Therapy Is Just Paying Someone With A Degree To Tell You Things That Would Be Obvious If You Weren’t

Today is the day, the day we’ve all been waiting for.

Today

We descend into

🔥THE VULTURE DIMENSION 🔥

my wife has shingled her gingerbread house with peanut butter and cheezits

driving all night and into the morning with your head lolling in the passenger seat. i don't want to romanticize cars because henry ford is evil; but i am in love with you and therefore everything feels romantic, even gas stations. i tell you i don't like the car-obsessed infrastructure of america; the same old rant about public transportation and energy costs and how racism and bigotry work together to hasten the End Times. you nod along and make sure i eat.

the sun putting down gentle feelers onto the winter sticks of massachusetts. feeling your hand in mine while we listen to a new album, ranking each song quietly. your jaw limned with the red-green passage of streetlamps. your hands around the large order of french fries we split between us. without comment, you pass me the biggest one. somewhere in maine, we stop randomly for a walk and are overwhelmed by the beauty. i'll never be able to find that place again, and it's okay. everything with you feels new to me.

spring is coming and the car is a stick shift and needs oil often and makes a concerning clicking if i turn left. we sit and watch the ocean come in, eating takeout quietly while the wind whips up and over the rocks. facing forward and feeling-rather-than-seeing you listen; i tell you things that are real and important and are hardly-ever spoken. the engine ticks as it cools and our voices get quiet. the hour gets small and i'll be sleepy on the drive home but as long as i don't have to leave yet, i can stay for the moment. let the moment linger on.

in the backseat my dog lets out a little sigh while he stretches. the gps says 354 miles until we hit home again.

a car is not a pure thing, no charming aesthetic. and then you tilt back your head and howl along to julien baker. and i think - oh god, oh god, i'm so in love that even the drive is romantic.

I had such high expectations for the finale and they were still all surpassed. The drama of Tula almost killing Jaysohn only for Viola to crit twice and completely wreck everyone. An absolutely insane last battle followed by an even crazier epilogue. Jaysohn deserves his airbud moment. I can’t wait for Lila to solve climate change. Thorn really was a prophet. I still need an update on the status of hats. What an amazing story the whole way through.

"college is the best years of your life" "college is for meeting new people and expanding your mind" wrong. college is for repeatedly learning that your foremost grievances with the world are ronald reagan's fault

The way that Abby’s dad would have done the same thing. What parent wouldn’t do anything to save their child?

My friend once said that “you have to be both gay and mentally ill to understand Siken. You can’t just be one or the other. You have to be both.” But I think writing is universal. The whole point is to convey the experiences of others and ourselves in a way that people who haven’t had those experiences can understand. But yet, I haven’t met someone who isn’t gay and mentally ill who likes Siken. Maybe I just don’t meet many people who aren’t gay and mentally ill. Maybe we try to find reasons that it’s better to feel the way we do. Like maybe I’m depressed but I can understand Siken. It’s some kind of solace.

What is “understanding” poetry anyway?

I'm not a socially awkward introvert. I'm a socially awkward extrovert. I am perfectly capable of carrying a conversation, but I'll carry it like a seagull carries a french fry. Snatching it from your fingers and flying off faster than you can process, and then taking it somewhere weird.

On my cop arc (have to proctor an exam)

she had taken all of the pronouns in my poems and turned them masculine. every she was he. every her was him. i wrote about women dipping their hands into the honey of my chest and she had changed it in this stark, violent way. men now, in my work. in my ribs, i guess. how odd, to stare at it.

i write a lot about worshipping at the knees of my girl. what sapphic can resist the allure of chapel-talk, the divine nature of what is ours and ours alone. her hair in your shower. her chapstick melting in your car. when we say holy here, it is a different meaning. it is the smithing of our own haloes from mix-tape cds. no hammer to the anvil - only our own palms, skin scorching. forging every astral ray with the prayer please don't leave. our bible a history that is never taught in high school. we shape a church from the tent of her arched back. what other word for hymn but her voice. her moaning.

a poem can be stripped of its component parts, maybe, but can it still breathe? is it still the same ship? the words this woman changed, biting and spiraling up at me: my man is holy. i worship at his feet. he is the divinity of saturdays and the wheat of my communion and he is the hushed summer's glorious release.

it's common knowledge that you can say a word too-many times, and then it loses meaning. but here was something new: it wasn't that the words had lost meaning, but rather that they had shifted in the air somehow and turned radioactive to me. all of my words were otherwise unchanged, except for the unkind and glowing eye of him.

ivory-tower glowing in my aorta, i thought about talking to her on the sanctimonious and erudite level. telling her: a poem can be changed, can be erased or added to or demolished or reconfigured; but we do try to respect the original author. i would tell her i would have preferred her not change only the pronouns; that her actions felt like censorship rather than collaboration.

in front of me: you cannot cut him out of me, i was made to love him. no scrubbing, no penance. i will always come back to this house, come back to loving men.

i thought about telling her why her actions were cannibalism, not care. i would tell her about being 18 and pressured by my catholic family to accept a man as a partner; how i'd dated him for 5 years before being able to escape. how abusive he had been. how he had made me kneel in front of him - that i wasn't using the word worship idly, but rather as a reclamation. how i had to be re-taught even the concept of faith. how when i learned peace again, it was by the hand of a woman.

i thought about telling her about the wound behind it, the unceasing loneliness. i thought about telling her shape of the small and quiet hours; the fear; the endless and unpretty nature of just being queer. i thought about saying: all of my work comes from a place of pain.

i thought about telling her everything. when i finally found the words, it was only one: why? in that was the summary of all i felt: why not write her own poem? why change it so violently? and why choose my work, if she disliked it so much? why me?

i imagine she shrugged when she responded. all i got was a single sentence: "i really like your work but i want to be able to enjoy it without being made uncomfortable."

on her insta, her pinned post is of her boyfriend - now husband - proposing. they were married in 2023. congratulations. i really do hope she's happy.

i hope one day it stops hurting.