re: college / my little selling-out / the fake forgiveness lament (3/8/25)

Let the record show, and show it time and time again, that I was the first: the first among my peers to look inside and ask so why did I come to Boston, anyway? Now we all wrestle with it, drunk and unsatisfied and jobless, but it was not long ago that the question was initially posed to me alone, before I even really stopped to pose it to myself. To it I would give my reason, which at the time I did not have to invent as much of, and then someone would tell me the response: “oh, well you're going to love Boston." No mind was paid to whether Boston would love me, though. And to that: no, it does not. This city semi-stochastically gives forty thousand rewards to the worst of us, and it repeatedly delivers bad fortunes to the good of heart. And, sometimes, me. And most immediately, I’m thinking, there are people here who think ugly of me — and worse still, most of that ugly isn't even true. But in this, no mind is paid to whether I actually care about that. My good friend from Worcester tells me: no, I do not.

At the time she tells me this I'm drunk and amenable, but she never has to press me hard on these things anyway. She's good at that. Just a suggestion, really, that’s how she phrases it. But she sees with certainty through the bullshit I'm putting on. I want to care, because it might lend some legitimacy to the idea that I am a Bad Person, which I must so desperately want to be. She tells me this later. Because how would I know I lived It if I didn't have real shame to cling onto? The yardstick with which I measure my Lived Experience? Some things are not to be ashamed of though, and I am told that some things are not even real to begin with. Some people, even, are not real to begin with. Though, I am in luck, because in my life there is still some shame to be had.

Much is said, rightfully, about the opening lines of the Silver Jews' 1998 album American Water. Of course, because it is iconic, because it is the ideal of a hook. Because the sentence, “In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection” takes up such a wonderful space in your mouth, your mind. But, personally, I’ve always been most concerned with the opening to its more somber companion, The Natural Bridge: “No, I don’t really want to die / I only want to die in your eyes.” This line is addressed, secretly, at poet and lead singer David Berman’s father, Richard Berman, a deeply evil and deeply rich lobbyist which David will succinctly describes as “a world-historical son of a bitch” when the band breaks up and he decides he can reveal his secrets. “I am the son of a demon,” he further confers on us in the letter following the band’s end, My Father, My Attack Dog. And so, in this element, it was a song which always most of all resonated with me. I loathe to delve so deeply into my own specifics, as the machinations of my father’s evil rarely reached beyond the familial space so much as Richard Berman’s had, but my father was too a deeply evil and deeply rich man, one who sent the collapsed heart of my family asunder and rent our skins. I hold him in a similar light to all the worst evils of the world, he one of few who I reserved a seat for true hatred of, and I held no punches in letting him know during the youthful and vital teenage years. It was then, at least, when he knew well of my hate, and he knew well enough to say he hated me too.

Have you even ever rented a room? David Berman asks his father this while craning his neck upwards to see the other man, so high in his tower as David stands in his low and indefensible plain of apparent poverty and addiction. At one point, I would futilely yet angrily cry this upward to my father from my own similar impoverished station, he did not listen, but today I can no longer claim to do this so sturdily. Because in August of twenty twenty four, I decided I had an answer to the question asked in every interview and icebreaker, I had a new reason for why I came to Boston and this one did not compel me to unwind convoluted descriptions of polyamorous implosions and whatever twitter-manufactured styles have come to answer the permanent identity crisis plaguing trans 4 trans spaces and the world. It was simple: I was going to college. I had taken inspiration from the tenacity of my new friends and my new girlfriend, all of whom had made or were in the process of making the four-year divergence. And it was complicated: I needed the money. Money, of which I had precious little, because it had all been burnt up on sustaining the unsustainable, both in terms of past rent and past relationship. Except for my college fund, which sat so large and so ready yet so out of reach — because the conservator of it was my batterer father. He had not closed the fund. He had not spent the money. He could’ve spat in my face and made the whole deal easier for me. He did not. I figured this was due in part to legal fixtures established in the winding, manifold post-divorce settlements, though as well simply good manners — lawyers still loomed over the factions of the family left in Virginia, watching for misbehavior to capitalize on, and I suspect at some point a man must have to tire of fighting. Simply, the money was still there.

Him tired or not, my access to that money depended on one thing: the foreclosure of my accrued values. In the fiery year of sixteen, I made a promise to myself not to touch the man’s money, no matter even if he somewhy gently offered it to me. In the January of this year, I stabbed that kid in the back. And then proceeded to, in what has now grown to a chain of forty-plus emails, twist that blade deeper and deeper. My mother, who retains a deep hatred of the man, still encourages this. She just wants to see me in college. She doesn’t care that it’s some two-year commuter school built into the side of a subway station. She doesn’t even care that I now regularly make formal niceties with my father to accomplish this end. I simply patter away at my keyboard in another request to him and hope I don’t fall too deeply into the fantasy-writing of it, the story I’ve constructed to make this all more amenable. In which the man I am writing to is not the same as the one who raised me. Even as a kid, in the heat of it all, I would sometimes wonder if adulthood might mean compromise with and forgiveness of my parents, who were then, among other things, responsible for making my life hell. I did this legitimately with my mother. I still do not know if I ever will with my father — instead, I reason that I just need the money from him. And I need an answer for the question of why I live here. These things, more than I need to not betray myself-at-sixteen.

When I'm walking around the city I always feel as though I may be a tweaker, an honest-to-goodness freak of society, because I think there is no connection between myself and the people I'm looking at when I'm in wait at a bus stop or some other place you're meant to leave. We have our own little parallel society, so we may as well be addicts and the like. We only interact with the yuppie freaks when we need to, when servicing them at our low-wage jobs or weaving through them in sidewalks and restaurants. Those are the sorts of places you try and assimilate in, then fail to. I suppose I only pretend not to have a rich father who is bankrolling my education. But these people do not pretend at all, or they just do a very bad job at it. “You see,” I could begin, “it does not count, because he was very bad to me, and my mother, and my brother when I was younger.” I can delude myself into thinking I am being paid some sort of restitution for what I’d endured. “Recompense for physical and emotional damages,” I would say. But that is not the reason for the money. I am paying tuition from a trust fund. It is even a little difficult to reconcile the man sending my school thousands of dollars and covering bookstore purchases with no complaints, with the man who made my growing-up years so dangerous. I do want to indulge, and ask myself: Did those years even happen? Maybe I am misremembering.

I always end up passing the Little Building — which is actually rather big — next to the Boston Common and adorned with flags for Emerson College, as I make a commute across town after my classes at the community college. I have a friend who has a friend named Emerson. I wonder if they've ever seen those flags and paused, like it is painful or just fascinating to recognize someone in an object. Like when I pass the sandwich shop near my apartment, the one named Roxy, and I always loiter my eyes for just a bit longer than I ought to. The sandwich shop named Roxy is alright, though, if a bit pricey. I went there with a friend when she visited Boston. She though it would be funny, and it was, I suppose. As my ex still floats around this city, so it would seem, though mostly in the margins of the pages, too ashen to pay any mind beyond her now-historical, now-symbolic role as an archetype for something in my mind. And sometimes, I listen to songs where they mention my father’s name. I used to avoid them out of principle. But him, he is now relegated to similar vague spaces as her. Is the virile of my hate a tapped resource? I rarely see them outside of screens, confined to objects. I just feel a general discomfort when I engage it now, and it is blasphemous to say.

When my friends and I are meandering up north of the city, where we go with only tepid frequency, we almost always end up charting a path through Tufts University. This most recent occasion, though, was different. We entered into what we made out as a church. This was on pure whim, or something like that, and I think we were all scared because upon entrance, it immediately became apparent that what appeared to be an Orthodox mass was in session. I had never voluntarily attended mass before. We were quiet, we did not move, we did not dare run afoul God, and we sat at the very back on a bench behind some wooden dividing wall — let it symbolize our still-obvious veneer of contemporary irony and guilt. But we did let enough of this down to really listen to the priest, who spoke of forgiveness, and I thought that I had made the very concept a bastard. I re-admitted my mother into my life with mailed cursive letters and the express message to her that I would forgive what I could not forget, because I could not have lived her life much better than she had. Not with what she had been through so recently. And I meant that in my heart. But upstream of her was pouring out the toxins of my father, architect of so much of her suffering and the rest of his litany of unforgivables, things of which so many are not even mine to forgive. As if I would want to. So his return had only been with the unceremonious subject line: College. And then, so many times over, Re: College. Hey dad, here is my receipt for a TI-84 graphing calculator — in no part genuine.

Despite how willing I am to bend my posture just enough to take his money, I do never think of forgiving him, except seldom the nights where I feel less so like the status-quo atheist and more so like a Bad Christian. It is then, when I wonder if some day I might be able to put it all up on some shelf in my heart. Along with the highway-overpass town where I grew up and the crueler things about it. But that day is not now, not even soon, so I line my pockets and my school’s pockets with his money, and then I pretend the shame and self-hatred I feel about it all constitutes some amount of absolution for this little song-and-dance that we do. Sometimes, he references with such vagueness the “hard times” I fell on as a teen, and after which wonders out loud if I ever recovered. He never references what or who exactly caused these “hard times,” but I do like to think he is at least being semi-sincere when he inquires. And I say, oh, it is easier now at least. At least it is easier now. But I can only speak for myself. And I’ll listen to the opening track of The Natural Bridge, where David Berman offers his father an ultimatum, after it coming the sting when his father only laughs at him (so the song goes). And I’ll only dream of being a person of such moral stature again. But if I had any consistency of beliefs, I would’ve by now written an album consisting of seven songs and a single chord and then I would’ve set myself on fire in front of everyone who would be so stunned by the truth of it. That’s what I would’ve wanted for myself, at sixteen. But in choosing to live I chose to compromise on these things. Now, at twenty-one, I can only tell myself all these aggravating little half-truth half-answers when I start to ask a question.

And I don’t know about you, but I moved here for the Boston Red Sox.

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.

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.