I want to hold our little traumas and form them into cups and eat them at a thousand different little restaurants on tiny plates and wash them down with wine and mead and lots and lots of butter. I want photos of me in this body in Paris and Hanoi and Iran and countries and cities and I don’t know fucking St. Lucia. I don’t want to grow old but I am. it’s sadness that comes from knowing it took me 30 years (well 20 because the first 10 I really didn’t know how to situate myself in time) to even begin to understand how crazy crazy incredible worth more than anything it is to love yourself and how hot yourself can be and how beautiful and other people want you and think you are kind and smart and artistic. 30 years to realize that I didn’t need a diagnosis I just needed people to tell me that how I am is okay and not even tell me just see me and not do anything except go about their days. and making little sounds and flicking my tongue and finding safety in silence and just being with me and giving me small things to do with my hands like folding up the wrapping paper into little swans. and that I’m not going to fit into this beautiful little box made for girls like me who grow up and get married and give their fathers' grandchildren and fix their mothers' computers and call them every day to make sure they’re also not lonely like I am.

the loneliness is constantly on your tail – isn’t it? and the boredom is like a fog, and when it clears, you can see the loneliness there, standing at the end of a long road, tall and unearthly like Slender Man and like the kind of fear you first discovered on early YouTube and so you take drugs and then you can throw a blanket over just everything and douse it in whatever oil but the less expensive kind and toss your half-assed cigarette over your shoulder because fuck that shit, kind of, and you walk away and you keep walking and you don’t look back but you do cry because you know that’s just not how it works and that shit doesn’t just up and burn like so many other things do.