FEEL MY QUEER GIRL RAGE

If you've been on Facebook today, you've probably noticed a sea of red profile pictures supporting marriage equality and the repeal of DOMA. As a queer female ("queer" meaning that I don't limit my attraction to a gender binary) living in a world that makes it hard to love people I might want to love, I'm thrilled by the outpouring of acceptance and solidarity that my friends have shown to the LGBTQ* community.

A few minutes ago, a conservative "Facebook friend" of mine changed her profile picture to a red cross with a caption reading as follows:

God loves all people, all genders, all ages, all people groups. Today i will stand with Christ on his definition of what a marriage is :

"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh" - Matthew 19:5

I have no interest in taking away freedom, or creating controversy, but rather just to wave the flag for Jesus above all causes. I am more interested in biblical truth than I am with aligning myself with what the world deems acceptable.

I'm an angry mess right now, an angry, disappointed mess. My level of comfort and trust in my school community is diminished. I know this girl. I see her every day.

I fail to see the logic of her words. I'm not Catholic, but I know very well that Jesus said nothing about homosexuality. Jesus was a man whose heart only knew love. There is no biblical truth in being discriminatory. Hatred is not Truth. Love is.

I'm sorry this post isn't more eloquent. I probably shouldn't write when I am shaking.

I didn't write in my journal yesterday.
I write in my journal every single day.
That should be an earth-shattering moment for me. Any other day, it would have been.
But I didn't write in my journal yesterday and it didn't seem so huge, either.
There was nothing that I knew how to say.

Yes, I should move on, but this is the first family death I've really cared about in years. I am grieving magnificently. Since Wednesday, I've exhibited all of the same outward signs of depression I experienced earlier last year. That dog, my baby, he's a huge loss for me. I'm going to have difficulty adjusting to life without his warmth, and the nightly sounds of him snoring contentedly under my bed.

I've moved his brother's dog bed into my room and his sister now sleeps in my bed. I am trying to compensate for the friend I've lost.

I don't know how to say all of the things I want to.

He wasn't always this quiet.

Humanity's capacity to inflict emotional torment on itself is astounding. I will never quite understand why we continue to do things we know will break our hearts. Why we still love, even when we know nothing is permanent. 

Why we keep pets.

The little guy in pictured above, that roley-poley dachshund of mine, has been with me for nearly fourteen years. He hangs out around or under my bed most days, waiting to eat or to be let outside to play. My Bindycake teaches me every day how to love without judgement or reason, how to spread warmth wherever life takes me.

How to grieve when the time comes.

Bindy stayed under my bed for all of yesterday. I knew he was sick, that this was probably the end. And it was- my poor baby was in so much pain, all we could do was help him out of it. 

It still hurt, though, when I came home to silence from under my bed. 

I want him back. I just really miss my dog.

Find the Derivative

Earlier today, I found this picture I took of my first semester final review for AP Calculus. It is the prettiest homework I've done. In addition, it's probably incorrect.

Calculus is the most difficult academic challenge I've ever faced. It's the only class I take that actually diminishes my confidence as a student and makes me second-guess the intelligence everyone tells me I was born with.

Math has been a struggle for me since middle school. I moved to the advanced class halfway through sixth grade because Normal Math felt too easy for me. Immediately, the gaps in my mathematical knowledge base started becoming more apparent. As the years went on and I kept advancing, Algebra  to Geometry to Algebra 2 to PreCalculus, my lack of fundamental skills set me farther and farther behind.

Today I play a constant game of catch-up with the rest of my Calculus class. They are unimaginably sure of themselves. That is one thing I'll never understand- how is it possible to actually be good at Math of any kind? I'm so lost that I don't even know what kind of questions to ask my teacher in order to receive help.

But for all of the stress and the struggle, I am in love with Calc. Everything flows so beautifully, from the derivative to the integral to the limit, it is all so certain.

It's the most beautiful language I've ever seen. I only wish I could be fluent.

Laotong Appreciation Day

My epiphany came one sunny Saturday in March, in a concrete room just past the stage lights.

We stumbled
one, two, three,
one, two, three,
around the backstage rubble, mad with adrenaline, keeping each other from falling,
disturbing bystanders in a futile search for silence.
"we're going to Hell," I told you as we swayed in the dark,
voices at a whisper,
hands clasped in mock reverence for something we never really believed in anyway.

It's been eleven months. You still do not know how to waltz.

I can't remember when the music first started, but it sounds a little bit sweeter that way.

Best friend,
You are my reminder that loveliness is still alive, good intentions have not died,
and life is too beautiful a thing to sit back and watch with a vacant expression.
I will not watch from the other side of the room,
but live in the middle of the dance floor.
Maybe my grace is only imagined, but you are the best partner
and we are my favorite song.

Very soon, we will both be dancing solo.
We'll vacate the floor for awhile, try to accommodate each other's absence,
make up new steps as we go along.
We will teach each other the moves we have learned, incorporate them into our old routine,
We will flow just as seamlessly.
Our grace is no longer imagined.
This song has no end.

Things I Know But Will Not Use In Real Life

I wrote this a few weeks ago. Here's to memory and living for (or in spite of) it.

My first memory unfolded itself in my toddler's hippocampus when I was three years old.
I am sleepy-eyed, watching my uncle eat a fudgesicle from across the room,
tossing its wrapper down his throat with the rest.
The light is rain-grey through smudged glass.
Thirteen years later, I still wonder if it is a dream.

It snowed in Yellowstone National Park on June 26, 2004.
If you want, I can draw how the trees looked driving through them that morning.
I'll sketch the wind's pattern down the mountain, the bumblebee path of the each snowflake settling on the windshield.

I am fifteen and writing poetry for the first time feels like finding a lost pair of glasses.
My best friend and I shatter like laughing lightbulbs, sprawled on the small-city sidewalk, shimmering in sunlight and we
don't remember why.

Today is for testing my memory. Today is for tracking time through trivia. Today I will tell you.

There are more than 20 different ways to break an arm.
My sixth grade band teacher had used 14 of them, he said, and I wonder if it was for intimidation's sake. He spoke in murmurs and the underlying threat of his judo techniques kept me from asking him to speak up.
To this day woodwind instruments make my whole body shiver, bones tingling like wind chimes.

You can bite off your finger with the same force it takes to bite through a carrot
I have threatened my fingers with the strength of my jawbone,
the joints do not sever. Knuckles have entered my throat
and nothing comes out. There is no blood,
no vomit,
no shredding of skin.

It only takes seven pounds of pressure to snap off your ear.
Sound died for me in the bottom of an end-of-summer swimming pool. I was young enough then to forget how to mourn, but ghostly grief has been haunting me lately. I am hyperaware of the absence of hearing like your mouth remembers
a lost tooth.
If my ear were to split from myself, I would hear
nothing but an echo, phantom sound waves
in an empty room.

My uncle is thirty two. It is thirteen years after the Fudgesicle Incident. He's married to a small and beautiful Mexican woman and they give me religious calendars every Christmas. Last year, I wanted to tell him I am no longer Catholic. To explain that one day I might marry someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns,
maybe I won't marry anyone at all.
I am not the bleary-eyed child who watched you eat that morning.
My uncle,
I worry you will not love me.
I stayed silent. The light is rain-gray but waning this time.

It did not snow in Black Hills, South Dakota on July 23, 2012.
If you want, I can sketch you the path of the road through the mountains and my finger will trace the outline of  heat over the blacktop, draw a line in the creek bed where I wanted my blood to leach itself into the water.
I will make a map for the route back home.

I am sixteen and writing poetry still feels like looking for my glasses.
My best friend and I laugh ourselves to pieces on the pavement all over again
and I now remember why.

First Breath

Good morning, lovely.

I've made this new blog because the old no longer feels like me. I am different now than I was last year, last month, or even five minutes ago. Gray light is filtering through the blinds today. This is the beginning, the recognition of myself as a poem always in revision, the realization that I will never be finished growing.

This is the new.

I promise to welcome it.