gator tail

the journey to becoming my old self and sharing some recent writing

Hi lovelies…long time no see. As you can tell, I took a hiatus for the summer (and spring let’s be honest). I wish I could give more context, but I needed a break from the stress of forcing myself to sit here and write something coherent, meaningful or argumentative at a time where I was relishing in figuring out myself. It’s hard to create enough separation from your own mind and body to analyze the world with the deep seeded criticism I’m so famous for. Mostly, I’ve been writing poems and little excerpts, with hope to one day combine them with a collection of personal essays about my life into something more tangible than this forum. Alas, for now, this is the best way to share my writing with the world. I don’t really have any context for how this drivel will reach you as an audience, but I’m hoping at least part of it will resonate. The first essay is below:

Gator Tail

I am on a first date. What do you like to do, they say. I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what my favorite movie is anymore. It feels like a projection of an old me, or an even older crush. I consume the media of a love interest and adopt it until a new one comes along to offer a palette cleanse. What am I left with besides a dusty collection of ideas that someone else believed in, where I willingly dipped my toes into their pond of eclectic taste until I drowned? What do I like to do? I’m not so sure. 

I don’t feel seen by anything, maybe because I don’t exist in anything. I wish I could see myself in the old ladies I see in the world, but I wouldn't even know where to begin looking for her. Is she flipping through the sale section at a record store whose aisles she’s haunted for decades? Inspecting soiled parsnips at the farmers market and haggling over the price? Probably not. I’m not sure I like parsnips.

Maybe she became the recluse I had a sneaking suspicion I’d always become, chain smoking cigarettes out of her bedroom window somewhere in the East Village; typing out her stream of consciousness into an outdated laptop overheating at her desk, praying that her writing can make someone else feel seen too. And not just anyone, and definitely not them, because you wouldn’t want them to get the wrong idea. But I hope to god they read it. The latter person will never care enough to make it past the first line.

I’ve learned dating feels like, ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. Only I’m the snake, and so are you, and we’re all in a line getting ignored by the person we like the most, and providing the section of the snake behind us with just enough crumbs of shedding skin to keep them satiated and convince yourself there’s a part of the snake thoughtfully obeying behind you. 

I tell my date I like to read. We will kiss on the subway platform under sterile lighting and feign niceties, and never speak again. I will do something later that day I have never done before to break out of the cycle, and then I will go home and not shut up about it. I will then get so intimidated by the idea - that I must be excellent at this new thing - I will never do it again. I think everything is the snake eating it’s own tail. I think my hobbies are the snake, and my groceries, feeding my cat the same scoop of chicken flavored healthy indoor cat food, smoking and quitting and smoking and quitting forever. Isn’t it a little fun to know you’re the snake? Sure, there’s some devastation there, but after you begin to accept it, it’s kind of like providing yourself with the knowledge that there’s an retched interconnectedness within all of us. We all want and then don’t want and then want again.

There’s a new restaurant here that serves alligator. To lift my spirits, I will go alone and feel seven and repulsed again. Begrudgingly, I’ll try a bite like I did once in central Florida, and enjoy the relief of “this tastes like chicken”. I will pay my bill and go home alone, too. Listening to music that doesn’t belong to me, but a bygone era of my existence that I held onto because it’s the closest thing that has fit so far. In that moment, I will think I miss home, but I don’t. I will miss the way my grandma scrambled eggs with lots of pepper and southern grits I could turn up my nose at. Bowls full of mush she wouldn’t make me eat if I didn’t feel like it. I’ll remember watching her cut up soft chunks of cheese in what my elementary brain imagined was a device exclusively designed for cutting cheese. I will miss playing gin rummy on the sun drenched patio, with the cicadas croaking and my melting ice water in a child’s plastic cup left over from a family-style restaurant we used to frequent, before I knew about global warming or the Iraq war, or before I found out that people could call me a dyke. 

Then suddenly, I’m making $7.25 an hour and thinking this is so fun! I can see a movie with the girls from my neighborhood- they invited me today at the bus stop before school. But then I will be dropped off by my mom and realize that no one else’s mom is chaperoning us in the theater, and in fact it gets worse because there’s my two new friends, and next to them are three boys who are planking in the mall. I realize that there has been a boy pre-assigned to put his arm around me in the 5:20 showing of a Dreamworks movie, and I haven’t even had my first period yet, but I’m positive in this moment that I’m a lesbian.

When you were little, life was beautifully simple. Your favorite movie was a tie between Transformers and Over the Hedge. You like to play sports but don’t want to be perceived as too much of a sporty girl. You go through a phase of never wearing dresses because other girls at school talk about refusing to wear them, and their knees are scraped up, and they have older brothers who teach them things and you think they’re so cool. Later, you will go through a phase of pretending not to like sports at all. Until you’re so sad, and venture into the frigid cold preparing for a marathon you can’t remember why you signed up for. When you come home sweaty and out of breath with your heart beating so fast you think you might throw up, you remember that this nauseating feeling - of your organs preparing to leap out of your body - made you so happy before. The gym bro persona you’ve now adopted is this alien extension of a past self, that when other people find it attractive, it becomes deeply unsettling and disturbing. But this isn’t me, you think. It’s just some costumed version of me in basketball shorts, and when you brace yourself for the next subway stop by putting your hand on the ceiling, you know it’s masculine, but you’ve existed in this body for forever. That minuscule unladylike moment is now ingrained. You’ll never touch the ceiling like that again. It makes you want to shrivel up and cry, and put more bows in your hair, and buy more mini skirts with credit cards that might get declined, and get tattoos of bunny rabbits kissing with little ribbons around their neck, and you’d wear heels if it helped, but you’d only be taller.

You remember being called a lesbian for the first time at the park after your parents got divorced. It was a weird park. The first time you were dropped off at your dad’s new apartment, the memory is clouded by a fight between your parents outside the neighborhood gate where CDs and sunglasses were thrown onto the asphalt. You were halfway out of the minivan holding a backpack and christening your new overnight bag. The metal and cheap plastic shattered so gloriously at your feet. It was all so shiny, and the street was so hot, it burned your eyes to look at the glittering concrete for more than a second. You remember that you were playing basketball with your brothers when the older boys called you a lesbian and you laughed because it sounded like the word lizard and you really liked lizards. Speaking of, you’ll play on a basketball team when you’re older, and it will be the thing that makes you realize you want to stay where you are, not because of it, but because the idea of it is the exact kind of specific and uniquely you thing that would make little you giggling about the lizards and hiding from the CD shards under your stuffed animals smile. To clarify, you play for a dyke basketball team again. It’s different this time, in that when you signed up in the league, everyone already knew they were gay, but it is mostly the exact same.

It’s reminiscent of that first crush you had. You and the girl whose parents loved you and then hated you and then tolerated you and then were there for you and then you never saw them again after graduation and their Instagram is private now but you think of her often and sincerely hope their lives are going well. Like when you went to her house on New Year’s Eve to watch the movie New Year's Eve, because you both liked Glee and Lea Michele so much. Then you had the obvious moment of pretending you forgot what happens at 11:59 pm, and the idea of you kissing magically comes to mind for the very first time only a few seconds before. You don’t kiss, though. Because she is Christian and not queer, and also you should leave. 

Now, life is like this: you oversleep and forget your vape at home. Rent is due soon. On your lunch break you think about texting a friend in Midtown for a cigarette instead of buying a whole new pack and a lighter because you know you’ll blow through them quite irresponsibly. You’re the only person at your corporate job to use the word “situationship” and simultaneously the least knowledgeable about TikTok. You’re an alien all over again; curious how someone could order things from Temu and Shein and Amazon knowing what you know, but maybe they don’t. Their lexicon exists within the dying breath of Facebook story highlights and the intersection of using the word summer as a verb. They ask “how much cash should you give as a wedding gift, like three hundred dollars?”, and you’ll never be a part of that world either. Interns younger than you in Aritzia with Hermes belts will drink chablis in the penthouse dining room, fawning over priceless art with infatuation that confuses you deeply. You think about how you’ll never go on maternity leave like they will. Sure, statistically maybe you’ll hold a higher position or take home a bigger salary, but it’s not about that. It’s about the idea of a few months off, that aren’t part of your pre-allocated vacation hours you have to plan morsels of freedom around for the rest of your life. You think, you would use that time to sit by the sea to cure you of your insanity.

In the bathroom supplied with luxury gadgets you didn’t know existed, and hand soap made with imported saffron, you’ll see a zit just below your left nostril. It’s quite small, actually. You’ll remember thinking at sixteen that they would never go away. It feels like when you would scurry out of the guest bathroom with a face flush with blood and nails that had been scraping your pores for too long to the point where your sweet but incessant grandmother noticed. She’d swat at your fingertips and say “stop picking at your face sweetheart”. I’d give anything for her to tell me to stop picking at my face right now. I’d individually place all the pimples back on my face for her hand to scoldingly brush against mine again. 

You wish you had held onto the innocence you had when you were making $7.25 an hour or making a big show of being disgusted by the idea of gator tail, because you didn’t know that it get’s better and then so much worse. That one day you’d have amazing friends, but also writing no one cared about, yet. That one of the girls from the bus stop and triple date at the movies became a stripper and died in a horrific car accident last year. Are your problems even that big of a deal? That eventually you and your roommate will play basketball on a court haphazardly covered in water balloons from a kid’s birthday party, and discuss the meaning of life or media ethics on the walk back. When you go home, you will make a big salad full of poultry seasoned chickpeas, cucumber and avocados that you take turns dicing. You’ll wash the dishes together and gossip. A soft-pornographic, vampire teen drama you know nothing about will play in the background on the living room tv. When you take that first bite of the arbitrarily-poultry-seasoned salad, you realize that maybe the best case scenario in life is that everything just tastes like chicken.