give me something i can handle
Hello! :)
I haven’t written for a while. I keep meaning to sit down and do it, but it becomes so difficult. Probably writer’s block of a sort, which feels strange to lay claim to due to my nebulous relationship with being a writer. I’m trying to own it more these days, I have so many words in me. Anyway, I had all these ideas for monthly posts that never quite eventuated. The seeds of this post were sprawled in looping handwriting over a week ago now, sitting with my leg propped up in somebody else’s sunny lounge room and drinking earl grey tea while we all wrote. You should have some too, if you would like.
At most moments, I feel tired more than anything else. Looking backwards now, it has been quite a summer, already amber-glazed in my memory. I went to China in mid-December and came back in mid-January, and that trip heralded the start of an anxious episode that I’m only now pulling myself out of. Even so, there were precious mornings of waking up and feeling okay about it. Afternoons passing into evenings into nights, gathering the feeling of being young and confused like popping a handful of ripe raspberries into your mouth and biting down. Weeks of heat wave after heat wave, lying around half-dazed and exhausted and then watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes with my nearest and dearest friends. I spent some time talking to people on dating apps just to talk — and then feeling bad about it, dropping the habit. I dug into my savings, leaving it as a problem for another day. Focusing instead on watching the sun cast its white-gold light over the earth and thinking of every creature that has ever observed the light falling through different angles, casting different shadows. I soaked up the sun and the green like a sponge, I walked across the river into the so-alive, spiralling city. And I’ve cried tears. Days on end spruced with anxiety, insecurity. Childhood selves rising to the surface to feel lost and not-enough. Summer loneliness is smothering even if you’re keeping an eye on it.
I don’t know. It’s the Year of the Dragon again, lunar new year come and gone — a whole new cycle looms ahead for me. I spent the weeks leading to lunar NYE crystallising the oncoming year in my mind, fear of the unknown bubbling inside me, perhaps building it up to something more than it is. Aleksiah says, Life will be better at 24 and I’ve been holding on, holding on. But already my phone is giving me a memory compilation for autumn and I suppose we’re well into the season now — the other week, a browning leaf flew right into my hand at the tram stop. It’s by my desk now. Took it to a girl’s house and then back to mine. On ‘Hard Feelings’, Lorde says It’s time to let go of this endless summer afternoon. On ‘Francis Forever’, Mitski sings Autumn comes when you’re not yet done with the summer passing by. Both are songs about missing somebody — ‘Hard Feelings’ being a breakup song, whilst ‘Francis Forever’ is more ambiguous but laced with a deep longing. Both songs adopt a feeling of trying to cling to a summer but ending up abandoned by the passage of time. Year after year, I find myself struggling to let go of those long days blurring into 8pm sunsets. The sky starts darkening earlier and I realise that I had forgotten, somehow, how crushing the cold can be.
I’ve been making my way through Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us since borrowing it from the library in February. I’ve been thinking without end about a line from the essay ‘Fall Out Boy Forever’, contained within:
Before they started playing, they huddled briefly, slapping each other’s hands. It felt, more than anything, an acknowledging of no hard feelings. Or, an acknowledgement of that which we all spend a lifetime searching for: the permission to come home again, after forgetting that there are still people who will show up to love you, no matter how long you’ve been away. No matter how obsessed you’ve been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who still wants you whole.
Or: I didn’t know if you’d care if I came back, I have a lot of regrets about that.
The truth is that I don’t think so much about my own vanishing anymore, and yet I’ll probably still spend of my life remembering that there are people who want me whole. I feel away from myself on more days than I don’t. A few days before the new year, I began drafting a poem. You may have that, I guess, since I’m just doing anything here:
If I only reached out, I could almost
touch another summer ending. Dust dancing
in the afternoon light, blazing ball of sun bending
to farewell the horizon. Nights still
tugging at the infinite as I bury myself
in minutes ticking into hours. Still awake
finding myself again in the early hours of a new day.
I spent the beginning of January so small, so lonely.
& so I cling to people who helped pull me through last year,
allow myself to be folded in & later again accept
the outstretched arms of a place to rest beside another.
As long as there are people for me to show up for
then I think maybe I don’t want to die anymore
& I think maybe I never really did.
On lunar new year’s day, I watched a one-man rewrite of the myth of Phaeton, son of the sun Helios, delivered in an upstairs performance room in the heart of the city; I teared up when ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ kicked in, a version with George Michael and Elton John harmonising grand and defiant. And queerness — for me, it’s lesbianism specifically— has never really stop feeling like a defiance. Later, Margaret Qualley’s character in Drive-away Dolls, Jamie, makes an offhand reference to the same song. Popping up twice is enough for me to take notice, especially as someone who has a core that wants to cry out, Don’t let the sun go down on me. Knowing the whole time that it’s a futile protest, like trying to swim against a riptide or save a fraying thread.
(About a month later, I was in the very same room, watching my best friend Grace perform in her friend’s one-act play. I cried again. It was an emotional play, and funny, and a little bit fucked up.)
So, let me give you this. Snapshots of books and music and film, all continuing to shape me as I try desperately to swallow living. Wisecrack by Haley Blais as a companion well into this new year, exquisite and full of a quiet yearning, so convincing that I don’t quite need to make sense of the lyrics. Vampire Weekend on vinyl filling the air on Nish’s balcony. Vampire Weekend in the speaker’s in Jordan’s car in a state away as we move to the percussive beats in the intro to ‘Unbelievers’. Anatomy of a Fall was a bit of a masterpiece in screenwriting, left me blinking into the daylight. All of Us Strangers seemed to exquisitely captured the melancholies of being gay and alone — and had Blur playing at the club. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed rendered Nan Goldin’s life and work on the big screen in all its tender, bodily glory. Drive-away Dolls was the brilliant bad film that more bad films should aspire to be (irreverent, with a lot of lesbian sex). Reading Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles curled up on a couch in CJ’s house. Before that, Penance by Eliza Clark made me think of teenagehood, its walls; I think it’s not that I’ve ever been able to get over those walls, more that I’ve slowly pushed and let them expand. Folie à Deux by Fall Out Boy, constantly, two friends at the end of a joined tether and trying to channel it into this frenzied record — but You can only blame your sadness on the world for so long (‘The Shipped Gold Standard’) and Nobody wants to hear you sing about tragedy (‘Disloyal Order of the Water Buffaloes’). Sunset as Taylor Swift sings ‘The Archer’ and I’m sobbing — help me hold on to you — on a night I may someday attempt to pull apart in writing properly. ‘Ready For It…’ before the football match, ‘Holy Ground’ before the Maisie Peters concert, everybody singing along in communion. Thousands of mostly-women at the Maisie Peters concert embracing emotion and pain and yes, hysteria, and still reaching towards healing, still raising our voices to proclaim, I made it to September, I can finally breathe. Singing Chappell Roan at karaoke, singing Carly Rae Jepsen, singing ABBA. Tracey Emin’s neon sculpture at the NGV Triennial says, “You put your hand Across my mouth But still the noise Continues Every part of my body is Screaming Smashed into a Thousand Million Pieces Each Part Forever Belonging to you”. The ever-elusive you. Through it all, tram journeys in and out of the city, coming back to My Chemical Romance’s ‘Fake Your Death’, over and over: Just look at all that pain.
The thing is. There was an anti-trans gathering in the city this weekend. Photos of the counter-protest show people wearing keffiyehs, someone holding a DYKES ♡ DOLLS sign. Solidarity forever.
The thing is. So much is on a downward spiral and I wake every day to updates on ongoing genocide and I believe in a free Palestine in our lifetimes.
I’ll end on a song I’ve been stuck on since seeing Gretta Ray open for Maisie. ‘You’ve Already Won’ is a litany of incidental moments to be grateful for layered over a rhythmic beat, whilst the chorus delivers a repetitive reminder to Treat it like it’s gonna be gone. It’s all the reasons why I love pop music and it’s already made me cry once. It’s a song about cultivating joy and then grasping onto it, knowing that these moments are fleeting and there will despair engulfing the gaps but the hope, the energy, will return.
(guy who rediscovers feeling hopeful and is like has anybody ever written about this. (me. I have))
currently I am:
reading: they can’t kill us until they kill us by hanif abdurraqib; gwen and art are not in love by lex croucher; rotating this article.
listening to: waxahatchee’s tigers blood, my current aoty forerunner; adrianne lenker’s Bright Future; the maggie rogers singles, which continue to strike some chord within me.
watching: dungeon meshi; recently finished mtv’s scream (show they made); still always rewatching buffy the vampire slayer; rewatching doctor who for a fun secret project (podcast. it’s an unlaunched rewatch podcast)
generally: applying to jobs, one of the worst ways to be living. appreciating that my beautiful chelsea women have been winning again.
