CW: discussion of suicide, homophobia, transphobia, trauma; usage of homophobic slur to strengthen point
You want to write something but you haven't. You want to talk about how sad you've been. You want to talk about trauma and how to be past it. You want to talk about how you went back to school recently, this time as staff, not student. You want to talk about how retraumatizing that was. You want to talk about the Valentine's Day carnation sale. You want to forget how it was used to shame you in 9th grade before you even knew why, and perhaps the bully didn't know why either (although you suspect he did). You want it to be the case that you weren't bullied for being a little queer fag all throughout school by both students and teachers. You want to live in a reality where you never realized that and you could just go back to not understanding why coming out was so hard. You want schools to be freeing rather than the sites of shackles they are now. You want them to ultimately not exist.
You want to find a good way to dismantle capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy. You want to do that work. You want that work to not be violent and to not inconvenience you. You want to not care about that part. You want everything to magically get better and no unnecessary life to be lost. You want utopia to be achieved without a revolution. You want the revolutionaries to shut up. You want to state loud and clear that you don't want to be a soldier in a cis person's war. You want to point out how fucked up it is that you've been subtly trained to be a soldier without anyone telling you that's what's happening. You want to never go to a fucking protest again. You want to read this at a protest. You want to be more connected to the land. You want to try harder. You want to try less hard. You want to educate yourself more. You want to be less proud of your education. You want to kill yourself.
You want to kill yourself; it's a feeling you haven't had in a while but it's there. You want to go back to the moments where suicide was just an abstraction and you weren't straining yourself to not physically go outside and do it. You want to cuss out the person who told you that you were better off wanting to go out. You want to cuss out the person who said you were faking it for attention when you asked for help. You want your trans comrades to stop betraying you.
You want to be mad. You want to be happy. You want to want to be happy. You want to want to want to be happy. You want to stop crying. You want to keep crying so you can write about it. You want to be a man. You want to be a woman. You want to be cis. You want to be straight. You want to write that you want to be queer to give the audience some semblance of hope but you know it's not there. You want queer to mean human (it doesn't). You want trans to mean alive (it doesn't). You want gay to mean happy (it doesn't). You want to help kids but you never learned how to help yourself. You want the months of shitty CBT you did to kick in so you can fucking ignore how much pain you're in. You want to explain to people your non-relationship to ethnicity and how that hurts you and maybe have them get it.
You want to do more. You want to write and read more. You want to volunteer more. You want to do the most good you can but you can't. You want to lie down and rot. You want to write something not rendered in the second person and shittily puked out in an evening so people will take you fucking seriously. You want to be able to include first person not as a quote but instead as you. You want to not care.
And so, to placate your desires, you include a stanza from Fionna Apple, who unlike you has a way with words. Here’s Fiona:
“And I know none of this will matter in the long run “But I know a sound is still a sound around no one “And while I’m in this body I want somebody to want “And I want what I want and I want you to love me.”
Send me a line here