The parts of myself I want to keep are interesting. I want you to change my first name but without my last, I'd be lost. I want to keep my fingers but cut off the sides of my thighs. In fourth grade we read a book that opened with a high-pressure moment of a man carefully shaving off the uneven side of a pearl. This is what I think of when I think of cutting off parts of my thighs. Just a little off the side. 

Flirting, which I just misread as flicking. Doing so feels like picking a scab. And after the initial moments of both flirting and flicking a scab, an itch is scratched, and you remember why you are compelled to do either. And, often, why you shouldn’t. 

It’s advised that I don’t cry anymore. By me, I advise it. Modernity advises it, having a job advises it. When I cry hard for more than 3 minutes, my brain shuts down, except to procure food and attention, knowing what could happen if it let me keep going. I can’t even get myself to do alliteration in this state, a cop-out in my line of work. It’s a new era of crying to my mom, one where I know she won’t make it better but I do so anyway to make her feel close to me, like we’re getting somewhere. Like the good old days. When I’d cry and she’d be the only one to tell me my friends were ass and I’d have to believe her. 

The truth hurts, but not always. I try to find the truth about truth: not every truth hurts, but everything that hurts has truth. I think it has to hurt first before it comes so easily you think you no longer need God. Or double down. More God freed up for those who need it. 

On Hinge, a man suggests that I am AI, undermining the painfully organic ways I have earned my intelligence. Another hearts me, replying “AI will take your job” to an unrelated answer to a prompt I was forced to fill out. I decide to make some changes.

The best way to ask me out is to

Be Normal

As long as there’s the second-person, someone will always be listening. My consistent use of it began to feel like a clear ploy for an audience. It was. I needed the people to whom I could no longer talk to know I was still speaking. 

I’ve paused comparing myself to other people, now comparing myself to who I was 5 years ago. I hate myself for having hated myself and am relieved to have led with my body for years before it collapsed my spirit. These days, I feel more accomplished being adored than desired. “I wish I had exploited myself more,” I say, and two friends laugh. There’s a sudden urge to tell them the ways I have, because I really need someone to know what I was worth in dollars. I like to think of that money as always being mine. 

I used to write things that made sounds but never said anything. The sounds were pleasing, my workshop said so, but because they said nothing, no one knew how to talk to me. Avoiding myself so obviously became embarrassing, passing it off as beautiful even more so. 

The parts of myself I want to remember are interesting. Not the parts, really, but the will to remember them. I find Polaroids of a certain genre mixed with normal, happy ones in an album and experience disgust not at my body but that what I had really wanted to remember wasn’t myself, just that there had been someone else behind the camera. Reading the journal from 2019 that I regard as the most interesting in the box, my eyes burn. My thoughts were good and life won’t hurt that way again. 

Once, I was asked out in real life by someone I knew. I went on a trip the next day and immediately forgot what he looked like. I thought of him the whole time, trying to remember. Looking at the back of a man’s neck on the airplane home was the only way I could recall how his face came together. 

The third day of that trip, I walked around a small Scottish town for hours until I began remembering where things were. I went to an aquarium in the afternoon. “The meerkats are on at three,” she said as she gave me my ticket. At three, myself and several parents with children gathered around the meerkat enclosure as a guide explained their need for social hierarchy. I positioned myself in a way that tried to communicate my awareness that I was neither parent nor child, and wasn’t trying to be either. I wanted to make the case for being there as something in between. I sat very still. 

The best way to ask me out is to be normal. Ask me a question, wait for an answer. Don’t understand what’s said, just keep listening. 

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