Letter to the ___ friends whom once I ___

2k barely edited words, very un-newsletter like and TL;DR we’re talking about writing, bikes, gender, and the need for ceasefire and a Free Palestine. Do what you will.

“Why do poets thinkThey can change the world?The only life I can saveIs my own.”— The Limited, Sherman Alexie

Each time I tried to write here over the past two months, it would not come. What was there to say? What was there to say beyond anguished people in quiet betweens?

Yet this is the space I’m supposed to practice. To write it out, in lieu of college workshops of people raptly listening to work read aloud or some other artist practice I think I’m supposed to have that is not the practice I do

There is something still out of tune to me still though. No, not just the news that Nazis are on this platform (I do not blame you for getting out of here). More a dissonant playing at the notion of where I write to a world of people I Don’t Know. I don’t know when I lost that paradigm, which seemed to make it easier to write, and seemed to make my writing better. Now an adult, I wonder why I can’t just write this in discrete missives that make up the world I live in. That’s not the writing I am still chasing after. That’s not what I want.

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How to balance it? How to balance the fraying hole that will not stop catching over the past weeks? I want between me and the world I speak and sweep and go broke in to say it, just say it. To say what I want as Atlas beneath my own world, and have that be enough. It is enough. It isn’t enough.

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If I were a better writer, I could connect these things in a way that did not feel so fraught: how to witness and howl at horrors, how to see, how to betray, how to forgive, how to write. Mostly it still feels like I wish I’d waited long enough that I wasn’t trying to put this together here, now, like this, imperfect as it is, as we are. And then there is the part where it does not feel like that.

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I’m at the lesbian bar surrounded by Christmas lights and my friend asks me about the bike race. To which I say fuck that and get so worked up my hat falls off my head. Then the sweet queer bartender looks over, concerned, and I am wildly sorry.

Surely all of this is proxy. It has to be. Surely I have knotted all of the recent up too tightly that like a child, when I offer it out to ask for assistance, a look at this problem, there is not even a second before I am furious and yank it back, unable to kneat out a breath in the thread.

It is tiresome to have now memorized the financials of a non-profit sports organization I should care less about.1 I can rote recite them to anyone who asks if I’m going to the race why absolutely not. I cannot imagine how much more tiresome it must be to be a trans person who does care, who shows up. It is still tiresome to lay this out as plaintively and patiently as I can, and there the inquiry ends, and with it, the modicum of curious consideration.

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It feels cowardly to not say what is fact at the time of this writing. On December 3rd the ceasefire is bludgeoned back into an ethnic cleansing of Gaza, of which the majority are children. Say it: children. The state of Israel is destroying hospitals and making it impossible for life as function. What is fact is people are equivocating and bending over backwards to justify whatever “humanitarian ways” the State of Israel claims to prevent loss of life. The State of Israel does not care about loss of Palestinian life. It is cowardly for me to pretend I believe otherwise.

To continue to ignore that I am not cracked at those in my life unable to articulate their own raw grief at this is also slim cowardice. Ignore that I don’t know how the other citizens of this country in my life do not stop each day and think about the billions poured into weapons for Israel. I am 36 years old and as impotent as I was at 15, catatonic ditching school as the US invaded Afghanistan.

At an event when I even demure to say I’m getting by, these are hard times when asked “How Have I Been?”, a man laughs at me for indicating life might be horrors. I am almost certain I am a coward for not punching him in his teeth or looking him in the eye and telling him to fuck himself to the moon. The knot throbs.

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Is it cowardly I have not been able to articulate out loud I am upset by this because I am someone impacted this because I am them too? Is it cowardly to be furious that not enough people have been paying attention to my internet pronouns or rainbow buttons I often waffle on wearing? Is it cowardly to not ask, sincerely, why are you doing this? Why aren’t you able to say what is? I let the throb settle while I form the words.

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Is it cowardly to keep courting what is almost guaranteed hurt with each plaintive ask to share my writing? To articulate the litany of jabs feels humiliating but this is writing, writing about writing after all, so debasement is de rigueur2. That the magazines and publishers and editors sternly require no simultaneous submissions or withdraw if placed which seems anathema to the goal of having your work read by anyone possible. The open mics at bars with the requirement to buy a ticket to enter the lottery to read, the emails unanswered, the doom fermenting under the PDF downloads. The quid pro quo of it all: submission fees, contest entry fees, residency application fees, whatever. The pro? I don’t know. The quo? My finances, where I prick my own heart routinely as I refresh the rejected pieces in the submission manager, by querying my bank account to total the fees. 3

It is certainly cowardly to complain about it, and I wish I were not writing about the misery of writing. Maybe that means I’ve made something of the pile of scaffolding and years seemingly wasted. Or not wasted, if I can start to say things aloud.

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For so long I have admired and wanted the cleave between my life as I live it and the revelation of what has felt core for so long. Is it irony or paradox or cosmic joke that writing is supposed to be public, writing is meant to be read, stories are meant to be heard?

And writing is also the way I sift through everything even when I don’t put a thing down or type or fill a notebook. It’s the only way I know how to be in the world, it’s the way I think. It is where I have followed a million treads and tried on so many things. I’m a teenager writing about being an adolescent boy and making scarlet blog epistolaries. I’m an undergrad obsessed with Shakespeare and masculinity and I write an entire novel in verse because what else is there to do at the end of an English degree. I am trying sonnet crowns and tumbling out of them, I am unable to escape short fiction in the second person, I am writing memoir without ever really wanting memoir. I’m listening to my mentor crow I think you’re a closet formalist!

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Closet formalist seems right. I walk and think about writing this and think about hewing to standards, to the guardrails of movements and forms. I think about still bisexual after all these years, about how jarring it is sometimes to hear myself referred to in the feminine, depending on the room. I think about how the need to explain aggrieves me to know end. When I say need, I mean necessity.

It is necessity to quietly point out I am not a lesbian, when it has seemed for my whole life I have not been concerned with being read as straight, because not being straight has felt core to me since I began to distill desire, and what’s the point in being worried about it? Closet formalist. I still firmly believe no one owes anyone coming out. No one owes anyone a word that they hold fast to their entire life.

It is necessity, I wearily remind myself now, to over and over again, as kindly with as many words both scathing and gentle and no, I know, you’re not a bigot that the reason this absurd niche problem of amateur cycling through the grass in public parks is because truly it is hateful and truly I am someone who can be harmed by it. I struggle with the right word. I wish the rainbow buttons worked. I do not wish for anyone except who I choose to see me when it is obvious to see what I am not.

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I wish it could be as easy as the problematic pith of I am Them. And also I am not. I throw up my hands lately and resort as I would as a teenager and say, the problem I have with this is because I am genderfucked.

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When someone says, Carmen is a writer, I cannot explain the treasure of it. A man I dogsit for asks You’re a writer? and I say, Well, I write, responds matter-of-fact, So you’re a writer. 

When people so easily use the pronouns that make sense because the point of believing in binaries and believing in their middles is to hold onto all of it, when people who have known me so long, or so short, simply get it right: treasure.

When people I rarely talk to, when people I talk to constantly, when people I love dearly, when people I know barely say it out loud, war is fucked up and we exist in horrors and This Is Wrong, even when it’s quiet or from far away: an awful treasure, and to be grateful for, nonetheless.

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Lately I have said out loud I am trying to write a novel about my undergraduate years. I say it because I’d like to be accountable to something, going so far as to ask a friend what I should use as her pseudonym. I worry I want to write this badly because I am afraid the last time I instinctively knew how to be seen in who I was, what I desired, my writing, was of all fucking things college. I think about those being some of the last times I made points to protest. I also think about four years where I blithely kept many things to myself, which were sometimes not the right thing to do. But it worked.

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I gamely offer when I have to explain why I Am Not Interested In Your Bike Races that when the day comes that this community divests and makes something to return to amateurism and relevancy and a space for anyone (amateur: who does it for love) I will be happy to support, even help.

I think I will likely finish this novel before that happens here. Publish it? Well, hopes that hurt can be true in all their contradictions.

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Stay true to form: I apologize for this formlessness. True to form, I am writing: I am figuring it out as I go and putting into the world what sifts and compresses and has remained in me because this is the only way to do so. Because it would be such a kindness to have the time for these words to be between us, a gentle walk out of cowardice. This is what will be, though, and this is what I know how to do. These words and words and words that exhaust so, sometimes very sweetly, and leave me with the forced courage that is simply unable to say anything else these days, and all of them so wildly untethered from each other, but important from truly least to most:

Yes, I am a writer.

Yes, I am not cis, and I know equivocated hate when I see it.

No, I do not condone ethnic cleansing. Yes From The River to the Sea Palestine Will be Free.

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Poetry Postscript in case poetry is not for you: This title of this comes from Nikki Giovanni’s “Letter to a Bourgeois Friend Whom Once I Loved (And Maybe Still Do If Love Is Valid)” which I have loved for a very long time, and included here because maybe you, too, nod knowing the world is full of being lonely and basically afraid but seeing it written down maybe is a way to connect, the words written down and resonating with us, lonely and afraid. 

“The whole point of writing you is pointlessand somewhere in the back of my mind I really doaccept that. But on the other hand the whole pointof points is pointless when it’s boiled all the way downto the least common denominator. But I was never oneto deal with fractions when there are so many wholesthat cannot be dissected- at least these poor handslack both skill and tool and perhaps this poor heartlacks even the inclination to try because emotion is inand of itself a wasteful thing because it lacks the powerto fulfill itself. And power is to be sought. ……

Or I must not deal with love at all. And if we are notto deal with love then we must not deal with emotionbecause if not love then we deal with hate or fearor anxiety or just everything but The Problem which iswhat we must deal with if we are to get back to loveand hate and anxiety and all those foolish emotions.Which is what we’re talking about. And you are angrywith me maybe because you think I’ll get hurt(if indeed you care) or maybe because you thinkyou’ll get hurt but not at all because I hatebecause you know I don’t hate and not becauseI’m violent because you know I’m not violentso perhaps you are not angry at all but just giveslightly a shade left of a good goddamn what the hellhappens to me and whether or not I want to share itwith you and the truth being that I should givea bout face and act like an adult except that adulthoodhas no room for me because adulthood implies anotheradult has to relate to and there are no adultsonly children whose balloons are bursting spitall over their faces and having never tasted spitlet alone eaten any shit or licked any assyou think that liquid on your face is rain from Heavenand maybe you hope if it rains hard enoughall the wrinkles will disappear and the fountainof youth

having been presented to you by our friendand neighbor, will be yours for-ever surrounded byflashing lights on the outside instead of the terriblehammer inside which beats the sweat or fans the coldand sometimes buckles your knees. So we move toneeds which must be met and I confess with a smileon my lips that my needs are far more important to methan your needs are to me and even though your needsmean something to me they are only importantinsofar as your needs have a need to meet mine.And your needs lack significance to me when yourneed is to get away from me and my needs.Which is why I’m currently going through a thingwhich is the only accurate description of my emotionalgoulash, as if you’ve never been lonely and basicallyafraid but recognizing that fear is an invalid emotionand so is loneliness but being afraid and lonelynonetheless. I called you but you have a job.Which is no longer inclusive of me or maybe I justdeveloped a bad case of paranoia which in the nextthousand years may be understood by all the peopleeverywhere who can understand how it feels to belonely and afraid when there is no place for emotion.And that has to upset your world which I fully intendto do even if I don’t like doing it because likes ordislikes have nothing to do with what has to be done–even to you with whom I’d dearly like to do nothingat all. My, but you hurt.”