June 10, 2008

I am obsessive. I spend hours a month staring at myself in mirrors, practicing my expressions for unforeseen pictures. (I still do my eyes too wide.) I lust for more music, although I could play my Itunes library for two hundred days without repeating a song. I think my clothes fit horribly, despite the complements an outfit might receive. I wonder if I am eating more than a normal serving, thus consuming more calories than stated on the side of the box, carton, bag. How will I ever be gay boy skinny? (I will never be with these hips and I have accepted this fact.) Every morning, I wonder if my “ weird phase,” will be over and I will finally fit in. my list continues, far beyond…



I obsessed over you.

I needed you to know you were broken, by my standards. I wanted you to come to me to be fixed. I had a blueprint laid out. I did not want to be that tired queen that I have read numerous times for not being able to keep a man for more than two months. The youths you and I conversed about as rose flavored smoke diffused into the air of that bar in the Lower East Side. The youths we were…are. (Feminized because of our queerness into Mammy figures, believing our life goal is to have and keep a man.) Yet, I cried in my bath tub over you with less than a month spent together. (More hours elapsed of me staring at myself in the mirror.)


I obsessed over what to say to you. I wanted to write scripts for the night I told you, “ I like you”. I wanted to stop sniffing the pillow you laid on because it had your scent. I wanted to stop talking about you and how I felt when you stared at me with your simple smile. How I longed to know what thoughts flowed through your head, the thoughts you were afraid to share because you thought I would not want to obsess over such thinking. But, I obsessed over your lack of speech and conspired biographies volumes thick off a simple eye flutter.

I realized, I have never been able to sleep peacefully with another my entire life. From sleepovers to m sister climbing in my bed at seven because a monster tried to kill her, I have never been able to share my space without feeling invaded and uncomfortable. We slept perfectly, intertwined, naked, apart, clothed, angry, happy, high- we slept. Our spirits were so similar that I did not feel an invasion but a warm embrace, a soul mate, which is delightfully disturbing. You are beautiful, but many of your flaws reside in my being. Realizing that I am the one in need of a blueprint and reconstruction has rendered me, well, distraught. I have been striving away obsessively to do this work in me, the work I was able to see by critiquing you in the mirror and praising my image, the work I was going to do on you.


Now, I sit and obsess over my completion, which is never-ending and dually wonderful and horrible.


-Marz