she/her, 23, wlw, jewish
i don't really tag stuff except for laugh rule! be warned, I stopped tagging properly a long time ago. sorry if you're not on mobile bc I haven't updated my desktop theme in literal years.
aesthetic blog: @petaledfleur homestuck blog @sarcastickarkat
I've been on this website far too long.
Telling young zoomers to “just switch to linux” is nuts some of these ipad kids have never even heard of a cmd.exe or BIOS you’re throwing them to the wolves
i taught programming to middle school kids last summer and I don’t think you understand how bad it’s getting.
a lot of these kids don’t know what a “folder” is. some of them don’t even know how to right click. I asked my class to put a folder on their desktop and half of the students did not know how. these are like, 11-13 year olds who’s parents thought they were tech literate enough to sign them up for a programming class. most of them did not know how to add a bookmark on their browser. most of them could not touch type.
basic computer literacy is evaporating because everyone does everything on their phone now, but schools are getting rid of any computer classes because “all the kids are using computers all the time anyways!”
I hope they’ll learn more as they get older but many of them wont. the divide between “basic user” and “advanced user” is quickly shifting towards knowing the most simple functions of a computer, and the more people who don’t know how to correctly use their devices the easier it is to sell them shit they don’t need.
“humanity is inherently selfish and bad” bbbrrrghuhjfkg. humanity is seeing a stranger’s grocery bag break open on the sidewalk and harvesting fruits and veggies from the branch-like cracks of the asphalt for them, just because you can. humanity is helping a lost child find their mother on a crowded beach, looking for the ladybug-patterned parasol with their hummingbird-small hand in yours. it’s an elder’s fingers wrapped around your arm as you help them up the stairs because the elevator is broken, and feeling like you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing, like this is what you would’ve been doing had you been alive centuries or even millennia ago. there will always be a heavily pregnant woman who will smile at your when you give up your seat, a nice blind man in the fruit aisle who will ask you to please pick the riper plantain for him, a tired cashier whose face will light up when you compliment their tattoo sleeve. humanity is connection
i know we’re both just messing around pretending to be whole but look at me. if the train was coming would you move. if the ground was falling from under your feet would you even notice or would it just be another tuesday for you. if somebody stabbed you could it hurt worse than you already do. what i’m saying is that i love you but i think we both drive over the speed limit when it’s raining. what i’m saying is that i want to hold your hand and i understand about how you sometimes have to sit down in the shower. what i’m saying is that i’m here for you and if the train comes please move.
i wrote this 7 years ago, somehow. every day someone else finds it and whispers to me - oh, i understand this. something always turns in the wash of my stomach: i am so, so glad you feel seen. i wish you had no idea what this post was about.
i wrote this while working in a program for new writers. on wednesdays, two of the teachers would be contractually obligated to read our writing aloud to the group of 300+ teens. i had never read my work in public before. i had something like 6k poems and was panicking about it. none of them are good enough. sometimes the train is howling. it is hard, actually, sometimes, even as an adult.
and then i thought - what is one thing i wish i could tell all of them. each of these 300 kids. what did i need to hear, at 16?
i wanted to tell them about the day you wake up, and the sun feels warm finally. i wanted to tell them about carving a life out of soapstone, your hands turning bloody. i wanted to tell them that sometimes yes - it actually does feel easy. i wanted to tell them about weddings and cookie dough and long road trips. about albums of new music and old friends laughing and the sound of snow falling.
you will learn the pattern of the train. you will learn to close your eyes when you hear the engine rumbling. you will learn to let yourself have the grey days in their lily-soft numbness. sometimes it will feel like life is wet paint, and god has smeared your canvas across a sewer grate. sometimes it will be so boring it isn’t even pronounceable - the tenacious, soundless blankness. survival isn’t just ugly nights and wild mornings. it is also the steady, unimportant moments. it is just driving with your seatbelt on. it is calling a friend on the way home. it is burying your face into the fur of your dog.
when i had finished reading this poem aloud, the auditorium was silent for a solid minute. someone stood up to take a picture of where it had been projected onto a screen, and then three more people followed the action, and then - like a bad internet story, people remembered they were supposed to be clapping. kids came up to me after it - thank you for writing that. i think i hear a train coming.
i would write this differently now, i think, but it has been 7 years. i still live by the tracks. i also haven’t picked up a blade in over 10 years. the scars are still there, but these days i only pick up scissors to cut my hair. i know why you can’t tell your mom about it. i know how the numbness slips over everything, a restless horrible cotton. i know how when you dropped the dish, you weren’t crying about the broken glass. i know about feeling like all the roads have closed their exits, that you aren’t supposed to still-be-here - and yet.
i am still here, and still yours, and i haven’t forgotten. what i’m saying is if any hope is calling to you - i know it’s hard, but you have to listen. i’m saying keep driving, but slow down the car. sit down in the shower, i’m not judging you. we can stay in the dark with the good hot water and do nothing but stare. notice the stab wound. make it through another tuesday.
i know what it is like to miss yourself. do what you need to. come home to me. i am writing to you, my past self, from the future. i’ll be waiting for you.
i love finding out how big this world is. my girlfriend has only visited boston a handful of times, but i grew up here. i told her we’d be going to do the tourist traps in salem, and she said - which salem?
to be fair to her, there are a lot of other states that have a town named “salem.” and i think there’s some evidence that the witch trials actually happened in what is now called Danvers. but the thing is - she thought “salem” was like, a made-up thing. there wasn’t actually a salem, massachusetts - like there isn’t a gotham city.
they don’t talk about it that much where she grew up, is the thing! and this made me laugh. a week ago she was talking about her hometown and said something akin to “well the museum’s kinda like the one in richmond,” and i had to explain i still had no frame of reference for what the hell this museum was like.
i love finding out what knowledge i take for granted. i used to live with 5 other women. 3 of them were from south korea. they had to take, like, a solid fifteen minutes to explain their birthday system to my gay math-blind ass, laughing as they did.
that same month, our roommate from denmark taught me the danish word for wreath by accident - she’d been talking about decorations, used krans, and i’d been able to figure it out through context. i just picked it up and kept talking. our entire house used krans as the word. she came home and slammed the door one evening, mock-angry, shouting: you motherfuckers! it’s a - a wreath!
and how often do you use certain words, anyway! i am cuban, so i was raised with certain spanish words sort of sprinkled in there; but never how you’d think. in middle school i asked someone to pass me the recogedor - in a completely american accent, like i was speaking english. i hadn’t registered it as a spanish word. i mean, how often in school do you actually use the word “dustpan” - i’d only ever heard it in the context of cleaning my house.
there are places that you grew up that you, just, like, know. that you assume everyone knows. there are things and people and “common knowledge” that you have that, just, like. doesn’t exist for me. i don’t know what you call your public transportation system, but in boston we call it “the T”. our train cards are called charlie cards because of a song where a father accidentally abandons his family, which was written because our system of transportation. in boston, most people would snort and say everyone knows that, kid.
i think you and i should go on a long walk - it’s getting dark early these days and we need any sun we can manage. tell me about the first time you saw snow. tell me about the stuff everyone knows about your home. tell me about the cities “everyone’s been to,” about the food “everyone’s already tried.” who knows. maybe it will feel nice to you - watching someone learn about it for the very first time.
how many times can you live through the apocalypse?
when you were little there was this beach that was free to go to. you didn’t really like it on account of the litter. at one point, a white bag caught around your ankle, and for a moment (fish child), you panicked about jellyfish. on the foam, the red-pink words read thank you, stacked on top of each other, tangled in the kelp.
they have a new program (three thousand american dollars) to send your dead relative to the moon. there is a lot of evidence that our local orbit is becoming ever-more dangerously populated with “micro” satellites - debris in a round miasma becoming a thick web above us. maybe angels cannot hear us through the pollution.
you used to picture deep space like a thick membrane, or a blanket. someone said to you once the universe has no edge and that fucked with you for a long time, trying to picture what shape infinity has. your coworker is writing a short story about ecological collapse, which she is submitting for a little side-money so she can survive the current economical collapse.
the birds haven’t gone to sleep this winter. that is probably bad. something that actually freaks you out is the natural temperature of human bodies versus the survival temperature of certain fungi. there is a podcast called s-town, in which a man kills himself over climate anxiety. he was probably meant to seem sort of unhinged. it just seems like it is becoming increasingly clear he was being honest.
space is not empty, we have put our dead into the stars. at some point they will figure out how to put ads into our sleep. you need to pay for the greenlife subscription service to be able to save the world.
there is a lot of ways this poem ends. but you have been wearing the same jeans and shirts since you were, like, 18. it is a hard life, sometimes, watching the entire foundation crack. there was this one moment over the summer, where you were shaking with heat exhaustion and dehydration. you were offered a nestle water bottle.
for three thousand dollars, you can send your ashes into space.
instead, you wash out the peanut butter jar. you put the avocado-toothpick spiked seed ball into water (even though they never grow very far). you borrow what you do not want to buy. you pick up any litter you find. you do not have a lot of control, really. but where you do - if there is one thing you can do, you do it.
something about that. you need to believe that must be true for the rest of humanity. or maybe - you need to believe that to be true, or else there will not be a rest of humanity.
i have spent a few days listening to the music you like. you have a tattoo of the band’s logo on your ribs. you got it when you were still kind of a kid. my first tattoo was a bird instead. i did the math - we got our first tattoos in the same calendar year. isn’t that kind of cool.
my mom loves hallmark movies, so i grew up thinking love would look like a firework. it feels like one, after all. it’s just that my house wasn’t safe. i thought love was a weapon, could be pointed at your eyes. could lose a finger to it, or teeth. my father used to say passion is everything. i thought that meant constant fighting was a good thing. i thought that meant love looked like a week of bickering, because it was worth the the weekend’s boombox apology. i thought quiet love was boring. i thought love had to blot out everything, compel the body and the mind like puppetry. i thought love looks like ruining your own dinner table - but at least you set a feast.
but love looks like a scarf. your hands smoothing it down my chest, being sure each of the edges are tucked in, worried about my asthma attacks being cold-activated. i race you while i’m wearing heels, you hold my hand to guide me downhill while walking my dog. we dance in my living room to waltz of the flowers, i show you how to hold your arms in proper ballet port de bras. you write a song about looking out of my window while the snow falls. i ask you to text my friends back while i’m driving. you play dj in the front seat. somewhere on route 93, we start murmuring about secret things.
oh. there is a difference between peace and dispassion. it was never that i feared quiet, it’s that i didn’t know what safe felt like. i liked the chaos because it was familiar, not because it was kind. i think i used to fear the word wife. i didn’t like the idea of long, lonely days and being yelled at for small things. i didn’t like the idea of sacrificing my one beautiful life.
you meet my friends and make a point to learn things about them. we both get excited about the other person’s passions. you read my book for hours, squinting at the small words. i try to understand basic guitar information. we talk for four hours on the phone while i string together a garland. we talk for six hours while you write a poem. i save a pintrest tip for the summer about making paper kites. i plan us a week-long trip to maine, map out my favorite places for an eventual hike. you fall asleep on the ride home, and i turn down the radio so it won’t wake you up. your quiet hands fold over mine.
when i look up, the stars are brighter. how carefully you’ve woven gold into the corners of my life. when i move, i feel some part of my soul reflected back onto you.
you spent hours in libraries and in art supply stores trying to absorb the artist tips from books your parents didn’t want to buy you. on each page of every “how to draw” is a version of the same four things: this is how you shade a sphere. this is how you shade a cone.
this is what a man looks like. he is hard and angular and jutting. his chest narrows a triangle down to his sharp hip and long legs. his jawbone is a square. he is powerful, imposing, his hands are big and meaty. he is a leader.
this is what a woman looks like. she is soft and her hands tuck her long hair back behind a delicate ear. she is big-eyed and round (but not too round, she is skinny, here is the faint sketch of her abs showing), she is smaller and lighter and pretty. she has thick black lashes and her tits do not come with a massive ribcage to offset the weight we put on her - she has curves, but they are impossibly slim without giving her backache trouble. there is a large red hourglass outlined on top of her figure, the way there is a triangle outlined on top of the man. her face is a heart-shape, and her lips are pouting.
here is how you draw the woman and the man together. the man should be in action shots. the woman’s ass should be in action shots. she should fit against the man to compliment his negative space - she should slot into his shadow so when they hug, they become one uniform space. here is how all the other artists have done it, see how good it looks when the man (angles, fire, passion, action) and the woman (roundness, water, emotion, supplication) complement each other? he begins the sentence, she is his ending.
do you want to kiss another girl? that is round-to-round. that is fitting the wire into the wrong socket! how would the faces look together? a single silhouette you sketch and then hide, scribbling over it.
do you want to look like a girl? by sheer genetic happenstance, you absolutely don’t look like that, and you never have. you don’t look like a man, either, though, do you. you don’t feel like you truly belong to either gender, but there is not a “neutral/fluid” drawing in the book. there is male (triangle) or female (hourglass).
but you have a square jaw and square hands and “masculine” proportions. but you have curves and roundness and full lips and “feminine” features. someone online says, definitively, that any form of gender noncompliance is “a mental illness.” this comment has over one thousand likes from people who agree.
here is how you shade a square. none of the clothes at the store look good on you, you always somehow feel like you’re wearing a weird kind of costume. here is how you shade a sphere. your friend’s mother calls the school because she’s horrified you’re in the same changing room. here is the neutral body figure: it is a wooden man. technically the wooden man is genderless, but that is because masculinity is the default, and everyone calls the figure “a wooden man.” you must be small and posable and skinny and featureless, then you can be masculine enough to not have gender.
here is how to draw a person. begin with some shapes. choose the right shapes to get that person’s gender correct. do not kiss her. shade in short, sharp lines.
the car broke down by the denny’s where you used to work and therefore could never return to. i am trying to pick out the satisfying parts of my life, one-by-one, like i am 12 and in a frog dissection. everything in my life all viscera and formaldehyde. if i can sort the good things from the bad things, i will have a nice clean pile.
i call you and make it sound like i am happy and hangin’ in there! when really i am kicking a rock and i am outside without a jacket and i am so in love with you it makes the little bones in my ear shake. someone called my tinnitus an angel choir. i like that it means i carry the echo of every concert.
this isn’t the right setting for love. this is a roadside, and a denny’s, and i am nauseous and ashamed i never escaped the town where i grew up. the clouds here are this strange yellow, like spilled sour milk. “someone once told me that the orange coating on the teeth of a beaver is due to the particularly high rate of iron in their enamel,” i tell you. “the beaver is the largest rodent native to north america.”
your voice is crackly on the other end. i’m going into a garage soon, i might lose you.
what i should be doing is calling the tow truck and explaining that my brother’s car (that i’m borrowing) (that i broke now, i guess) needs to be lifted by another, bigger, stronger car (which is love too, i guess).
i shouldn’t say so much. i should wait, and let you ask about my mom, and ask if i ever got over that cold, or how it’s going at work. i should let you lead the conversation, for once, so the love doesn’t leak out of me into the gravel. i open my mouth anyway. “if you had to choose between being a beaver with very few trees or being a tree around a bunch of beavers, which would it be?”
i don’t know. your voice always has this warm cast to it when you talk to me, but maybe i am just imagining that - i am a poet, though, so i imagine things sort of chronically. through the static, you sound like you’re laughing. are you the beaver?
i know, like, logically, not to fall in love with a girl-that-is-your-best-friend. like, who would i even call if we broke up? you’re my best friend, you’re the person i’d want to speak to. so what if these last few months we keep sleeping over at each other’s houses, calling each other for hours, sending each other poems. so what if you keep wrapping your fingers into mine. no best friends. that is the first rule. what you are supposed to do in that situation is leave the situation.
but my car broke down, so. where exactly am i going to go? the car is a very-old chevvy and also where i almost-but-not-quite kissed you after you’d raised one shoulder and looked up at me and said i don’t know, i think i’m straight, but for the right person - i’d try anything. the music had been good and it had been raining and your thick eyelashes had made me feel god crawling up my throat like a spider. and i didn’t kiss you, because i am a coward.
anyway on the chevy the whole exhaust pipe fell out, and is now scraping on the ground like one silver finger stroking the back of the highway. recently we were watching netflix in my bed and you pushed my hair back from my face like you were making the slowest, most desperate prayer, and then your boyfriend called. i remember us both jumping. i couldn’t look at you in the eyes for like a week after. i kept feeling the heat of your fingerprint; computer science, you’d unlocked something dark in me.
google says the closest tow (joe’s pick up) is 50 minutes away and also closed permanently. so that’s not great. you live in another state and i should be calling my insurance company. i should be calling anybody else. this is not helping. i need an uber. i need to get moving. instead i say: “i need three words for a poem.”
yesterday i said love you, goodnight after our 2 hour call like always and then you just, like. paused. all i could hear was your breathing. and then you’d said what a pretty three-word poem. i love you too, sweet thing. the words made my tinnitus act up again, and i must have some kind of synesthesia, because the sound travelled into my mind until it became the shape wedding rings.
orange, you say. the static is now chewing through most of your words and i only catch - borrowing the chevy -
the call dies. i have 12% battery. i never get the 3rd word, but i know you’re still going to get a poem from me. actually this rest stop is kind of pretty, and so is the exhaust pipe, and so is joe’s pick up, and so are the clouds. the light here is the color of a glue trap. before you worked at the denny’s, we used to get milkshakes every wednesday and called it a friend date. you said you’d wanted to work there because it reminded you of me.
the sign’s gone dim. the letters now spell out deny. and isn’t that something.
at the end of the day it’s not that you hate your job - actually, you like working, you like routine, you like feeling like an adult - it’s that any time you fuck anything up, you feel like you’re fucking dying.
because you could be actually fucking dying. because if one day you wake up and you misunderstood something - you could lose your job, and nobody is hiring, and nobody is paying, and nobody takes people like you, and that job you want hasn’t gotten back to you. and what exactly are you going to do without insurance? good luck with those meds. you should have thought of that before being a person.
so it’s not just that you forgot to CC someone on an email, it’s that if you don’t have this job, you can’t afford rent. it’s not that you misread a comment, it’s that if you get fired, you will be in massive amounts of unpayable debt. it’s not that you are bad at your job, but here are the stakes as they have been decided for you: be perfect or fucking die. like, literally, die. that is how much safety net you have: none.
it’s not burnout, technically. but you literally just had two typos in your work, and you’re already picturing the ending. you want to throw up & curl up & make it all go away. it is two typos. if he decides he is mad at you, you lose literally everything.
your mom says that you seem stressed. the thing is that you have never known a job that isn’t stressful. welcome to capitalism. there is no other road, only this one. what the fuck is a career. you come here, and we hold your life against the barrel of a gun, and somewhere someone is spinning the chamber and pulling. eventually the bullet will come.
you live in a mugging. your boss owns three cars and has four kids. you worry about having enough to feed your dog. good luck. beg for forgiveness. CC the right people next time and be grateful, kid. somebody has it worse than you. someone, probably, has it worse than you. so what if you can’t sleep or eat or focus. your work chat sound literally makes you panic. you had to change the sounds of computer notifications so you’d stop having such an upset stomach.
welcome to the real world! the rat race! the dog eat dog circus!
your doctor studies the results and frowns at you. “it’s bad for your heart,” she says. “try to reduce your levels of stress.”
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