Fragments from the train to Boston

“tomorrow is gonna be one of those mornings where you’re just walking around like ‘you have no fucking idea’”.

I want to go everywhere with her
Hold her hand kiss her neck claw at her back bite her lip
I want to melt into her, be enveloped in her arms, become as close as humanly possible

I have this habit of telling my significant others they’d be hot as a different gender and it always makes them kinda uncomfy lol whoops

Sometimes I think I’m gay, but by the time I try the label on myself, it feels so wrong and sad and limited so I know it’s wrong

Em said that’s the same way she knows she’s cis, despite not feeling comfortable with conventional femininity/gender roles, and questioning in the past. For her, femininity is uncomfortable, but claiming they/he feels more wrong. I guess in some ways it’s easier to know what you’re not.

T said if you’re questioning/unsure about your gender it’s probably ok to identify as not cis, since cis people typically don’t spend ages agonizing about what gender they are. This makes sense to me, but I’m cis so Idk I’m not trying to speak out of knowledge/personal experience. I guess I’m just trying to get a better understanding.

Gender is fucked anyway tho I know that much at least ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

She told me about how she told her doctor she was in a dark place and thought she needed help during her equivalent of junior year. He told her it’s normal for young women to feel bad during their time of the month, and to practice breathing exercises. She thought it was funny cuz coming out and saying it, she already felt like she was attention-seeking and like her emotions weren’t valid and he confirmed those fears in the worst possible way. Isn’t it cool how it’s so hard to be a teenage girl and then on top of that no one takes you seriously?

I went to see Fun Home with her on Broadway. I saw the actress who played Alison Bechdel on the way out, stared blankly at her. She said “hey”. I said “.......HEY!” and ran off. I didn't even ask for a picture or an autograph. Em and I laughed for ages

Sunday night I ate indian food and watched kpop videos for over an hour with A and M. Then Em and I watched anime and ate ice cream for the rest of the night.

I smoke weed with her, something I never saw myself doing. I don’t think I’d have any desire to do it without her, but I don’t dislike it as much as the first two times I smoked, or as much as I thought of myself disliking it, which has caused some cognitive dissonance. When it’s not good, it’s like I thought it would be, boring/mildly uncomfortable in the way it makes me feel like not myself. At it’s worst it made me feel like my heart was breaking. But when it’s good it just amplifies my feelings of love. I feel warm and comfortable all over, just so happy. She looks so beautiful and I can’t look directly at her, like staring at the sun. Touching her and being touched feels soft and electric, it goes on and on and on. Honestly, it feels like that already though, it's just to a whole other degree when we're high. There's a part of me that feels guilty for enjoying it so much.

Things I bought since turning 20: ~100$ worth of food, skin cream+essence, powder, calvin klein underwear, a book of shakespearean insults for my brother, a star map, a glass dildo, almond milk, mini wheats, rum, old spice deodorant, Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman

"There’s a place I want to take you...
...I’ll go anywhere you want me to"

Update as of 2016: Em def isn't cis! Still incredible uncomfortable with traditional femininity, would prefer more masculine features, but not currently interested in changing pronouns/coming out/pursuing hormone therapy

Lol fuck my rapist for making me tell him I loved him after he raped me now I can't fucking say it when I mean it 5 fucking years later

"What are you thinking right now?"
"I hope I don't get pregnant"
"Don't you have anything to say?"
"Like what?"
"How about I love you?"
------------------------------
"Bye Loki"
"I love you too"
"No, I said "bye Loki""
"oh."
------------------------------
"I love you"
"Yeah."
------------------------------
"I liked your card because I could tell you really love me. I don't wanna say it now because I'm drunk and it wouldn't mean anything but for now, let's just say I really like you"
"I really fucking like you too"
------------------------------
"Bye, travel safe............"
"Yeah. See you soon."
FUCK

Lol

I spent so much time over this summer thinking abt Em. I obsessively replayed moments between us, the good and the bad. I was constantly worrying abt what we were, what we would be. I thought abt her so much and kinda exhausted myself w this obsession. That, plus the 3+ months that have past puts me in a place of relative ambivalence which is interesting? I used to get really excited with the thought of seeing her when I got back to school but now I don't really feel anything. I think this is a good thing, like I found my chill/got over myself. Or maybe I...stopped liking her? I mean better that I've been living my life than obsessing over her, right? Seeing her again should be interesting in any case. Maybe it'll all come rushing back. What'll I do if it doesn't?

Don't Gatsby it.

It’s too soon to make generalizations, since there’s only been the two, but it seems like with girls, I do this thing where I get into *something* with her, but lack of communication skills (on her side? Mine?) leaves our relationship super nebulous. I don’t know what “we” are. More troubling, I don’t actually know anything about her and I end up projecting all sorts of stuff onto her to fill in the blanks Gatsby style, so she can’t ever live up to the idea of her I’ve created in my head. I saw this post on Tumblr today, which is what started me thinking about this; it said “absence and lack of communication makes the heart idealize a person and subconsciously twist one’s perception of them into something greater than they really are”. And I’m doing that, I think. With S, the more time I spent w her, the more I saw her as a flawed person as opposed to some ideal other. I realized she wasn’t gonna be right for me. But my relationship w Em is still active and new, which is why there’s so much danger. I think about her so much, but talk to her so little there’s no way I’m not fucking up the distinction between who she is and who I think she is. Like I have this plan, when I get back, I’m gonna hang out w her for a while, then a few days into it, I’m gonna ask her if she wants to go out w me officially, be my gf and all that. But I’m so scared I’m gonna come back and it’s not going to be there anymore. Or that I’ll come back and realize it never was there. Like, I feel pretty confident that she likes me, but the fact is, she never said it. She never said anything really about herself or how she felt, besides the one time she mentioned we didn’t have much time left to be together before summer and one time when she said I was awesome after I made her cum super hard. And like, I’m scared I twisted those and other moments into way more than they are. Like yeah, she kept hanging out w me, even when we weren't doing anything but talking, and she stuck w me after the karaoke incident (lol) but what if she really was just in it for the sex and the company? Idk, like I’ve made up this idea of her being more reserved and quiet, nervous about expressing emotions. That could be true, but also she could just not be at the same place I am in our relationship. Anyway, her not saying much about her feelings contrasts with me, constantly spitting out whatever’s on my mind, just talking and talking, about nothing but also about every feeling that passes through my brain. So when we’ve been texting, it’s always I have a ton to say, which she responds to with less, then we have nothing to say, and the convo ends. Idk how to make it right. Well I do, I know it involves fucking making an effort to communicate, but god-it’s so fucking scary.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This school year started and ended the same way-with a kiss goodbye. The first was B, and it had come off of a nearly year-long relationship with an expiration date. The last was a girl named E and it came off of a little over a month of hookups that grew to be something more. With B, the expiration date gave everything the month leading up to me going away a sense of heaviness. And our lack of a clean break led to some unpleasantness after I left. With E, it's kind of snuck up on me, just cuz of how close to the end of the year we ended up getting together. (Fun fact, she's the same girl I mentioned seeing making out with another girl at a party in an earlier post) I'm excited to go home and see my family and friends. I can't believe how fast this year has gone and I'm glad to be done with freshman year. It also hasn't quite hit me how long I'm gonna be home for. I'm going to miss my friends here, going to miss the things I like about BMC. I'm really going to miss E. And our relationship is so new and so undefined, I'm not sure where we're going to be in three months. It's gonna be esp hard since she's international. But man, I'm really glad we got to spend the past few weeks together. She's really special and we're gonna try to keep in touch over the summer so idk here's hoping I guess.
Back home I'm gonna get a job (I have interviews ^.^) and try and keep busy. It'll be interesting to hang out with people from high school at parties, but I'm still looking forward to the things already planned as well as any kinda get-togethers that are gonna come up. I'm so excited to spend time with my sister again, and see becky and cassidy. I'm really excited to see you guys. We should get together, go to the beach, party it up. Idk tho it's definitely a weird limbo to be in. 3 months. I'm staying optimistic though, It's going to be a great summer!

Hey all, I had a bunch of coffee and a lot of thoughts so I’m just gonna drop them here. Not tryna be eloquent, my thoughts are all over the place, and there's no real point to any of them, but putting it all down is rlly therapeutic to me. That’s what this space is for, right?

-I wish I had more queer friends here. It’s a desire I can’t even really explain/justify. In some ways it doesn’t make sense to choose friends based on the only shared quality being the people you find attractive/sleep with. It makes sense of course, in a situation where you feel marginalized for being a queer person, although here I’m not really experiencing that. That’s actually another interesting thing I’ve been thinking about recently. In high school I assumed that I wasn’t experiencing discrimination at all based on my sexual orientation. And of course, I wasn’t. And I knew about microaggressions but they didn’t apply to me, you know? But idk my queerness was definitely invisible. It’s not something I ever hid but it also never came up. Was that an issue that I was assumed to be straight by people I had known all my life? And that brings me to the more pressing issue of family. I remember talking to Z about this over winter break. My dad doesn’t know I’m bi. Or my brother. My cousins should know by now but I’ve never told them, they never asked, and I think they still (hilariously) assume I’m straight. What Z and I were talking about is the way that sexual orientation is so linked to sexuality and how that’s something that you don’t really discuss, straight or otherwise, with close family members. Anyway I guessed I’d just not make a big deal out of it and if/when I ended up dating a girl I’d bring it up at some point. It wasn’t a priority to bring up because I had been single or with a boyfriend. Now though, I’m stuck. I was briefly in a “relationship” with a girl I’d been crushing on for ages, but it ended quickly and didn’t amount to anything. I’m currently “seeing” a new girl right now, and it has the potential to be something more, but again it’s not really real. So these relationships are happening, but since they’re not actually “real”, they’re not something I feel the need to discuss with those close to me. I don’t even really talk about them with the friends. I’m just in this weird kinda place where in some ways, there’s nothing to talk about, but I think it might be nice to have someone who has had experience w girls who I can talk to. Idk though. Like this school is amazing. It’s so queer, and the more time I spend here, the more people I realize aren’t straight. And that has the potential to be comforting to me but at the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m “not queer enough” to fit in with them. And I love the friends I have here, they’re great, but it feels like sometimes they get uncomfortable when I talk about girls. One “doesn’t want to know the details”, one assumes I’m interested in getting with a queer mutual friend just cuz I ask about her, one asks me if my attraction is 50/50. It’s nothing outright, this whole situation just seems to have all these undercurrents I can’t name or place that make me feel uncomfortable. It’s a really gross, nebulous feeling that creeps up around the edges whenever my sexuality comes up. And maybe it’s not even that I’m bi, maybe it’s just the fact that college relationships are weird and the ones I’ve had hardly count as relationships.

-On the topic of college relationships, what’s with this desire to be “chill” about everything all the time? Like commitment is such an abstract concept and no one wants to talk about their feelings. Miss Palmero would have a lot to say on this subject.

-I gave my number to a guy after a concert I went to on monday when he found me on twitter and asked if I was “the gorgeous girl standing in front of him”. Of course, that was flattering and pretty smooth, so I’ve been texting him, half cuz he seemed pretty cool, half because I like the attention/flattery. The convos have been hilarious (he’s an english/philosophy double-major who thinks he’s going to be the next James Joyce) and I’ve been telling everyone about them as a not-so-subtle brag. His flirting attempts that are comments on my appearance have got me thinking though. When I was 15, my pubescent self-esteem was so low that I got caught up with the first person to show interest in me. That led, as you know by now, to trauma that wasn’t my fault of course, but that could’ve potentially been thwarted had I not depended so much on some stranger to define my self-worth. In the years since, my self esteem has reached new highs. Which leaves me intrigued when this rando tells me I’m gorgeous and asks me if all the girls at my school are as pretty as me, saying “I’m just being honest”. Of course, the compliments themselves are a bit of an ego boost, but the way he says them gives me the sense that he thinks he is doing me some kind of favor, telling me something I’ve never heard before. The whole “you don’t know you’re beautiful” kinda bullshit. Cuz I do, you know? Makes me think of that post abt girls on the internet responding “I know” to people messaging them telling they’re attractive who then react negatively w something like “lol ur not all that bitch”. Idk none of this is revolutionary stuff, just interesting to think about. I guess I'm just glad to be in a place where I'm not reliant on people like him to make me feel worthwhile and attractive. Cuz then there's this whole sense of obligation to this person. They find u attractive so you better get on that cuz no one else will. Idk. Loving yourself is so important. I always try to tell my sister she's beautiful so when some guy tells her that it's not the first time she's hearing it. And that she doesn't owe anyone anything. Ever.

"You can't take a picture of this, it's already gone"

20 Spaces I feel content
in no particular order

1. My living room, staring out the huge front window from the couch
2. The kitchen at my grandparent's house, at the counter eating cinnamon toast and drinking coffee in the morning
3. Brooklyn outside my aunt and uncle's house, walking down the streets in the fall weather around thanksgiving
4. In the ocean at the beach, Newport, Jamestown, Block Island, staying in the cold water and rising up and down with the waves
5. Drinking with a group of friends in someone's dorm room before going out
6. Achieving equilibrium underwater while diving, just hovering there in the silence, feeling the weight of each breath
7. On the couch in Z's living room
8. Driving down the backroads on a spring day with the windows wide open and my sister in the passenger seat
9. H's kitchen with the tv on in the background
10. Supreme pizza with my dad and sister and brother sharing a large 3/4 pepperoni 1/4 cheese making commentary on the sports channel playing on tv
11. Walking through the east side of providence and college hill
12. At work in the kitchen chopping vegetables and placing cookies on giant sheet trays
13. At the gym running on the treadmill when the perfect song comes on that makes it impossible to think about stopping
14. Driving down a straight stretch of 295 late at night with the perfect music playing
15. Am's living room in providence, laying on the couch that's both comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time
16. The shower back at my house
17. In my bed under the blankets watching a movie
18. On an airplane with a good book
19. In the dining room while my mom is in the kitchen, talking to her through the space between the countertop and cabinets
20. In the passenger seat of my dad's car while he's driving when he mentions he loves me or he's proud of me or he's glad to see me happy

blahs

Sooo this semester isn’t going as well as the last for me. It’s just been really lonely. I’m in these 100-level classes that are big and lecture so it’s not at all an environment where I can meet new people or have conversations with anyone. Then I have lunch alone, which I already hated doing. I can deal with it and everything but it’s still such a depressing state, eating alone, you know? Also got some bs girl issues that are prob 30% me not giving up on getting close to avoid getting hurt in the long run and 70% her not being able to handle being in a relationship. And this kinda stuff has just left me feeling so isolated and lonely, esp since I thrive so much on social interaction and was having such a fun time making new friends and flirting and having fun last semester. Anyway, this kinda stress compounded with stress from overeating in the first part of this semester has been causing me to further overeat as a way of just trying to quiet the feelings of anxiety and inadequacy and solitude. My self esteem has just gotten so low compared to how freaking high it was last year and I can’t figure out how to get back there. Thankfully, I’m at a place now where I’m working to control the scarier parts of my eating habits. I’m working to cut desserts and sweets out of my diet cuz A-they’re unhealthy when you eat them every day like I did, and B-they were actually stressing me out, like I would freak out about what dessert I was going to eat and if i could have two or just one or how many in one day is alright and it’s just so much easier and calmer to not have that to deal with. And I’m also working on eating more consciously, the age-old eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full. That part is harder. So often I’m full, not even hungry but just have this strong pull to keep on eating once I start, to keep getting up and getting more food. I’m not sure if it’s cuz I don’t want the satisfaction of eating to go away or the stress I’m dealing with wasn’t solved by my meal so I’m trying to eat more as if that will fix it. There’s also this feeling like if I don’t eat a certain food item, I’m never going to have the chance again so I eat as much as I can even if I’m not hungry. The worst days are the ones where I eat until I’m so full I feel sick and strongly feel the desire to make myself throw up to deal with the guilt I feel for all the food I put inside myself. I just hate the dining hall so much, not that the food is bad, but that it’s just all there, all the time and the environment feels so gross in a way I can’t really explain.

I’m just so sick of thinking about all of this, about how I’ve been dealing with food, but it keeps happening so I have to keep checking myself over and over again, trying to think my way out of this. I know that I’m always going to have some kind of stress in my life. If not loneliness or relationship bs, then something else for sure, and that if I don’t change the way I eat in response to stress, this is always going to be an issue even when those aren’t. I also know that I’m getting better. Or working on it at least. It’s not something I can just switch off. I’m going to make more efforts to text people who aren’t my closest friends to see if they’ll eat with me so I don’t have to be alone. I’m going to do my best to eat what feels good to me and stop once I’m satisfied so I don’t spoil that feeling with one of regret. I know that I am worthy and smart and hard working and beautiful, even if I don’t always feel like it. I just need to get out of my head sometimes.

Expectations v Reality

So this post is going to be a bit whiny, I'm sorry about that in advance, feel free to skip this one.

I was honestly so excited for break. I had these expectations. Going to Washington would be a great time to do fun stuff with the family I love. The second half of break would be a great time to catch up with friends from back home. The reality has been a little less exciting. I know how it sounds complaining about a month of free time, but I'm honestly not having a great time. Washington was two weeks, which is about one week two long. I saw too much of the cousin I hate and not nearly enough of the one I don't. We watched tv and ate, maybe leaving the house to actually do something three times out of the two weeks. I was ready to come back to RI.

The first weekend back was great, I saw some friends and had a fun time. This was followed, however, by a week stuck at home until around 5pm or later when my family, usually just my dad and siblings, would come back, all tired/stressed and take me out to eat at some fast food place. So much time alone has a tendency to put an unhealthy amount of focus on unpleasant memories and feelings that are usually distracted from. I also am starting to doubt the possibility of anything happening between the HC girl and I, we've been talking a lot over break and it's kinda starting to feel like idk either we don't have enough in common or we're both too boring or we're just plain incompatible or something. I'm not sure where we stand or what I want from our relationship and I think she's in a similar place. I should talk to her abt us but honestly idk what could come of it.

My mom's been working too hard. She's miserable and irritable and I hardly see her, which is extra bad because she wasn't in Washington with us. Being stuck at home like this has made me a little crazy, so I was excited today to go into prov with my dad. I ended up hanging out at his office for a few hours while AB hung out with B at blue state then went on a date or a meeting or something until 1 when I went back to school with her to visit. The visit wasn't bad exactly, and I got to see some ppl I've missed, but going back to wheeler has a way of making me feel sad, not in an "i miss this so much" way but more in a "I don't belong here anymore" way and a "this part of my life is over" way. And now I have a little more freedom since it's the weekend but it seems like everyone I could see is busy doing something so I'm stuck at home still not just because I don't have a car but because I have nowhere to go.

I'm sick of reading and watching tv I don't exactly want to go back to school but I don't want to be here anymore. I'm sure I'll be able to do something nice during this weekend and the next one but I feel like I can't stand the week in between. This break feels like a waste of time I can't get back.