't, when I was stricken with the guilt she would instill in me for leaving the house to be with people. I can visit friends, I can apply for college, I can even learn to play guitar. But I am afraid I might never be an adult.
Recently, a steady friend in Worcester told me that adulthood is a product of forgiveness. She is, I will say, religious with a conviction that I seldom see despite the consistent ungrounded appropriation of religious decor by so many in The Community. And so it is not only this forgiveness she speaks of, but also of accepting yourself as a part of something greater, as not just a hyper-Individual but a piece of God, who is all around us and is all of us -- I still recall when she, months ago, paraphrased to me physicist John Wheeler speaking of his theory of the Universe: "It's all one electron!" I call on this memory when I want to return to some perspective, or just feel a certain chill down my spine. Though this all scares me worse. Because despite how intuitively it comes to me, I am afraid I cannot, I cannot believe in a God and there is no true community here left to turn to, nowhere but in. In this late era, it is my problem as much as it is every other individual person's, but it is not Our problem, so to speak. In a video log with a name I can no longer recall, Matt Christman spoke of this, how nearly all of us are rendered immature by this alienation in ways that our God-fearing ancestors could never be. I've carried on with a weight on me ever since hearing that. I was seduced by this immaturity by Fate, and my ex-girlfriend, and now I can never be unaware of it again. I might never be an adult.
At the very least, even bereft God or community, I have found people who will help me move, who will give me a floor or a couch on which to sleep and recognize what's coming before I allow myself. I am so deeply thankful for them, and so deeply thankful for the chance now, months later, to finally sit and reflect. It is the only thing I have, maybe, that sets me apart from the people who have nearly ruined my life. The exile has ended, I am back from the suburbs. As long as we do kind things for each other for the sake of each other and nothing more, there will always be a chance to rebound, a place to slowly mature in a world of petulant storytellers. In a world of petulant storytellers, say something true.