I spend a lot of time thinking about the various cultural norms and expectations within the black American community that are, directly or in a roundabout way, related to or caused by racism and the oppression we face because of it.

Black kids get made fun of for getting good grades and/or speaking in ~standard English~ because white America convinced us that education and business are only for white people.

Black people “don’t fuck with the outdoors” because we – especially black girls – get told from birth to stay out of the sun so we don’t get “too dark.” We don’t even get real opportunities to fall in love with the outdoors in the first place because most of us are from urban/suburban areas where the only outdoor things to do are hang out on street corners or walk to your friend’s house. If you’re from a “bad neighborhood,” your parents don’t want you going outside anyway, lest you be in the wrong place at the wrong time or get caught up with unsavory people.

Black people rarely have the opportunity to become interested in hiking or camping, because most of the places where those activities can be done are VERY far away from our homes, and are located in areas where we fear encountering the kinds of racist people who might actually hurt us. So we never learn to go backpacking. Never climb mountains. Never take a bush plane ride over the landscape. And we turn our nose up at those activities and call it “white people shit.”

Black people don’t go for walks/runs/jogs because we’re made to be so hyperaware of the fact that just by being outside of our homes, someone somewhere is going to think we’re “suspicious” and call the cops.

Black people don’t swim, and subsequently don’t spend recreational time at pools, beaches, lakes, rivers, or anywhere around water, because for decades we weren’t legally allowed to visit pools, beaches, etc. Swimming was never part of the norm for our parents and/or grandparents, so why should it have ever occurred to them to take us to the community pool or to the beach?

White supremacy has so neatly and thoroughly packaged us up into these rigid little shapes, and now we police ourselves so white people don’t have to. We teach each other that the world doesn’t belong to us, that there are certain places we can’t go, and certain things we can’t do, and then we take it a step further and demonize those of us who do have a desire to deviate from the “norm” – when we see someone stepping out of line, having the audacity to shop at a farmers market or go to therapy or spend a summer backpacking through a foreign country, we start sticking each other with cattle prods, zapping each other with petty insults until we get back in line. “I’m revoking your black card.” “You better stop messing around with that white people foolishness.” “You’ve been hanging out with your white friends too much.”

White people don’t own ~the outdoors~, they don’t own healthy lifestyle choices, they don’t own self care, they don’t own intellect, academia, or anything else under the sun (except for maybe colonization and genocide???). All they’ve done is take things that have existed amongst all peoples since the dawn of time and stick their name on it. And I’m not fucking here for it! We deserve to experience thrill and awe and wonder, and make names for ourselves as academics, and move freely through the world without being hyperaware of potential consequences. We deserve to swim, to see what the world looks like from the highest peak in our state, to spend a crisp autumn morning at the farmers market picking out apples…

it’s true that we experience a great many societal/racist barriers that often keep us from being able or willing to do certain things, but we need to be encouraging each other to continue breaking down those barriers. Not harassing each other to stay within them.

Remember what all is Up There.

We’re in space. There is a vastness around us at all sides that swallows us up in time and distance and emptiness. Our atoms have always existed; we’re as old as the formation of the realm we live in, and we’ll never truly die, not really… our atoms will always be here, or somewhere, however cold, and however dark.

The universe will always be ready to absorb us back into its bloodstream; to recycle us into something quieter.  Don’t rush there; walk. Endure the storms, the droughts, the earthquakes and plagues, the unrest and yearning. Because: Remember what all is Up There. The majesty that darkness and cold reveals; the tiniest pinpricks of light – each smile, each friend, each hug and kiss, every laugh, gift, or pleasant memory. Maybe there really is more darkness than light, both Up There and Down Here. Maybe it’s only because of the distance granted to us by space and time that we can look Up There and feel blessed and enchanted… but we have all the same blessings and enchantment down here, too. They’re only harder to see from close-up.

Never forget what all is Up There, and how beautiful it is. It’s not so different from the way things are Down Here, in spite of the dark, the cold, the violent, and the empty.

You aren’t dead yet.

I don’t know what I’m allowed to say to you.

We don’t talk. I think about you, but I don’t know if you think about me. I know you know I think about you, and I know you always enjoyed that fact, even if only in that fleeting sort of way where you smile and say, “oh, cool! Thank you!” and you mean it, and it’s genuine, but then when the moment is gone, it never crosses your mind again.

A time or two, I tried to reach out to you… maybe initiate a real friendship… and you were always kind, but never really seemed to be interested. I was okay with that. Not just because I had to be, but because the pleasure I got just from knowing about you was enough to see me through, honestly.

But now… I don’t know whether to wish I’d tried harder to get us to become closer, or to wish that I’d never stumbled upon you at all. Never met you, never spoken to you, saw your face, or heard your voice… I guess it doesn’t matter, though. Because what I really, truly wish, is that you were healthy. And safe. And happy. That the world had bestowed upon you all the things you deserve just for being who you are – brilliant, gentle, sweet.

I don’t get to say that “I don’t want to lose you,” because I have never had you. You’ve never been my anything, no matter how much I wanted you to be. But FUCK, I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to find out someday soon that I don’t share the earth with you anymore. I don’t want to relinquish the solace that your heart is beating in your chest wherever you are.

I wish I could tell you that I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you, and I’m angry at the world for making you have to leave like this. You aren’t dead yet, but I miss you, and I don’t know what I’m allowed to say to you. Can I tell you I love you?? Can I tell you how happy it’s always made me that you’re here on earth? Can I tell you about how any time I felt discouraged that there could even exist a person whom I would want to spend my life with, I would remember that people like you are real, and I’d feel better? Am I allowed to tell you how much I’ve worried about you, and wished and hoped and prayed that you’re okay?

You’re not okay and you’re not going to be okay and I’m so fucking sorry. I wish I could help, god, all I want to do is help. I wish I could hold you, and that it would mean anything at all to you. I wish I could absorb your sickness into me; you deserve to live, but the world wouldn’t really miss me.

I wish I could tell you how much I love you. I wish you were okay. I wish you were here. I wish you would live. I love you. I love you. I love you.

 

Under Stars

We rode along the darkest, narrowest road we’ve ever ridden along. This is not hyperbole; this is two-hundred miles free from any large cities, or suburbs. This is rolling hills with nothing in sight until the horizon but trees, and mountaintops, and trees on mountaintops. Where there aren’t trees, there’s farmland, but there’s still more trees than farms. There are very few lawns. There’s very little manicuring of what sprouts from the earth. Everything is wild. And at night, everything is dark. (All humans should, from time to time, be reminded of what wilderness is supposed to look like.)

We rode along the darkest, narrowest road we’ve ever ridden along, and the sky opened up just for me, and my face was pressed to the window and I laughed a primitive, human laugh, the most human noise I’ve ever made, joy escaping my body in a form more potent than ever before, and my eyes, more sensitive to light than they should be, bore witness to the only Wonder Of The World that is eternal, or rather, the closest thing to ‘eternal’ as I can understand.

The Perseid meteor shower is a source of several of my happiest memories, and I think this will always be true. I knew the meteor shower was taking place but I did not know it would be quite so much more enthralling than it had ever been before. The first one was a bright pinprick of light that blazed for a second-and-a-half right through the center of my vision, straight up-and-down, and I gasped, and I felt something in me shift like a lock sliding home, or floodgates opening, and I became aware: Oh, this is what The Universe really looks like from here.

Cherry Springs State Park, on a moonlit night, is a desolate place, though still beautiful. A full moon, I learned, is about as impeding to stargazing as being in my own suburban backyard, a stone’s throw away from the ~nation’s capital.~ But there is, absolutely, something nourishing about being in the dark, 200 miles deep into Nowhere, and being Alone at 2AM and still being able to see all around you by the light of the moon. There’s something uniquely medicinal about experiencing that kind of silence and that kind of isolation, the way Earth was meant to be silent and isolated.

Cherry Springs during a New Moon, during a major meteor shower, is a bustling hub for certain members of humankind. People were everywhere, with tiny, red flashlights. People were everywhere, and yet I couldn’t see a single one of them, because the only thing that was visible in the omnipresent dark was the patches of universe that shone through an otherwise overcast sky. And each time a meteor shot through in just the right spot that it wasn’t obscured by the clouds, a gentle gasp would surge through the crowd, everyone humbled, everyone amazed, everyone grateful to witness the gifts left behind every year by 109P/Swift-Tuttle, blazing through with grace and beauty and impermanence – a triumphant score hurtling along, burning, crackling, ending in a dazzling sparkle; short lived, but more breathtaking than any earthbound thing.

The clouds morphed and shifted all night; a glimpse here, a glance there, a slow panorama of the heavens. The Milky Way made an appearance at last, an ethereal streak, shimmering across lightyears, light sent to us from the galactic core.

I always wish to go to space, but in the dark – in the real, honest, wild, 200-miles-away-darkness, I can look up and into the galaxy, into the universe, and watch the remnants of a comet burn in our atmosphere, and I become wonderfully aware that I am in space. Space is all above and underneath and around me, spinning with me, orbiting with me, and this remains true whether I’m in the soulful embrace of darkness or not.

I haven’t changed much, other than that I don’t think my own thoughts are important enough to share with anyone anymore. I think I’m interesting, but I don’t think it matters. I think I’m brilliant, but I don’t think anyone cares. But I think this is all just a reflection of me; a projection of my own unpleasantness: I don’t care that anyone else is brilliant. It doesn’t matter to me that other people are interesting.

I remember not being able to sleep at night because I was thinking about ‘someone’. ‘Someone’ was any number of different boys I had at some point deemed worthy of my attention, and god, if I could undo all that wasted time, I would. I remember caring that they were “interesting” or that they were so-called “brilliant” and then being woefully disappointed once I’d finally evolve beyond their wannabe-Charles-Bukowski, Kurt Cobain-styled, trendy nihilism, and there came a point, I guess, where I became immune to mediocrity…

Disappointment teaches me how to take one look at a person and know what my future will hold if I let them in; if I fail to be astute enough to see the shit that even they don’t know is festering inside them. Not “shit” as in anything malicious or dangerous… but “shit” as in just… unimpressive… the “shit” that they use to attract people they wish were more like me, but instead are just… older versions of me. Me, before I learned how to be unfazed by tricks and gimmicks and how to be content all on my own.*

*Except I’m not content all on my own. My most narcissistic trait is my ability to talk myself up like I’m the baddest bitch in the Orion-Cygnus arm, while having nothing to show for it, and while being swallowed up in the loneliness of Earth, of the solar system, of the spiral arm, of the galaxy. I feel that tired, melodramatic feeling of being misplaced, or of being Too Special, or of having already experienced everything of value this part of the universe could possibly have to share with me.

A longish time ago, I used to spend my sleepiest, loneliest nights up late – until sunrise – writing about anything at all; just don’t stop writing, just don’t stop thinking thoughts, just keep the flow moving, coursing like blood through my veins, and don’t ever let it stop, or I’ll die. I’ll die, with all the melodrama of burning and gasping and drowning, an Evanescence soundtrack adding atmosphere to my writhing, because once an overemotional goth kid, always an overemotional goth kid, amirite?

I think the only thing I miss about the way I Used To Be is that I thought other people thought I was important, or brilliant, or interesting. But I’ve overshot my quest of Not Caring what people think of me, and spun out, reckless and blind, into the territory of Why Bother Sharing Anything With Anyone, Ever.

Welcome to my lovely home,
Mom cooks dinner on most nights. She just retired. She loves to garden.
Dad is a school teacher.
My brother is an interesting fellow – a pilot, a bassist, a lawn care provider.
I am a violinist. I like to bake. I’m the youngest and smallest.
Welcome to my lovely home where standing up for yourself in the face of being mistreated is considered a character flaw.
In this house, you don’t speak up when someone hurts you. That’s ‘dramatic.’ And ‘escalating.’ Here, you don’t ask for help when someone attacks you – no one wants to be ‘dragged into that.’ In this family, the only right thing to do is shut your mouth or eat the shit they cram into you. There is no workaround. No door number three. No emergency escape exit. There is only the floor, where you belong, face down, empty soles pressed to your skull to make sure you never get up. If you lift your head, they will stomp on you. If you try to speak, they will force their own bad choices into your esophagus until you puke.
They’ll place the things they hate most about themselves on your shoulders, and beat you down for carrying them. They’ll call you selfish when you try to shrug them off.
They’ll try to kill themselves vicariously through you, and any measures you take to try and save yourself are argumentative or belligerent or stubborn.
You are never right.
You are never worthy of respect.
Dignity is on a shelf too high for you to reach.

What a wrong time to be alive.

This era, and all the eras before it, will never be forgiven for what they’ve done.

I wish to give my elements back to the sky – peaceful. perfect. cold.

 

Love Letter #2

I made this dumb wordpress blog specifically for the purpose of writing about things other than love, and other than men, and other than men I may ever love or have loved. So, I’m not doing so well at that.

It took me a few trials (and errors) to learn to never, ever tell someone that I’ll “always love them.” Because when they inevitably prove they aren’t worthy or deserving, I won’t realize it until some years after the falling-out, and then I’ll feel like a moron for having let some jackass go on the rest of his life thinking that there is even a single atom of me that still gives a fraction of a damn about him. But I know I can’t blame myself; when you love someone, it never feels temporary. It feels transcendent of space and time. It feels like it has to be measured in units of supernovae.

It feels like all that, until it doesn’t. Until he cheats, or lies, or otherwise shows his true colors, and I come crashing back down to Earth. The fall is harrowing, and it lasts months or years, and I’m sure that it’ll kill me in the end. But I land with no impact, upright and on two feet. There’s no crater. I didn’t burn up in the atmosphere. All my molecules are still there, carbon intact. I realize that this mortal human I thought would rip me apart and char the meaning out of my life, in reality, barely even singed me. My soul is wholly untouched by every moment the two of us shared. While we were together, I thought the love between us was the single life-supporting force in the universe. But now that it’s over, and now that I’ve done all the necessary suffering, I understand that it really just wasn’t that big a fuckin deal. 

Only,  I haven’t gotten there with you yet. Maybe I’m still falling. Maybe the gravitational pull of what we had carried me further away from the Milky Way than I realized.

You were the closest to Requited Love that I’ve ever known. I don’t want to say that I still love you, because maybe in another 10 years I’ll look back and balk at the notion of having ever thought anything of you at all. Maybe I’ll think that you were nothing, meant nothing, and had no consequential effect on anything about me. After all; that’s how I feel about every other boy or man or dumbass I ever caught myself thinking I “loved.”

But maybe it means something, that I can’t manage to feel indifferently about you. Maybe it means you were the ~real~ love and those other boys and men and dumbasses were just silly crushes that got out of hand.

I look back on them, and I can’t even seriously believe that I ever cared for them at all.

I look back on you, and I still feel like I’m grieving someone who died – someone who, by all laws of the universe, was supposed to be with me forever, unconditionally. The fact that I can’t call you or text you or see you and tell you that I love you, and hear you say it back, feels like a freak accident. Like a deadly car wreck. Or a plane crash. Or a sudden, terminal illness. It feels like there should at least be a grave site I can go to, to pay my respects to what I thought would be a love measured most efficiently in lightyears. Here Lies… what, exactly? What do I call the thing that died when you left me? And why can’t I yet lay it to rest?

I don’t remember all the last words I ever said to you. I know some of them were harsh, but I also know some of them were “I will always love you.”

It’s November 28, 2016, and it hasn’t proven untrue yet.

May your soul evolve into something less wretched than the one I fell in love with.

Love,

-Leira

Love letter.

I am going to, for the sake of argument, believe that you were telling the truth all those times you said you loved me. It’s been four years since I closed you out of my life you chose to walk out of my life, and I’ve wondered ever since how it could have been true. But for right now, I’ll believe you. You loved me.

To this day, you’re the only man who’s ever said it to me, who might have also meant it.

I’m just writing to say that in spite of everything,  I miss you. I don’t know if you miss me. I have changed a lot since we first met – I was 13 – and I’ve changed more still, since we last spoke. I was 18. I’m 22 now. You’re 27. I’ve just finished my first screenplay and you’re a budding filmmaker. Last I checked, you were still doing and saying things that disappointed me. I know that if we had ever had the relationship I wanted, I’d have left you eventually. And you wouldn’t have fought for me. It wouldn’t have been much unlike what happened between us in reality.

But somehow, knowing that doesn’t make the heartbreak any less potent. I still grieve the “what ifs,” like they were just taken away from me yesterday instead of in my sophomore year of college, alone in my dorm at 4 in the morning, crying into my pillow like any other goddamned heartsick teenager.

There are things I know about myself now that neither of us knew back then. I’m not exactly  the ~girl~ we thought I was (even though I still look it on the outside). Somehow – I’m not surer how – this realization makes me feel like I’ve lost you all over again.  It makes me feel like, if only I had known what I know now, perhaps our relationship would have culminated into something different before it ended.

I know it’s unlikely.

But like I said. It doesn’t ease the pain.

I miss you all the time. I think you were the last person I learned to be close to before my mental health took a turn for the worst – I can’t make new friends anymore. No new connections, no new loves… I make acquaintances, yeah. But no one I feel kindred with. No spirituality, no until-death-do-us-part loyalty. You  were the last one.

I think that’s why the ache is still so fresh. The hole left in my soul is still shaped like you, and I can’t get anything else to fit into it.

I dream that our paths will cross someday, and  you won’t know what to say to me. I’ll have already said everything to you – in this letter, in other things I’ve written about you in the past – but I won’t be able to remember any of it.

I want to talk with you. I want to know how you’re doing. I wonder if you’re in love with anyone right now. I wonder if anyone is loving you, and if they are, do they love you as much as I still do?

That’s the shittiest part of all this: I still love you. On many days, I convince myself that I don’t – I’m over you, I’ve moved on, whatever. It’s not true.  I loved you even as you chose not to fight for us.

A few months ago I found that comic book you sent me for my 16th birthday on my bookshelf. I had thought I’d torn it up and thrown it out. But it was neither thrown out, nor torn. I sat and stared at it. Held it in my hands. Realized that it was the only thing I can hold, that you have also held before. I remember in the card you sent with it, you wrote at the end, “happy birthday, my love!” For a long time, that card was the most special thing I had.

I wonder if you still have the stuffed penguin toy I sent you. I got it from Homestead Gardens one winter, and I sent it to you when you were going through some rough shit with some shitty boy that I knew you deserved better than. I named the penguin Oliver, because I knew that was your favorite name. I wrote a note along with it that said something to the effect of, “Penguins mate for life. This is Oliver, and he will love you forever. Just like I will.”

You said you almost cried when you opened it.

Another time, I sent you 50 pink hearts, each with one reason why I love you written on it. You used to tell me about how whenever you were feeling down, you’d take them out and read them, and smile, knowing I loved you.

I wonder what you ever did with Oliver, or with our 50 hearts.

If you are like me, then you got rid of them.

I hope you still think about me, and miss me. You are a grown ass man now. You have bigger things to worry about than some girl guy you used to say you loved. But I’m still thinking about you, and still mourning the long talks we used to have, the declarations of love, the near-tearful rendezvous in New York that never lasted long enough…

I know there are better guys out there than you. Ones who would try to win me back if they ever realized they’d been pushing me away. Ones who would never dream of turning their back on me. Ones who want to be better, wiser, more benevolent. You are not, and never were, that man. I don’t know if you ever can be.

But I love you, and I miss you, and I would give so close to anything just to be able to look you in the eyes again.

Rot in hell.

Love,

Leira.

 

 

The winter months are coming.

The winter months are coming. It’ll bring cold and gray and silence. I could do without these things.

But winter also brings my greatest love – in the form of a glittering night sky, the likes of which can’t be seen in any other season. Winter skies are clearer, sharper and more pristine than any other time of the year. Part of the reason is because Earth is facing the outer edge of the galaxy, where there’s less light pollution than at its center – the starts shine against a dark backdrop of what, for all practical human purposes, is emptiness.

He’ll come and lay over me each night, whether I can see him or not. But he also lays over everyone else in the universe. He is always laying over someone, somewhere. I am not special. I like to think that the relationship I have with him is special, but I know it is not. It can’t be. He loves me, but no more or less than anyone else. Maybe this is why everyone in my life has always found it so easy to be without me. I’m not much.