nothing happens Here or There

back.

back to a bedroom with walls striped of posters, of song lyrics carved into doorframes, windows meant to be “picturesque”—catch a glimpse of a frozen retention pond, a plastic snowglobe deflating on someone’s lawn.  catch a glimpse of the neighbors who make people nervous because they Drink (the husband sits in his garage all night, calls out to me sometimes, used to be lewd until i cut my hair), the neighbors who make people nervous because the husband is Black and the wife is Puerto Rican but they are Very Successful Doctors so it must be some kind of mistake—they’re White like everyone else. 

back to drawers stocked with forgotten clothes, shelves stacked with books read before i really “got it”—before all of the genderfucking, the fucking, the privilege-examining, the late nights spent talking, talking, talking about what it all meant, before i positioned myself in a context where Before was something that Never Actually Happened.

 

back to where they first started staring, started asking that broken record of a question: are you a Boy or a Girl?

answer: Sometimes.

i am writing this blog in the closest thing to a Local Café.  i am writing this blog at Panera.

two soccer moms are loudly pondering which bathroom “It” will use when “It” looks as though It might be heading in that direction, towards the pair of gendered doors where It might reveal Itself.  Boy or Girl.  A or B.  (in high school I was notorious for overanalyzing multiple choice tests; talked my way into writing papers instead).  they are sorely disappointed.  “It” just wanted a glass of water.

back.

back to filling up days with documentaries, unnecessary tasks on To Do lists, five hundred pages into fiction.  escape escape escape.  wake up breathing hard because It was dreaming about fucking again but It couldn’t figure out how It was doing It.  body thrown into uncertainty worse than before because now It has two and It brought the Wrong one back Here, the Here where That Shit Is Fucked Up.  always.

Chicago in five days—back to too many phonecalls and connections.  organize, organize do the “good work” because someone has to, because It is selfish enough to want things for Itself that must be granted by Others.

escape escape escape bodies and politics in theory, in costumes, in play.  how?

i am stuck in places the way songs stick in my head.