good things, actually

Pictures of my friend’s baby. Not really the part where you are lifting the weights but the seconds just after. Megan in her denim apron on the couch hours after dinner’s over, Megan falling asleep during The Amazing Race. Shaved ice, cheeseburgers, tofu bowls. Pictures of my friend’s baby. Megan smiling at the corner when my bus pulls up. The first three sips of cold brew. Ice water, which I didn’t know mattered so much until she told me. There are a thousand things like that. I feel almost delirious when I think about it, the small and large and stupid and unnamable sacred tiny ways my life is better now, now in love, now with her. This watery wall of shivery, embarrassing fear rising up toward my neck, so I wade waist-deep like Rose running the wrong way on the Titanic. I know where I’m going now. I like the Nivea Blackberry lip balm, which is actually very gender, very in-between, very pretty boy, very kiss me, I’m clean, I’m wanting, a pinched, bloody purple pink but only barely. And my skin is very dry. And my mother used to tell me to pinch my cheeks and lick my lips as I was getting out of the car to go to soccer or a friend’s house or a dance in the gym. She’s never cared about makeup. She did not teach me how to use it or that I should. Pinch your cheeks and lick your lips and go and laugh and be, I mean. I do have a baffling confidence of her scrupulous creation sitting there beneath the self-loathing I constructed, later, on my own. Also, Frank O’Hara. And pictures of my friend’s baby.

Cold fruit as one’s best defense against despair and linen sheets on the beds of all the dykes I know. And on ours. I work a job where people are often offering me perfunctory thank yous. I press the button that opens the door. They say thank you. I print the documents. They say thank you. I forward the calls, I reply to the emails, I lock the door, I unlock the door, I know where the extra sleeves of Coke Zero are, I make the coffee, I can find a new roll of paper towels, I can contact engineering about that flashing lightbulb, yes, I will set up the iPads before this meeting, I’ll add that to the schedule, yep, on it. They say thank you. I want to throw up. But I am trying something new. I am releasing resentment. You’re welcome! I grin broadly. You’re welcome! I always said it, you have to say it, I mean, you can toss of a quick, of course! No problem! Yep! I always said it but now, lately, I say it and try to feel that I have been appreciated, to let this penetrate through the skin and inside. I’ve got to be here anyway. Why abuse myself about it? Why feel always so ashamed? It’s just a job. I guess, of course, I thought I would be the one doing the thanking by now. I had these visions. I had this confidence. Sometimes the fact of my failure, as of yet, to become what I once felt certain I would be feels like a tragedy. It makes it hard to breathe. To be in a room beneath lights. To smile and say you’re welcome. Then I remember it isn’t, and then I remember it’s fine. It’s just my job. It’s not my life. You’re welcome!

The new Muna song that mentions the 2, aka the bus I ride to and from work each day. The short haircut I got a couple months ago, even though the woman who did it for me had rancid vibes. For two days, I did not recognize myself in the mirror but, later, after that, what I saw looking back was someone I knew better and closer and more surely than I can really otherwise recall. The nice dentist who gave me two fillings last Friday. I know, he said in a gentle, fatherly way, both gloved hands in my mouth, that what I do is not pleasant. It’s a dirty job, he said, chuckling, but someone has to do it. I nodded. He said try not to move. These Doc Marten sandals that I wanted for years but put off buying and put off buying. Last August, I did it on a whim as we walked through the mall after a movie. Immediately, I took them on a flight to DC for a wedding and for walking around museums and the sticky streets and they’re outstanding. No break-in period, instantly comfortable, and I think they look good. A deeply satisfying purchase. I wear them to work with jeans. It’s LA. I wear them on the bus. Im an LA metro booster. I read on the bus. I read the extraordinary scary lesbian boarding school novel Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran, and I wrote about it for The Rumpus this month. I read Passing by Nella Larsen and was, I think, maybe truly the most actually g a g g e d that I’ve ever been in my life. What an incredibly lean, mean little machine of a novel. Jaw-dropping and cool and funny. I liked Mother Mary. It’s flawed— and, sorry, it’s weird that David Lowery isn’t gay???? —but I appreciate, now, starved for it, someone attempting pretension. We got CinemaScore cards when we went to see You, Me & Tuscany. It felt like half of Halle Bailey’s lines were ADR’d and the whole thing is such a tepid reheat of better movies that came before. But we never stopped laughing and the soda was fizzy. I gave it an A.

I think it is good to have hobbies. I try to make water color painting mine, but historically and still now my chief hobby is running the water in the bath so hot that it hurts, hurts enough to spike my heartrate. I like putting my toes under the flow to savor the stinging and then taking them back when it becomes too much. Dancing. Under the spray, flexed away, under, away, sizzle and soothe, repent and repeat, repent and repair, I am bad, I say, I am good, I am red, I am changing. As I stew myself it is impossible not to think about the days, the decades, when I would have to soak in the hottest water available for hours all day and in the middle of the night just to keep from vomiting, from fainting, from sweating—no, there was always, anyway, a great deal of sweating— on the floor undressed with shaky legs. It was this way for years and years and years and years, it was, it was, I tell myself, though the horror grows fuzzy, all the time morphing into more like something I read about than what I once took for normal life. When the tall, iron door would open in my abdomen and release all the beasts of the world to batter me, okay, the purpling blood pouring for days and a pain that wiped my mind clean. It was awful, obviously, and it was stupid of me to let it go on so long, to find romance in losing days, to suffer needlessly in some garish aping of a starved and spouting Catholic martyr. There is no good explanation for why I didn’t go to a doctor sooner, why I did not express to anyone that my period, that thing, the thing that is a simple biological fact and an ancient curse, was making me want to die for at least seventy-two hours once every thirty days. I don’t like doctors. I don’t want to be looked at that way at all and certainly not by someone who knows what I don’t know and not what I do. I’m a blockhead. I was a rock that bled. Megan was appalled. That “bitch, you live like this?” meme happened genuinely in our home. She made me go to the gynecologist. The very first birth control pill prescribed to me by a shiny ponytailed woman who offers cool sculpting and vaginal rejuvenation in addition to pap smears worked perfectly. Just like that. It’s so stupid. I can barely believe. I don’t hurt. I don’t bleed. I gained weight, which is, we know, we get it, enough of this, sorry, I am sorry but it’s true, like, what I was afraid of all those years. A blooming of new fat is what I could not, in the long winter of my twenties, possibly conceive of taking on as trade for freedom from even this great hurting. The hurting was at least sort of literary to me. That’s what I felt. Blanched in the steaming tub, I was one in a long line of interesting, intelligent women (Zelda Fitzgerald most of all, always, but so many more…….. again, I do always recommend Heroines by Kate Zambreno but possibly NOT if you are nineteen and mentally ill) who were struck dumb and sickly by the ground sharp meanness of their own organs, by the violence they grew in themselves without meaning to, by the need to expel and get empty. And my legs underneath the water looked thin and they don’t anymore and I’m happier. I’m a woman of science. I have breasts now. It’s okay. It’s not great. It’s okay. It’s great. It doesn't matter. I only cry about my body a few times a year today instead of weekly, hourly. I’m happier now. I eat dinner, I watch TV, I have sex, I sleep, I take my pill when I wake. In the tub, as my paperback swells and the hair gets damp behind my neck, I remember the white-out pleasure that wasn’t pleasure, exactly, but the delicious, sudden absence of pain, a vast expanse of blinding nothingness, the moment when the hot water all around me would at last serve to quiet my insides, albeit temporarily, and I would float outside of my body, humming, wasted, grateful. Taking the pill is better. But I do miss that feeling sometimes. The pain was cut out and put in a jar. It took this excision to prove to me that the pain was invasive and not my fate.

So I guess, fuck, well, sorry. Sorry, yet again all I’m saying is that I love my girlfriend, that everything good and generative and hopeful and healthy and funny in my life would be in constant peril if not for my girlfriend. And Arnold Palmers, and the vampire Lestat, and whatever was wrong with Anne Rice. And pictures of my friend’s baby.