I Was Going to Google It, But I Thought We'd Have a Conversation Instead

I WANTED to document 30 minutes of an amphetamine crash.

5:04 a.m.
These are the most unproductive moments of my life. My heart has never beat so fast, and my eyes have never moved so slow. I'm darting. I'm shaking. I'm drafting notes.

Is this a panic attack?

The sun doesn't rise until 6:38 a.m., did you know that? The fuck is that about? Did you know I'm a little more than a mile from campus, and there's thunder and lightning and rain, and that might make it dark for a little longer? I think it will, and I don't have an umbrella or a hood or an excuse.

No, really, is it?
Hours ago my heart felt like it would swell until it exploded. MY BODY WAS ALL CAPS. I was so excited. I love(d) you all, I want(ed) you to know it. My arms tingled. My thoughts chased after my words, which tumbled carelessly and endlessly out of my mouth, my eyes were bright. I laughed into your collarbone, I told you all how much you meant. Now, alone at 5:09 a.m., an amphetamine rush is only panic. My mouth is dry. I don't want water. I want water. I have to get up for water. No water. Where is my love now, where are my thoughts? I have no more words; the insomnia stole my words. Where are all those whom I've neglected for fear of missing? Where are all those whom I've avoided because they kept calling, unknowingly waiting for my anxiety to subside? Where is everyone now that my hands are shaking and the sun's still hiding and the clock moves two minutes forward only to fall one minute back?
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I think I have effectively broken every basic rule my parents have ever given me. All at once.
I think I look like an asshole when I try to dance like a hipster. I think everyone looks like assholes when they try to dance like hipsters. But I think I do it wrong, so the asshole-ness is extra. Like, I get a gold sticker.
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By the way,

Sorry I stole the sheets from your bed.
Sorry I didn't let you know what was going on. I didn't mean to, or not to.
Sorry I was drunk when you saw me. Sorry I'll be drunk next time you see me. I'm actually only a little sorry, but I know I should be more sorry, so here's my apology.
Sorry I did exactly what I begged you not to months ago. Sorry I cried then. I cry easily; it's a little stupid and a lot embarrassing.
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What if we made fewer confessions and told more truths?
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Sometimes there are nights that disappear into haze. Maybe you forgot what you were on.
Sometimes you wonder where you were all night, and then you wonder where you should have been, and you wonder if you should have been the source of the noise. If you should have been making the floorboards creak and wail with your jumping, if if the walls would have been happier to echo your voice. Entire portions of night disappear. Where did they go? More importantly, where did I go? I think that I stopped existing for just a little. I think I got lost in an alcove; it was pretty dark, y'know?
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I think that I live far away from home, though I don't really know what that means.
Hometown nostalgia tricked me in those last few days, made me think it was real. Made me desperate to be seen before I disappeared. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be wearing skinny jeans and plaid, I wanted all of you to see how the band of my boxer briefs peeked out the top of my pants. I'M GAY, I wanted you to know. I'M GAY, and I was gay when you knew me, but now I'm not sorry, and no one needs to tell me it's okay and that I'm okay and that high school doesn't really matter, because I always knew those things. It's just that now I believe them.

Leaving was sad. Leaving was final.
They said you'd go to college, and you'd come back, but you'd never come back. I think I'm going a little farther this time.

About that thing, about my parents, about how we fucked it up. We just fucked it up, this thing. That they always saw their lives, secure and prosperous, without lesbian daughters or heartbreaking arguments or silent stalemates. We should have been sad to see each other go; instead, I think we're relieved. How does that thing happen? That thing where your life wasn't what you wanted or expected or believed? Does it happen to our unhappy, middle-aged parents? Or does it happen to us all?
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But hey, what am I scared for? Hey Brandon, didn't we realize today that everything, every moment has already happened at some point in time? All of this has already happened; somewhere it's done. It's just a matter of getting there. I'm worried about 6:38 a.m., but that's okay, because by 7:38, I'll know. It's just a matter of getting to 7:30. Life will just happen until then; we'll get there. We'll know.
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5:33 a.m.
Street lights still glowing orange. Can't tell if it's raining, can't see through the blinds. Weather.com says it's raining. Guess I'll have to trust that. I wonder if, when I get outside in an hour, I'll be trapped between places, locked out of one apartment, a mile away from the next. It's going to be raining, which is too bad, because I wanted to walk along to the sunrise. Maybe I should memorize these directions, just in case the newly inked napkin melts through my fingers on the way.

What Am I, a Bicycle?

Or, The World Clock on My Phone Means Nothing
Or, There Are Motherfucking Cats Fighting on the Roof, and I Think I Just Heard One Fall Off

I was going to do a pretty dry, straightforward post about what's been going on the past week, but that got difficult as I have too many feelings, and I still can't properly structure any of my thoughts. I go between feeling elated then lonely then listless then frustrated. I can't quite figure out what I'm doing here yet. I think I'm on vacation. I don't know what that means.

Anyway, since I'm obviously going crazy, I've just compiled a couple of stream-of-consciousness deals I've written over the past few days. Sometimes I'm almost coherent, but it's not something I'd like to get used to.

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IF A TRAIN LEAVES from Montreal at 8:30 am on July 23, and a plane leaves from Manila at 11 am on July 24 but also at 11 pm on July 23, at what point will the difference in time zones start to make sense? When will I understand what day it is? What will it feel like when I’m hurtling through time in the body of an aircraft, a time machine cleverly disguised as a plane? What will it feel like when the world unfreezes, again engaging in its perpetual motion, and I am awakened from this listless existence where I am haunted by the shuffling feet of lethargy and ennui? Will my days still blend together? Will they continue to lie before me, stretching out into infinity as if in a perspective study, their only end an early night’s sleep? What day is it now? It wouldn’t make a difference.
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I think that, if I stared hard enough, I could make myself into you.
I think that maybe I’ve been studying without knowing, tracing dotted lines and cutting out patterns. But no matter how hard I try or how closely I look, I will always be only the paper doll version, cardboard clothes falling off at their poorly bent creases.

Maybe what I really want is to turn you into me, because maybe the only person I’ll truly love is myself. The only person who won’t ever leave is me, and even that’s a little questionable. If I turned you into me, would you leave? Or would I decide that I didn’t like myself and abandon you in your paper doll clothes? Probably. I’d let you turn to pulp in the rain, and I would know that you couldn't chase me.
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THERE SHE GOES again disrupting the poetry of her collarbone.
A flash of red is a plea that you’ll remember her face, because she won’t tell you her name.
Her walk is brutal, her hips, her skinny, swaggering boy hips, unforgiving.
I’ll always think she hates me.
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Sometimes
When I am drunk
My thoughts
Move vertically.

This also happens
When I am talking crazy.
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I wonder sometimes if I made you up, or if it was the other way around. I wonder if you made me into you. Maybe that’s why you left.
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Last night I meant to write a series of drunk emails.
Instead I threw up in my grandma’s bathroom.
And knocked over a picture of the Pope.
My cousin passed out on the couch.
And our grandma found her at 4am with all the lights on.
Today a really wide truck tried to get through a narrow street where our car was.
My aunt rolled down the window.
Translated, she yelled,
“What is this? What’s going on? What am I, a bicycle?”

I’m staying here an extra nine days.

Something About Airplanes

Location: Seoul, Korea
Time: 5:41 am

I believed in God on runways and starting lines. Crouched waiting for the gun or strapped tightly to my seat, I murmured incantations with every breath, crossed myself an innumerable amount of times, praying for agility, success, safety. I quit track three years ago, effectively halving my belief, and my family has stopped traveling since trying to save for college. God and I haven't spoken in about two years.

It was necessary today/tonight/last night/I don't understand time though, as we sat on the runway, the standard safety video playing, preparing us for our flight. Showing us how to blow up our life vests in case of an emergency water landing.

I fucking hate those videos.
I don't know if I'm neurotic or paranoid or insane, but for me, those videos force me to imagine every possible scenario in which the plane could crash over and over and over again, and all it has to offer as solace is a pigtailed Korean girl calmly applying an oxygen mask to her face. Or a business-suited man manually blowing up his life vest because the ripchord didn't work. And in my own morbid fantasies of falling from the sky, the asshole with the malfunctioning life vest is always me.

Airplanes scare me because they don't make sense.
They're giant carriers floating in the air, carrying lives and luggage and and...metal. Giant winged creatures with turbines. Just floating. Flying. I don't like to think about it, because I'm always convinced that these things run on pure belief. I'm like Wile E. Coyote, running off a cliff, suspended in the air, until he looks down, until he stops believing. Until he falls out of the air with nothing but a picket sign reading "Yikes!" left to remind everyone of what happened.

But something happens when you take off from New York at night. It's something surreal.
The plane picks up speed, rumbles, takes off, tilts and banks until the glow of New York City becomes visible through the tiny windows. The streets are real at first, filled with cars, cabs, pedestrians. But eventually they shrink and fade, and the city and the plane do each other the mutual favor of disappearance, Manhattan becomes an incandescent grid, and the airplane a blinking memory, a twinkling apostrophe in the sky.

The airplane is absurd because people have no common sense and like to put words where they don't belong. I can listen to "Blackout" by Britney Spears while playing "In-Flight Tetris." Like I needed to be reminded that I was on a plane. Like in-flight Tetris is somehow different from safe-on-the-ground Tetris. It's like the Seattle Cafe's Original Classic Burger. Hamburgers are a classic American staple. Tetris on a plane is in-flight Tetris.

These are the things I have to contemplate on my 14-hour flight. I have three more hours in this terminal, and another 4 to Manila. I could bitch about how, by the time I touch down again, I'll have been traveling for about 30 hours, but when you think about it, what's 30 hours when it gets you to the other side of the world? Think about the months and months it took to round the tip of Africa. It takes 30 hours to get to the other side of the world. Think about all the people on the plane. Replace "people" with "lives," "stories." We're all being taken somewhere.

I Can Stand Up Straight

I'm currently having a bit of trouble trying to condense the ridiculous ups and downs of my weekend into a single entry.

Short version:
1. I think I'm going to get ink poisoning from having my hands marked every time I go out. I got made fun of by a bouncer at Town. That's how you know.
2. Home isn't over for me yet.
3. The Ting Tings/HotTub will change your life.
4. D.C. is fantastic. Thank God for marches on the Pentagon and Guernica signs and shouting at buildings and making up for missed opportunities.
4. Time slows down on a sun high.
4a. The steps of Katzen Arts Center, and now subsequently my body, are covered in some sort of weird chalky substance. Do not fall asleep there.

#3 will probably be expanded upon in a later post, because they really were phenomenal. Seeing both bands reminded me of how I felt when I saw Tilly and the Wall right before leaving for school, and that was pretty significant. So...that will be given attention at some point.

The indirect re-introduction of some characters into my life this weekend brought me to some really unsettling conclusions about the way all my problems from home are very strongly connected.

The main point is that you should not be a janky homophobe.

It's not just your overt disposition toward the LGBTQ community. It's not always violence (both physical and systematic) and offensive language and the like. It's the subtle things that pervade our lives. It's indirect exclusion and slowly losing everyone in your life, and feeling unwelcome in their houses once you get them back. It's gossip and sneers and seeing the disdain of other people's parents reflected in the reaction of my parents when I finally came out. It's the I-don't-mind-gay-people-but-thank-God-that's-not-my-child. Because you know what? If you wouldn't accept your child as queer, then you do not accept queer people. And you need to accept that.

In short, home is hitting too close to home, and somewhere along the line the only rational and mature decision I could manage to make became promising to completley cut people out of my life, and that is a damn shame.

It's not all bad though, because home-induced blues come and go and can always be ameliorated by a weekend on the DC gay club circuit. Welcome back to my life, Apex. I missed your lasers and sticky floors and shirtless men dancing with themselves in the mirror.

Wait, did I? (Yes, kind of, actually).

A day spent lounging on the steps of Katzen didn't hurt either.
Just when I was about to be freaked out by the perpetual motion of the earth and that whole recurring panic about everything moving too fast, time slowed. And it didn't just slow, it swayed and lingered and wrapped me up in a dreamy sun-induced daze.

Also all that chalky shit that's on me now.