Captured Moments

Lights behind glass:
Scenes presented, each mine for the taking if I choose to simply
Stop and look for a moment.
Fairy lights strung across a window, reflection of someone's small flight of fancy
The interior of a dining room all wood panels, red walls, and vintage chandelier giving away the age of this particular house.
Apartments only give away a glow of color, or in some cases the soft light of curtained interiors.
Some windows show black.
This person has plants, that one leaves the TV on when no one's in the room.
This room belongs to a child, the one above to adults: a family house.
Basement apartment: order on a small scale, bike propped against a wall, hatstand in the middle.
Small snippets, captured moments, windows meant for viewing: glass, after all, works both ways.

These Days

Spring break saps the motivation from my limbs. Time moves at a slower pace (or so it seems), allowing me the gift of a whole book in a day, devoured slowly over many hours. It's been a while since I read for pleasure. Long bus rides make knitting a necessity, and a whole pair of socks sits ninety nine percent completed in my knitting bag. College decisions happened, and still, I'm stuck in limbo. Waitlists happen. With two full days left of pure free time, I'm starting to feel the clouds of doubt descend. Work, this break, has simply... passed me by. A paycheck came for me in the mail today, and I simply read the number and set it aside. I take my job for granted, these days. Even heavy chains of potential probation don't seem to drag me down. These days, I'm floating, and I'm not sure how to come back down. Apathy has set in, and the only things I feel passionate about are those the larger world says don't matter, or those I do on my own time. College has never seemed so far off.

Supernothing (Effort, and Why It Sucks)

Did I mention that effort doesn't come naturally to me?
Have I ever told you that if it weren't for my friends
family
teachers
I'd be a nothing (supernothing, going nowhere fast
and I don't care).
Take today, for example:
Right now, I'm meant to be at a
Dance
(of all things)
Meeting other queer kids and generally having a
Good
Time
(capital letters merited).
And yeah, that'd be awesome but
Effort
Doesn't come easily to me who
Will probably end up on the streets in five years because I
Blow all my money
On knitting needles and
Stolen library books.

Ache

Standing up takes more effort than it should
Muscles and tendons size and compress
The floor pounds into my feet and drives
Up my legs and through my back to my shoulders where
It simply
Sits.
Ache.

Identity

Some days, the Internet can be a really, really bad place for me. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, photos and faces and articles flashing past as quickly as I want. Some days, I get sucked in. I read articles for hours, ogle more photos than I can count, open tabs upon tabs until I cannot fathom the amount of information I have on my screen. Some days, I look too hard.

I identify myself as queer. I've slowly come around to carrying that label, because it fits as well as any I've used, more so than lesbian or bisexual. It's open for interpretation, and I like that. It doesn't force me to make a decision, or force people to make a split-second decision about me the way I feel some other labels do. I have fluidity in my sexuality, and I've come to terms with that. I love my queer self, and I'm proud of me for who I am.

I also identify myself as female. I've never felt uncomfortable in my body. It may be that I'm incredibly lucky and privileged  but I've always loved my body. I have strong rower's shoulders, muscular arms, rower's thighs, and the core of the equestrian I used to be. I have a Nike-swoosh scar on my face from a riding accident, calluses on my hands from oar handles, bike riding and rowing induced scars on my legs. One of my ankles locks up from an old injury, and I can't touch my toes. When I see myself naked, I'm proud. I've occasionally had bouts of thinking that other people don't find me attractive, but I've never felt like I had to change everything about me. Just occasionally overlooked.

Some days though, despite my solid grounding in my identity as a queer female, I feel inadequate. I'm fine with my naked body- hell, I'd wear less clothes during the summer if I could, it's too hot where I live. It's my clothed body that brings me down. I've been toying, picking, worrying at my gender presentation for a while. It's been hand in hand with the issue of my sexuality, but up until recently, it was a non-issue. I didn't know who I was, or how to present that person. Now that I have inner balance (most of the time), I've been struck by the problem of outer harmony. I've never been a girly-girl. I chopped my hair into a short, fauxhawk-ish thing over a year ago, and I've been dyeing it various colors for almost three years. My hair has allowed me to explore my appearance, and my confidence has grown a thousandfold because of my experimentation. I shook the first couple of times I went out in public with short hair, but eventually I got used to it and just embraced it as part of my overall changing identity.

Yesterday, I went to a fancy mother-daughter tea-thing at my school for graduating seniors. It was lovely, and I had a great time, despite less than high expectations. True to form, 99% of my class was in dresses or skirts and heels or nice flats. For me, a dress was not an option. For the past year, I've grown more and more attached to pants, button down shirts, ties, and blazers. So, true to form, I threw on a black and white checkered shirt, my black dress pants, my trusty Doc Marten boots, a blazer, and a skinny black silk tie. With my hair looking extra spiky and my tie perfectly knotted, I looked damn good. Or so I thought. When I got downstairs, my mother (who, by the way, has a Masters degree in Women's Studies and as a pretty radical feminist, should GET THIS) looks at me and goes, "Why aren't you wearing a skirt?"

I just looked at her. She's always been very accepting of my sexuality (even though I haven't *exactly* come out officially, but she definitely knows), so this was just kind of an unexpected blow. I know it wasn't her fault that she mentioned it at a bad time, but she brought me crashing down from the high I'd been on. I was so confident in how I looked, feeling really dapper, and suddenly that just... disappeared.

For the last twenty four hours, I've been brooding. I was home sick today, so I had ample amounts of time to distract myself with the internet. This proved to be a rather bad idea. Instead of a pick-me-up, I got a downer slipped to me by mistake. Each article I read, each photo I saw, made me question myself a little more. And each question brought up more bad feelings. I'm not unhappy with my physical body, but even so, this new sense of dysphoria made me feel extremely off center. I'm unhappy with my presentation. I'd love to have a more masculine of center, androgynous appearance. I want my jeans to skim my curves, not hug them, my shirts to show off my shoulders and not my breasts. I want to wear bowties and blazers and oxfords and cool sneakers and dress like a hipster boy and be a dapper queer and wear snapbacks, even though I look bad in hats. Almost everything in my closet feels... wrong, and that makes me sad. I don't feel very confident in myself anymore, and that makes me even more sad. I want my confidence back, my assurance in my queerness. I want to find my swagger.

But.
Where do I look?

Posed

In their eyes, you are not you anymore.
Reduced to a series (collection, grouping, abundance)
Of lines and planes, dark and light,
Shadows and highlights,
Tones.
You look at them but they do not see you,
Only
The precise geometry of your ratios:
Eyes to nose to mouth to chin and shoulders, beyond.
Pure, spatial construction, no
Judgement tweaking fixing just
Faithful recording
Setting your lines down on paper
Capturing
In a moment
What you truly look like.

None For Me

Two for you
None for me
Uneven math, of course. It's what I
deserve.
One plus one is two that's
Two for you and
One plus zero (one) for me.
Hint: that one is
Me.
Is that fair?
Hint: (it's not.)
But I guess that's how
It has to be.
Two for you and
One (none) for me.

Sunday

After a week of clouds and heaviness, stepping outside this morning felt like heaven. Still cold, but the clean, snapping kind of cold that comes with the lingering breath of winter, not the sticky oppressiveness of a damp, 40 degree spring. A wind came through last night, and whisked aside any traces of moisture. Even this morning, we still felt the briskness, heating our cheeks and roughly slapping our chins with bouts of cold. Above our hatted heads, the sky seemed washed clean, taking up more space than allotted. It flew down between buildings and scraps of cloud, piggybacking on the wind, a force of depth as much as temperature. The sun glinted, stinging our eyes with a light as bright and cutting as ice. Even in winter, the sun can wound. Trailing tears of cold and light, we continued on our way, still aware of the vastness of the sky, falling away around our heads. We encountered a busy intersection, and paused. Almost unnoticed, we spiraled up and out of ourselves and flew with the clouds, skimming over previously unnoticed buildings and hidden rooftops. The world, for a moment, distilled, small crystalline images forming and melting quickly as snowflakes. When we touched down again, I looked at you and remembered sitting down here and now to write this, on this particular blustery Sunday, just one in a string of Sundays that connect our weeks. In a year, will you even remember?