I’d thought of a nice, dramatic way of turning the second person narrative into first person. I’d have done it somewhere towards the end of this paragraph, a quick switch enabled by brisk em-dashes. It was so cool in my head. So much so, unfortunately, that I ended up writing nothing all day yesterday. I’ve let it go now, and instead just begun. At some point in 2019, I wrote my first ever poem in a second person narrative. I got so hooked to the voice, however, that I couldn’t stop writing in it. It was the perfect way to write about myself without feeling like I shouldn’t, or like it was too personal. So much easier to pretend that I am talking to myself and that any reader is merely a coincidental bystander than to acknowledge the intentional and responsive presence of an audience. So tempting to resort to the passive voice, to avoid the “I” as often as I can, to stick to a crisp newspaper-headline-style of writing. Something about not taking up too much space, perhaps. Also a way of hiding, perhaps. These “grammar tricks” remind me of one of Heather Christle’s “Dear Seth” poems in her collection
This will be disgustingly long, but a friend forwarded this to me and it finally (after so long, years maybe) forced me to sit down, organise my thoughts and write something with a semblance of wholeness to it. Thank you.
1. I suppose I have written extensively in my little life nearing its first quarter, and in this archive of My Feelings, never have I ever used a second person narrative. I am oddly uncomfortable with even the idea of it, despite not having much of an opinion of it when employed by someone else. My first real poem, ever, was called Indigo Blue and it was a lament of sorts about my human incapacity to take away my lover’s Big Sadness from them. It was a pitiful sort of wounded vulnerability that made me fall desperately in love with the idea of loving someone that was not me (I was 19). There were two protagonists in that poem, me and my desire to be everything a person needed to not feel lonely. A futile narrative of the first queer relationship destined to be doomed, woven around a question I had asked them on our first encounter: what is your favorite color? Indigo blue, they had said.
I don’t avoid the “I” at all, I invite it in(to my house) like my closest friend who knows what is most pathetic about me: it is my way of hiding. To me, it takes up the least amount of space on paper, it is a singular letter un-needing of any other from the entire alphabet to make itself make sense. It’s a grammar trick to tell myself solitude and loneliness are interchangeable (for me). You, me, Heather, we’re all playing grammar tricks on ourselves in different ways, and today I felt something in me wanting to take a chance at un-hiding myself because you did too.
2. The human condition has some such base similarities sometimes that I wonder if the inanimate is not the simulation, but us feeling beings instead, and the rocks and buildings and telephone wires are living through us and not the other way around. All this to say, I would go mad without performing for a non-existent audience as I go about doing my silly little tasks every single day. It took me the first couple years of my 20s to realize I am petrified of loneliness, even of being alone sometimes, and that the most human thing about me is wanting to be perceived (sometimes to touch and be touched is proof that we are here, or whatever Ocean Vuong said). Reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble at 19 was the same kind of addiction as watching Hannah Montana at 14, if you know what I mean. Gender is a performance, we’re all always in drag and you get the best of both worlds all coalesced in my brain to make for a big blob of Sense during the pandemic.
When you said, “to share an experience with another is to invite them into your perception of it” I had one of those gasp-out-loud, you did not just moments that happen so very often when people read people writing about the vulgarities (just kidding!) of feeling (too much? too deeply? not enough?). Joy Crooke’s song To Love Someone is to Lose Someone is exactly this to me. I think sometimes it appalls me that there are people out there who know parts of me and are carrying those parts around like dead-weight, or worse still, had dropped them by the curb somewhere, someday. It is misplaced rage too, for I have done this as well. I am so busy collecting and carrying new people, moments, and secrets around that sometimes I drop parts of people off somewhere to make room for new ones. You’re right about it being basic, this keeping of some parts of you to/ with yourself. You’re right about needing someone to spell it out for you. My mother sat me down the last time I saw her (after almost a year) and told me I need to lessen my intensity for life, to stop wanting to be the most important person to everyone, to stop wanting constantly to share everything everywhere all the time - but show me how? Have you found out?
3. Quick little tangential detour, Existential Investigation is going to become my most favorite thing to say now. But friends, friendship, aaah. That has always been my life and it is a tragic little nuisance that I cannot seem to do justice to them using words (I thought it was my thing to be able to do that, but alas, there is no lexicon for this love as yet). My Masters has been lonely and the disgusting expectations my friends from my life before set is something that I kept looming over new relationships forged under incredibly different circumstances. When I went back home to visit my friends after 10 months of being away, it felt like a bit of a pilgrimage across three different cities (ridiculous, I know) with each encapsulating different stages of my life. Everytime someone started a sentence with “Remember when” I had this insane urge to start shaking them and screaming even if I don’t I do, I do, I do because it is so wonderful to have lived life with someone and to be told weeks, months, years and decades later that they remember having lived it with you. The fragility of human temporality never washes over me as much as when someone says that, because there is no evidence to time as strong as a relationship that continued through it. I remember I was 9 because my best friend from then is now 24 and she tells me “Remember when you fell flat on your ass while desperately running down the flight of stairs to catch up to me?”. I am always running down some flight of stairs, trying to catch up to something or someone, and falling flat on my ass every time and somehow, luckily, there has always been someone there who chose to love me enough to witness it, carry it through an indefinite period of time, and deliver it to me as something now not just mine to remember but theirs to make permanent room for, as well. As E.E Cummings has said, “I carry your heart with me, I carry it in my heart.”
4. “Those who don’t worry about people-pleasing do still love you.” - How dare you?
5. “To see takes time” - Georgia O’Keeffe. I love her art (and person) so much. Here is one of my favorites, it’s called Ladder to the Moon. https://whitney.org/collection/works/37900
This will be disgustingly long, but a friend forwarded this to me and it finally (after so long, years maybe) forced me to sit down, organise my thoughts and write something with a semblance of wholeness to it. Thank you.
1. I suppose I have written extensively in my little life nearing its first quarter, and in this archive of My Feelings, never have I ever used a second person narrative. I am oddly uncomfortable with even the idea of it, despite not having much of an opinion of it when employed by someone else. My first real poem, ever, was called Indigo Blue and it was a lament of sorts about my human incapacity to take away my lover’s Big Sadness from them. It was a pitiful sort of wounded vulnerability that made me fall desperately in love with the idea of loving someone that was not me (I was 19). There were two protagonists in that poem, me and my desire to be everything a person needed to not feel lonely. A futile narrative of the first queer relationship destined to be doomed, woven around a question I had asked them on our first encounter: what is your favorite color? Indigo blue, they had said.
I don’t avoid the “I” at all, I invite it in(to my house) like my closest friend who knows what is most pathetic about me: it is my way of hiding. To me, it takes up the least amount of space on paper, it is a singular letter un-needing of any other from the entire alphabet to make itself make sense. It’s a grammar trick to tell myself solitude and loneliness are interchangeable (for me). You, me, Heather, we’re all playing grammar tricks on ourselves in different ways, and today I felt something in me wanting to take a chance at un-hiding myself because you did too.
2. The human condition has some such base similarities sometimes that I wonder if the inanimate is not the simulation, but us feeling beings instead, and the rocks and buildings and telephone wires are living through us and not the other way around. All this to say, I would go mad without performing for a non-existent audience as I go about doing my silly little tasks every single day. It took me the first couple years of my 20s to realize I am petrified of loneliness, even of being alone sometimes, and that the most human thing about me is wanting to be perceived (sometimes to touch and be touched is proof that we are here, or whatever Ocean Vuong said). Reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble at 19 was the same kind of addiction as watching Hannah Montana at 14, if you know what I mean. Gender is a performance, we’re all always in drag and you get the best of both worlds all coalesced in my brain to make for a big blob of Sense during the pandemic.
When you said, “to share an experience with another is to invite them into your perception of it” I had one of those gasp-out-loud, you did not just moments that happen so very often when people read people writing about the vulgarities (just kidding!) of feeling (too much? too deeply? not enough?). Joy Crooke’s song To Love Someone is to Lose Someone is exactly this to me. I think sometimes it appalls me that there are people out there who know parts of me and are carrying those parts around like dead-weight, or worse still, had dropped them by the curb somewhere, someday. It is misplaced rage too, for I have done this as well. I am so busy collecting and carrying new people, moments, and secrets around that sometimes I drop parts of people off somewhere to make room for new ones. You’re right about it being basic, this keeping of some parts of you to/ with yourself. You’re right about needing someone to spell it out for you. My mother sat me down the last time I saw her (after almost a year) and told me I need to lessen my intensity for life, to stop wanting to be the most important person to everyone, to stop wanting constantly to share everything everywhere all the time - but show me how? Have you found out?
3. Quick little tangential detour, Existential Investigation is going to become my most favorite thing to say now. But friends, friendship, aaah. That has always been my life and it is a tragic little nuisance that I cannot seem to do justice to them using words (I thought it was my thing to be able to do that, but alas, there is no lexicon for this love as yet). My Masters has been lonely and the disgusting expectations my friends from my life before set is something that I kept looming over new relationships forged under incredibly different circumstances. When I went back home to visit my friends after 10 months of being away, it felt like a bit of a pilgrimage across three different cities (ridiculous, I know) with each encapsulating different stages of my life. Everytime someone started a sentence with “Remember when” I had this insane urge to start shaking them and screaming even if I don’t I do, I do, I do because it is so wonderful to have lived life with someone and to be told weeks, months, years and decades later that they remember having lived it with you. The fragility of human temporality never washes over me as much as when someone says that, because there is no evidence to time as strong as a relationship that continued through it. I remember I was 9 because my best friend from then is now 24 and she tells me “Remember when you fell flat on your ass while desperately running down the flight of stairs to catch up to me?”. I am always running down some flight of stairs, trying to catch up to something or someone, and falling flat on my ass every time and somehow, luckily, there has always been someone there who chose to love me enough to witness it, carry it through an indefinite period of time, and deliver it to me as something now not just mine to remember but theirs to make permanent room for, as well. As E.E Cummings has said, “I carry your heart with me, I carry it in my heart.”
4. “Those who don’t worry about people-pleasing do still love you.” - How dare you?
5. “To see takes time” - Georgia O’Keeffe. I love her art (and person) so much. Here is one of my favorites, it’s called Ladder to the Moon. https://whitney.org/collection/works/37900
you can never not enthrall me!