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missouri and my identity (11/6/24)
"Just like there are only so many sorts of ways a person can look, there are only so many sorts of taste in music," is what my coworker imparted to me in the wake of my shock. Because what do I know of coworker music? In my working life it has been identified by myself and the online others only in the KISS FM surplus, the imitations of Top 40 and inexplicable The Beatles covers that trickle out of the overhead plastic speakers at retail jobs. It follows, then, that when a man removed from me so both in age and geography plays the very same tracks I might've listened to on the subway commute there, it startles me enough to ask him: "How?" "If I looked though your high school yearbook," he continues, "I'd probably find somebody I thought I recognized from my own." This theoretical grouping of music tastes as a category of people is the same concept by which recommendation algorithms such as Spotify's must build from, and by which David Berman was convinced that he was entirely within Pavement's shadow. And, it is the very same as what compels me to build my own taste in music -- which I had once privately prided, though never voiced aloud, as seeming so eclectic -- around what I now think I am funny when I jokingly refer to as the "western canon", though what my girlfriend now thinks she is funny when she jokingly refers to as "rym bait." But I can't help it.
If you're from a family like mine, chances are the first music you heard was Mozart. No doubt some tactic lifted from the pages of a parenting advice themed self-help book on how to raise The MIT Grad, or God forbid a book on "tiger moms" written with very questionable faith at heart, the ritual of placing plastic headphones over the womb and playing the popular ideal of classical music from an mp3 player had swept the suburbs of the early 00's. And if you are from a family even more disconcertingly like mine, the next music you heard was likely by They Might Be Giants. Perhaps your father loves John Linnell, perhaps they've recently come out with albums about the alphabet and numbers. He will beat you far later, but now he has his music to share. Sonically, experentially, that is about all you need to be primed to cry to "Ana Ng" as an adult.
It does all add up, and the score is, in fact, kept. When you finally connect to the internet, so unsupervised and with the stars still in your eyes, the music you wind up finding is not only defined by discovery algorithms, but very much by what your parents had played for you in your youth (as with many things). Those first few formative years, the years when all the music you listened to was about playtime and school -- because that's all that dominates your life at that age, the ABCs and 123s and playdates with the Mormon kids of your parent's Mormon friends, all of which you are beginning to see nakedly and with no priors. Good luck. A decade or so of wading through the Imagine Dragons-adjacent trash of a free Pandora account, then whatever I could run into on YouTube, and the inscrutable workings of my Spotify subscription's algorithm, I was not only prime for listening to Ana Ng, no, I was at full-blast on the so-called genre of midwest emo.
Full-blast enough to need for see it for myself. Real and authentic, I convinced myself. Something must be out there in the bona-fide midwest. So at a time when I was scraping by on a few hundred dollars a month, I resolved to take what was left of my car and my checking account and migrate west for a bit. I needed time away from Virginia, you know, and I luckily had a friend in Missouri. Despite the risks associated, manifested in such times as when I emptied my checking account and had to beg for fifteen dollars to pay for enough gas to scrape back home, I hardly even needed to rationalize my decision. I knew what I was expecting, it was more important than all that. I expected such a monumental drive west to be more memorable -- but I was wrong. I had expected this new frontier, past the gateway to the West, to be more memorable. I was wrong. Because what I first noticed was not the stupendous difference in our states, so far apart, but the sameness. As my car rattled into the westernmost point of Missouri, eighteen hours after I began driving nonstop, a thought flashed across my mind and never left, especially as the music proved it to me again: This was only Virginia, with all her copper wiring stripped out. I was there for a week and yet could hardly fill a page with what I remember from it. The novelty was seldom, the novelties were only two:
Above Branson, Missouri, there is a great steel cross, painted down its face with twelve fat tears. It stands so obscenely tall that it needs beacon lights to alert passing airplanes to its presence. And I couldn't tell you much about the shows I would end up attending near its shadow, not even the one which was nearly busted up by the police for a noise complaint. But I could tell you about the cross, seeing it rise over the highway well after midnight while I was nearly too busy nervously watching the arrow on my gas meter tick toward empty to notice. It felt like such an anachronism, certainly having been born from some Bush-era performance of "compassionate conservative" revival -- but it was opened in 2019. Entirely surreal. I was not roused, I was not turned toward the good book in that particular moment. But I did find what must have been the last open gas station just afterward. You can see a lot of hollow Protestant religiosity in Virginia, but never of that scale, which nearly was enough to make up for the state tourism board's cynical insincerity. If God can be in the bramble of lit-up empty white billboards I saw driving outside Indianapolis, could He as well have been in the lit-up empty white cross outside Branson? I carried that.
By the streets of Springfield, Missouri, there is a decaying parking lot with hardly any painted spaces still visible. Weed is still not legal in Missouri (though this made little difference for me, I am still at an age where all substances are illegal for me anyway), and this parking lot is where we bought it, from a trans woman who my friend explained conducted audio production and mixing for local live shows. I was nineteen, not even yet having begun HRT, and primed now to be completely starstruck by the prospect of her. Immediately after having only briefly met her, I decided that ought to be my path. Being so craven, I set aside my sixteen-year old's dream of retreading Will Toledo's footsteps, or whatever. It should be my job to perfect the work of other people, Lord knows I didn't have my own. But what was the work of other people? It was that simple. Later that day, I realized. In a basement in southwest Missouri, a place with such a chip on its shoulder about its "midwestern identity", and it follows a place so desperate to prove it, I realized that even this invigorated midwest emo now failed to resonate with me. It was only so demystified now, the alibis and new air I wanted it could not provide me. My playlists then began to wither and the short-lived audio mixing dream died just before. So Branson is the midwest, sure, but I do not care. I carried that, too.
It was these things that made me realize that the type of person I wanted to be had so suddenly changed, changed from my parents making and now changed from my own. And that type of person I now wanted to be was no longer one who listened to midwest emo. Because it was missing something for me, something which I imagined could possess the Real Midwest I had seen, and I was disillusioned. It was not actually about something I could not be sold back at home in Virginia, as I had imagined priorly. Because the genre, in truth, goes no further than you can throw the Suburbs, and I wanted to see something else. I wanted to hear something truer, something foreign, that metal cross and the consequences of that quickly-dead dream. My eyes crossed on the drive back, and I passed a thought similar to how my coworker now thought just a few days ago: sure, the days of looks determining behavior have been gone since the time of Ancient Greece, but if there's only so many ways to appear and so many ways to listen to music -- I extrapolate, then there must be only so many ways to be. So many ways to want to be. Our sense of music is greatly tangled up in our sense of self, it seems, and so I would too carry a third, more dormant novelty. A worn old GAP coat which would take me through the inbound mild Virginia winters, and stay with me further into the far harsher, far later Massachusetts winter I witnessed earlier this year, where the sort of person I wanted to be would change once more. And, it followed, so too did the music I listened to. I left the coat in my ex's apartment when I moved out this summer. I finally had no need for its associations anymore.
But, I still listen to bands I picked up when I rolled through that among a series of very doomed relationships, just as I still listen to some of the music of my very doomed parents. Even when other people are assigning it to me, even when I am trying to be another thing for them, I still must be pulling something honestly for myself. And now time again, I walk myself into being every single joke anybody has ever made about me. My own nascent worldview tells me I must avoid self-parody, but surely, in group settings and in the presence of those we look up to, one always will become a parody of themselves. At least, sometimes. Why shouldn't you? As the old saying goes, other people know you better than yourself. So what do I know? I listen to Yoni Wolf despite my ex, I listen to John Linnell despite my father, yet I also listen to both because of them. I cannot help but question it. I must be more similar to them than I care to admit if I listen to their music. I must be more wrong and they more right. After all, did I not date, was I not raised by? There are more similarities than I'd ever care to admit, and I cannot ever hide from it when I browse through my saved albums. Perhaps the gap between our selves lies in the ways we choose to receive the music we do, perhaps on my worst days there is no gap at all. I wish I had a steady conclusion. Either way, I'm set. I will be accused of stealing from things I have not seen or read from people I have never met, because I will be permeated by the same music as a hundred others just like me, because there really are only so many ways to want and so many ways to be. Even if this may change. I may have found my way to want to be, and it was not actually in Missouri nor in midwest emo. And between me and my coworker, me and my ex, me and my father? I have arrived, I can only try and mind the gap.
digital graffiti of an eye (10/14/24)
When I first moved here, months and months ago, the people I met loved to tell me stories best described as "portending." It was all a flurry of names, half of which I did not know, and places, all of which I did not know (outside of one or two mentioned in a Modern Lovers song), and the shape of only a single vignette really stuck with me through it. Told to me by a friend of mine, it would be the most prescient, though I did not know it at the time -- or rather, I did know, but I did not want to know. Of course, I will not relay specifics, but it is likely one you've heard before: girl moves to a city, and after a long enough time begins to see things on its walls that she hates. Reminders. Things put there by other people, representing other people. So lucky me, the public works of both Boston and Cambridge can bail me out of some of these instances of vandalism. But cities are made of the stuff that happens in them, actually. And white-out still leaves indentations, even when it is painted over.
This constant buildup takes up more than just physical space in our Real World, it also much more visciously permeates the digital space. While idling for a bus recently, I read a piece by Lauren Goode for Wired describing how she was persistently trailed by photos associated with her abortive wedding by way of the "memories" feature now-ubiquitous in all photo storing apps. I myself am hounded in the same way by years of accumulated photos, of the interiors of psychiatric wards, of the aftermath of messy domestics, of my own doomed relationships. In an interview with Goode, an employee for Pinterest refers to this consequence of data accumulation as "the miscarriage problem," so to speak, the algorithms across the internet know to cater content to you if you are having a baby, and they do not know to step off if you have a miscarriage. So the old axiom repeated to us in every computer lab class went: "if you put something online, it is there forever."
It doesn't just stop at photos, or even advertisements, though. The piece reminded me of something a friend pointed out to me. While sitting on the deck of my new apartment, shortly after I had moved in, she noticed how obsolete her set of pinned locations in her maps app had become. Names attached to places now long-vacant, queer housing situations long-fallen through, new adresses not yet made old. Reminders. She said it was nearly something out of a Phillip K. Dick novel, to which I nodded even though I hadn't read anything he'd written since freshman year of high school. I figured that I must've gotten the gist of what she was getting at. This bizarre science fiction we live, to immortalize a fragment in time kept just as alive as it was when we set it. I was unsettled for a bit after. Returning to this thought, though, I decided to look back on my own.
When I first moved here, months and months ago, I was completely lost. As a young child, my mother had barred us from the DC Metro -- and anywhere with numbered streets, more generally -- and by the time I was able to leave the house I was huddled into reliance on my car until I was nineteen. Living in a city for the first time, I had no idea how to navigate by subway, or bus, and consequently found myself often leaning on the crutch of Google Maps to get anywhere, taking tangled and backwards routes to get across the city for work. It remained that way for a few weeks, until a friend finally noticed my error and set me on using Apple Maps, which she said had far better public transit routing. It was after this that my Google Maps account remained, now locked in stasis. There remains the uncomfortable pins from my childhood strewn about Virginia, the town halfway to Harpers' Ferry that I marked with the help of an ex, certain that it was the one sung about in Beach Life-in-Death, all the places I knew and hated for nineteen years. And, in Boston. Shadows of my prior twenty-twenty four and my spectacularly failed relationship stared me down. People I would come to know were absent from the map, and the home I had then still was marked so defiantly. The brand's old label still sits next to the new look, unaware of its hypocrisy. This haunted me, this I had curated for myself.
The Boston portrayed to me by Google Maps is a very different city from the one I see most days on Apple Maps. And even with Apple, it is one which has to constantly be updated to keep pace with the Real World. Bike stands are put up for the winter. People move. Little red and blue dots disappear, only to reappear elsewhere. In her article, Lauren Goode references Kate Eichhorn's book The End of Forgetting, from which she pulls, "our lives play on a constant digital loop." The life I had then still lives on, then, in the implications of this map. Ultimately, this fake world on my phone is projected from a server farm somewhere in a Valley, which will too dissolve in the rain or be subject to physical human forces, just as the posters and graffiti associated with my past do across town. But it is in transit, but it is always in transit, again and again and again, bounced between mirrored servers and other peers. I can close the app, it doesn't cease. I could prune it all from the map, I could even delete my Google account of twelve years. But I won't. Some part of me doesn't want to disturb what I put there. So it exists there. A reminder.
Subways are transit, cars are transit. They are conduits, they are between here and there. But they are too places unto themselves. It is for that reason I had various rituals when driving, I never played Tyler The Creator while behind the wheel again after getting into an accident while listening to New Magic Wand, I always kept my hands on the bottom half of the steering wheel. And it is now why I attempt to avoid that final stretch of Orange Line, inbound towards Forest Hills, and keep a weary eye out for Car 1461. These impermanent places can still violate us. I can still wince as I do in corners of Fenway, just by opening an app on my phone. It's inescapable, now. Staring down a ghost of what I was. Static in transit, always going somewhere but never being there. Moving to a future doomed not to happen. The bus ends up being late, and I feel sick.
showcase
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.
summer post-mortem (9/5/24)
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.