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waltham, mass (8/4/25)
It began in the same place most things as of late begin — we were all sick of Boston. We, or I, had come to regard Boston as a stagnant “practice city” of sorts: you practice riding a subway across its miniature train system, you practice social drinking at the nearby undersized dive bars, you practice management of (frankly) diminutive social conflicts, until you grow bored and decide yourself ready to move into a more consequential place. Or, you discover yourself unsuited to any greater pace of life, allow your dreams to sputter out and become damned either to languish in Boston or cast out further to its surrounding country of strip mall hell. And if Boston is a “practice city,” as it were, then its abutting Waltham is worse still — a trash town historically stockading us when we were either Boston’s exiled refuse or aspiring denizens-to-be, in both cases people constantly occupied with these bitter, resenting thoughts of Boston. At least, this was the sentiment we, or I, were operating from. Though when you are so iterated away from the subject of your ideation (Boston), staying with a friend still hanging-on in this distant Waltham, it does become easier to divorce yourself from the simple idea that your actions might have any sort of weight here, as they might in some metropolitan center of gravity. Like that light and airy discourse I so enjoy about just who is fucking who, and then — heavier! — just what all of that fucking might mean. The answer to which is, of course: nothing, if they are doing it right.
There are those who do not agree with such a damnably uncomplicated answer, though, and it is when this discourse of meaning in sex (which, as of now, I am probably responsible for starting at all) grows headier that I begin to hate it. And these conversations do, in fact, often reach such a level of complexity, because even discussion of something so basal in settings so pedestrian has been made the subject of painfully exhausted moral litigation, and then in turn defended from these ethical attacks along the same lines, by way of embarrassingly trite platitudes about “free love” and “t4t magic.” All sides of the discussion have conceded to the fact that an argument must be had about this matter, that all fucking around must have to come with some addressed moral baggage. It is in these discursive moments that I remember those who founded this city — the Puritans — and imagine myself as somehow outside their influence, a real-and-true debauched cosmopolitan with so little ties to my dour surroundings. This is a self-serving fantasy, of course: they — the Puritans — as well founded my entire country. But I do still cling to my own credentials in these discursive moments, after all, the consummation of my present relationship was executed as part of an apparently salacious love affair (a fact which I once tried to shamefully duck away from); I cannot be completely my ashamed sex-repulsed self, either. This act of our cheating was erotic enough in its own right, so much so that every moment spent in our shared company then might as well have been sex; and then as well every moment after, the time spent giddily covering hickeys with concealer and inventing dubious stories for my now-ex to explain the innumerable bruises (“I was hit by a bike downtown, I couldn’t believe it, the guy was just cycling on the sidewalk!”) Erotically, it is hard to top this incipient electricity as the relationship matures and leans back in its seat. Genealogically speaking, too, I have my predispositions to the controversial: my mother seemed to greatly enjoy her own infidelity even as it increasingly became a crucial part of what felled her ailing marriage to my father. The exact sex lives of our parents are out of bounds to us, the children, of course — though my mother never shied away from implying (and even outright announcing) to me her obvious disregard for the bounds of traditional monogamy, in our best moments I was more her friend and confidant than ever her daughter. In our worst, I was a moralizing snitch. I began my present relationship behind a Catholic church in this very same Waltham, last July, when I had given myself completely to reckless abandon. It felt like the right place, and the only possible moment I could ask for her hand. We paid no worry to the infidelity our love had been found in — and then afterward, despite everything, for quite some time we operated our relationship on a basis that was, confoundingly, downright chaste.
So it was that in some similarly retrospective moment, as I recalled my own inevitable likeness to my mother, I became acutely jealous of all that weightless moving-around which I had seen to preclude myself from for months in my emergent sexless stasis, the dynamic falling-in-love and breaking-up and otherwise so-desirable fucking indulged in by some friends of mine, which must make for them such great inspiration, such great writing — or, at least, be a shortcut toward it. To counter, what did all my life’s insipid settledness bring? It brought me to a distant Connecticut lakeshore, watching the July Fourth fireworks with my girlfriend’s family as Lowe’s advertisements played between patriotic tracks on their dingy outdoor speaker; here, where I looked around said to myself, oh God — I realized after I began that this was not my typical mere pleading, but rather a full-throated prayer — please let these people get home safe. So many drunk drivers must be out. By some awful psychological accident, the chastened course of my life since probably-January had sent me careening toward sitting on a plastic deck chair and directly imitating the rote prayers of my Mormon grandparents, the words they incanted during each saying-of-grace at each doomed, fractious family meeting — I myself felt doomed, and all things treasured and libidinal abandoned — I am twenty-one years old and already choosing to forget the vitality of youth. I was alarmed at this betrayal of myself, I lusted for something to break my now-obvious paralysis, and a voice shouted over the inbound train of my religious revival with a horrible question:
Is this it?
Waltham is far from lakeside Connecticut, and further still from Northern Virginia, wherein I was raised, wherefrom I recently received a new correspondence. These messages from home are infrequent (a relative silence I labored after for years in the punch-drunk loudness of my childhood), though they are often staggering. The latest was a text from my sister, equally cautioning me of a new disaster and asking for my advice, written in a nervous cadence I had become acutely familiar with: she was to leave our mother and her awful home, as I had shortly after my eighteenth birthday. Despite the obvious fretting, the phrasing of her desire was simple, exact — she wanted to “cut her out.” I knew my sister’s angle, I knew it so desperately from myself, she was certainly not asking me to change her mind, and she was even less asking me to patronize her so much as to give her my permission. She simply wanted an acknowledgment; and she perhaps wanted the promise that such sudden, radical action could work for her as well. I suppose, outwardly, it had worked for me. Of her plans, my brother did not know. My mother, obviously, also did not know — I swore not to tell her, though this did go without saying: myself and my siblings have an established trust built through years of strife, although one I was concerned had been frayed by the time of relative calm since I fled home (I was convinced my “freedom” came purchased in a Faustian bargain of sorts, canceled out by me unilaterally sacrificing this covenant among myself and my siblings.) My family had not been so plainly neat and ordered as my girlfriend’s, so amicably perched on their lakefront, though I try not to make any more than the occasional, necessarily sparse reference to this historical blackness. Of course, now it comes back to re-interrupt me, manifesting itself again as it was — my mother, for whom I went to such efforts to forgive, I was now told had “reverted” in her behaviors and once again begun the violent arguments and bouts of excessive disciplinary action displayed by both my parents, which I so egomaniacally believed I could ever shelter my siblings from when I was aged eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I had been told my disappearance had shaken her enough to reconsider her own vitriol — now, I am left to wonder if it really could be true that a fifty-one year old woman is always permanently set in her ways, too captured by the sluggish doom of middle-age. I am hurt, betrayed, any number of deserving adjectives for allowing the wool to slip so completely over my eyes in the time since I’d left.
In order to negotiate myself back from the idea of this moment’s immediate consequences (in all things), I routinely imagine myself speaking of said moment, retrospectively, hypothetical years off into the future — a similar, yet inverse process to when I mourned my thought-idyllic childhood as it still lived at age ten, having become aware of my own creeping mortality and the growing anger within my father. My present reality is, through this exercise, pruned of anything which might’ve revealed itself with time to be superfluous, thus cheating my way to the clarity of supposed removal. With this temporal compression, though, comes a certain immaturity; how embarrassing it is for me to permanently be perched, so fragile, at the cliff-edge of my actual childhood, whatever sprawl of abuses I once faced. It is wrong to say I “return” to it in my nightmares of this time, or when I am impelled to recall it by a waking spat of total immobilizing fear (referred to in the DSM-V as “dissociative reactions,” “flashbacks”) — my history instead has already been brought to meet me, folding up everything in between us as it approaches. I am so unaware of this precarity, too, until it becomes clear I have already fallen from the ledge; upon which I am also forced to understand that the distance I had spent so long driving between me and those awful years was in fact only myself spinning along the lip of a teacup — despite the physical chasm, I have iterated myself away from nothing at all.
As I had been forced to reach back out to my parents’ fractured half of the world, either in hopes of imbuing it with my forgiveness, merely securing the funds for my college education, or now attempting a calm voice to separate my mother from a reeling sibling — some of my hardened teenage radicalism has seeped away. I, rather bizarrely, engage in oblivious pleasantries with the people who dragged my early life through a hell of unspeakables. I even allow myself to believe it when they approach expressions of pride in me, likely to selfishly and recklessly reclaim from them what I believe I missed in my youth amid their exhibited twin absence and hostility. In this re-approaching of them, perhaps the faults in my mother’s relationship with my sister reemerged, her realization of the totality in her mistreatments thusly delegitimized by my apparent compromising. Or, perhaps, my mother never realized anything about her mistreatments of my sister at all — the jury is still out. She had missed some of the most informative years in my life, though, but in a loss unapparent to her: while I never
came out to my father (instead, he heard through a long and winding chain of gossip across the less-estranged links in the family), I did go to the effort of
coming out to my mother. In practice it was a vast ritual for me, and as such one which I waited some time to engage with — sparingly, too, the wait spared me the shame and humiliation of giving her what would’ve been the “wrong” answer. In the letter I wrote home to my mother, penned in the cursive she had once, in a more tender year, paid for me to learn at a Montessori school (which I would be ejected from at age six), I told her the conclusion I had finally arrived to. I was not a gay man, nor a non-binary queer, nor any of the abandoned theories, I only told her I was a trans woman — the cleanliness, brevity of my revelation was the only possible virtue to arise from such an alienated parental relationship. It came years after I first began the guilty crisis with myself, embarked upon as I drank from a stolen cache of my father’s spirits (despite his taste for alcohol, he did not take any with him when a court mandate forced him out of the family home). For so long I tried to whittle down a total amateur's analysis of this person I have been all my life, probably; in fact, I do sometimes wonder if that I am trans at all arises from this selfsame project of distancing from my parents, a means to “kill” (in a sense) the boy who suffered them the most — I am lucky that in the times I wonder this, I am as well lucid enough to realize the exact inception of my being a trans woman does not bear any meaning in my daily life. Regardless, neither of my parents were there for that crucial period, which was instead spent by them mostly at our throats or each other’s; instead of finding such solace, I was recalling being tied to a chair with my father’s belt for my refusal to eat, which I neatly sorted too into a vast index of sexual shame during this teenage-years reappraisal of my once-thought idyllic childhood. And I reappraised as well in that early adolescence, when I stashed myself behind doorways and listened through the heavy air as my parents fought about just who was cheating on who, and then just what all that cheating might mean for their marriage. I purchased with my curiosity a debt now paid by my recurrent memories of their violence inflicted upon each other, somehow worse to me than what was inflicted upon us children — I was often pulled into these arguments by them, so my contemporary journals reveal, and asked to take sides and appraise the veracity of their claims — curiously, though, this never came against my will, despite what my contemporary journals also claim. I loved to watch the stage-play drama of their marital collapse, no matter what lies I told about it. I relished in it. I was
willing to be the victim of my own perverse thrills. And I reap just what I sow.
My present life must still be marked at the edges by unclear, muted sadnesses, if nothing else forming the shadow of such an alluring mystery to my friends — or, I'd hope. Not every word is meant to be closely read. Some are meant for a reader’s eyes to skip over, merely noting a blurry shape in the overall structure of a paragraph. And I anyway try not to recreate for those people I love the air of such interminable nights spent with my father in the summer of my twelfth year, in which — amid the low-hanging humidity and screeching cicadas, both inevitably adorning the swampy lakefront cove nearby to which our family’s eponymous Lake House was built — he told us each night of his desire to kill himself. To plunge his car into the Potomac. To make total amends with the life he apparently had come to hate so much. Such wallowing is far too verbose and self-serving, far too stuck on itself — even for me, so formed by it in youth — and he was, of course, no longer suicidal when he told us these things, rather this feeling was one he had left in January of the same year. He was only seeking shock, maybe even reassurance from myself and my ten-year-old brother. Such a bitter man, so completely caught up on the history of his own suffering and whatever wrongs had befell him at the hands of others — he could never forgive my mother for her trespasses and would, in my thirteenth year, exact upon her such awful and unspeakable revenges at the same Lake House, when the low-hanging humidity and screeching cicadas had left for the winter. He could not live in any way beyond it. I resent him as stagnant water, a drunk, an abuser. And my mother, as someone for whom I cannot muster the same ire. I do not tell my sister anything of this, though, nothing of the continuation after you think you’ve left it behind. That forecasting would doom her to it, after all, demand she — as I — continuously set herself against an imagined world in which she is still talking about these awful moments, constantly retrospecting. Hardly advice. Instead, I tell her that disassociating from our parents is an “important decision to make,” as though it were one commonplace as a teenager setting out to pursue a driver’s license. She is sixteen, the same age as I was when I made up my mind to. It is only a coming of age.
Like my father, like my mother, when I become drunk in midday I am damned to sullenly spend the rest of its hours in a post-inebriated haze. And, often in this haze, I am caught up entirely in nostalgia for conversations I once had, with friends or lovers or all — that is not good for me — the abolition of horizons such as that is taken for an inevitability in politics, but we can surely yet salvage our interpersonal relationships, they cannot be entirely touched by the influence of a waning future. As an adult I have realized all the creative potential I once imagined my childhood suffering to possess was naught anyway, and that truly nobody wants another gratuitous airport book about the author’s tragic plight with their abusive parents — even the narcissist self-hagiographer must have some repentant tact! — still, this does not mean my childhood suffering has not
happened, and even despite my resistance it does continue to inform my present life. As this domestic conflict dominated my father’s life, as it dominated my mother’s. Theirs is still a dour world of blasted-out suburbs and pathetic adulation for their own stubborn fighting spirits — manifest in a devoted hatred expressed for one another in courtrooms, and proxied through expensive lawyers, still after so many years and likely to be ongoing even after all three of their children have left home. Perhaps the hatred is justified — or, at least, my mother’s most justifiable. But there are entire industries of divorce court litigation and mass consumer media dedicated to massaging a total commitment to one’s hatred, nostalgia for one’s traumatic history, and entire profits to be made from the discursive and non-productive re-living of a person’s childhood and its resultant infantilization, forever. It is exhausted. And if I am lucky, the demanding shadow of my childhood and its wrongdoings becomes damnably and immorally uncomplicated in my life, no longer my problem, it becomes the light and airy discourse that it is to my friends, only their hushed-tone answer to the question of why I’ve so quietly stayed in tonight. But, I don’t stay in every night, I do not stay in even most nights. I frequently now find myself in the distant town of Waltham, following-up on the regimen we began when we were all so sick of our immobile lives in Boston, and some nights I live, have sex again (perhaps irresponsibly) — with friends, with my girlfriend present, and it is thrilling enough. And, of all that fucking? It means
nothing, anyway, if I’m doing it right.
