I hope this doesn’t crash again.
I used to write prose here right? I haven’t been posting for a while.
I am writing because I just had a glimpse of feeling myself. It’s been a while since my partner and I have called. We just hung up, but I was completely frozen, just drowning in sadness and thoughts, unable to give a good goodbye to my partner. I think of how I used to walk them to the train station, and make sure I make a polite good night. Maybe now that I am letting them too close to my heart, I wear my emotions out. Maybe in the past, if I had emotions, I would go home and think them out. But now I want to show them I am sad, then I want them to notice, we can make it alright before they go. There’s this Chinese proverb “相敬如賓”, to treat your spouse like a guest in the house, to keep that respect in a domestic life, and that’s the key (or reminder) to keep that respect and personal boundaries alive in a relationship. Maybe I should adapt that to my relationship. I don’t know, nobody really taught me how a healthy and lasting relationship really works.
I have a thing with prototypes. I like to imagine how something ought to work, then I meter my life decisions towards that direction, but at the same time allow myself to stray away from it when my heart tells me to. I don’t need to be the prototype, I just need a general guideline to tell me how to make something work, how to make something feel good, or to be beautiful, functional, enjoyable. I look for the middle of the median curve, and think, okay, this is how the majority survives.
And so I do that. I picture how it ought to work, and I be approximately that. And that reminded me. I know how to be a teenager. I had a picture in my head.
I just hung up the call with my baby. And I felt not so okay, I think I just am not good with goodbyes. So I began watching Adventure Time. I also knit this white beanie that resembles Finn’s hat, with bunny ears. I have this “teenager” concept in my head, and people live this “teenager” phase in different ages. It includes Adventure Time, Animal Crossing, beautiful bedrooms, pastel color household items. These things give me so much comfort somehow.
I lost track of the feeling, and many thoughts. Like how I’m gender queer, and how I can find my personal space to think and feel like myself.
I miss being my old self. I want to capture the feeling of feeling like my old self again. And that’s why I wanted to talk to Hinly and write here. I miss the feeling of 2017-18. I was lonely at home, and trying to make up for boyhood. I think I am good at living the adult-boyhood, when you are making up for things. Maybe I put wellness in such a high priority, and I was so open to try so many things that people suggest. And I was open to being romantic. In 2019 I watched Call Me By Your Name and wore a lot of Hawaiian shirts with shorts. I was open to love, I thought that through physical intimacy I can be in touch with my senses and open myself for love. I was taking my sensitivity as they are, and wrote about it, and I wanted to be a gay boy artist, holding onto a beautiful boy who makes me feel and is open to my creativity. Later, I had a close group of friends, I was enjoying being the talkative queer boy, who is embracing his polyamorous side, and trying to self love, and spirituality. In 2020 I embraced the minimalistic aesthetic of a contemporary metropolis, then I moved to Basel, and I was open to love, shaken to my core, sharing my decade of loneliness with someone. I was I afraid to be myself and be destructive. I think through destructive ways, we express who we are, because we project our damage outwards, and we cry our feral needs. I hurt myself badly, and then I treat my now partner with a healthy distance. Also because they know how to set their personal boundaries.
I miss a time when I would love so wholeheartedly, I wasn’t afraid to ruin each other for other people. It was so heart wrenchingly complete, it cuts deep, and I feel honest about my intensity and desires.
I guess what I’m trying to say is I need that deep end, keep imagining meeting wished away entire lifetimes
R U Mine – Arctic Monkeys
I miss being that intense. And I guess the feeling like something is off, something looming in the background, something dark, and inevitable; the feeling was always there. Maybe living in an Airbnb with a stranger, in a borrowed time felt alright. Because I was happy, but the sadness of the parting was still there.
I keep having this sound in my head, of my mother talking, “If not this way, how?” Often her justifying actions done to me, making me feel uncomfortable, but her explaining why it is inevitable. There was just no other way, that since there are no other way, I should not feel uncomfortable. This is uncomfortable only because I will it to. And I think there’s this certain forced, oppressed romance, that turns this feeling of unwilling acceptance into a kind of masochism, that my suffering is wrong, my suffering is a misguided feeling of love and affection, that to love and be loved is to deny uncomfortable feelings, or to appropriate some damage, that there are no other way to be: No other way but to emotionally neglect you, no other way but to make this all about me, no other way but to accept you’re a creator of other’s loneliness. That a relationship is supposed to suffer, and there are no way to improve, that this is the way it is, it’s inevitable, and if you want to improve the situation, it’s just an extra mile that you have no business in expecting them to initiate.
Maybe part of me wants to love my partner the way I love my mother, to see the parallel. I want my close one to be out of reach, and I want to feel the desperation to beg someone to meet. And to be so lonely, that every gathering feels like my only chance to leap onto something nice. When with my partner, I wrote a list of habits I formed because of chronological loneliness, because I don’t want to forget the feeling of being lonely. And if I don’t write them down, I wouldn’t see my progress.
I don’t know where my list went.
I’m having a hard time being reliable for my partner. I’m having a hard time being a reliable person. In work, in relationships. I don’t know if I would make enough money to sustain myself. And my mom doubts that too. At least my lecturer believes in me. Parents always think it’s good to toughen their kids up to prepare them for the society. I don’t know, I think having a grown up to believe me is what sustains me, it calms the fears and anxieties in my head and makes me feel like the future is a manageable thing. Maybe it’s hard to ask my parents to believe in me, when they don’t believe in themselves either.
My partner told me today that there are things they could ask my help for, but I’m being an unreliable person, and that’s why they never did. They have issues trusting people, and I need people to believe in me. And we were stuck in that cycle. Also I want to be needed. I want my partner to trust me with their needs, the way they trust me with monogamy.
I want people to believe in me. And I want to feel like a 21st Century young adult.
I know how to be a 21st Century queer kid living childhood in their 20s. I gotta binge 90s cartoon that I couldn’t watch when I was a kid. I connect with online LGBT friends on Amino. I believed in gender binary, I listened to one band religiously. I was I afraid to write, I made music, I had something to proof myself. I was unafraid to write offensive and personal stuff. I reached out – I felt like I was on the brink of oblivion, any chance of being seen and not forgotten would have been my next ticket towards salvation.
Maybe I just need another blueprint of who to be. I know it starts with Adventure Time. I know it starts with making music with my interface. I know it starts with maintaining my room, and listening to MCR. Informative YouTube videos. Musical classes and regaining my voices. Treating my partner like a guest. Maybe some shopping. Accepting that I’m gender fluid, and not sexualizing my feminine days. Not coping with my feminine side with forced feminization and sexual harassment would be a good start. I want to stop doing visualizing, or do visualizing, but not feel like anytime I stop, it would lead to catastrophic disasters, a karma avalanche that pushes me to unmanageable circumstances, or attract spirits. Maybe I should reread Macbeth, of how guilt and fear drives people to insanity. Maybe Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy of her bloody hands would make sense to me.
I just want to be a good person, feel safe enough to live out my days here, graduate, and live safely in another country. I just want to leave and live.
Steno Notes 