The last and first act of power I performed
when I was nineteen and I moved out of my dad’s house, embargoing the tentacles of his tyranny—because let me tell you, my dad is a fucking asshole with a proclivity for surveillance. A few weeks ago I had brunch with Katie, sweaty and steamed with rain because I got flustered and lost on my way to the German café just north of the Lincoln Park Zoo. She’d step away to used the bathroom and her sister got around to asking, “so where are you parents?” ha. “well, I don’t know where my dad is, I think he lives in Spain maybe,” I admitted, “and my mom died when I was in high school. So.” He really might live in Spain; that’s at least what I heard from my brother, who had maybe heard it from my dad’s wife Deborah when she mentioned it in a text message? Before that it was Monaco, where I imagine Pat hanging with the young greasy playboys, jacking off over each other’s sports cars and laying down some heavy plastic for shirts that drape away from immodest button-work as the ink on my dad’s pectorals fades next to the parrots and palm trees on his beloved Tommy Bahamas. My dad is a born-again evangelical Christian with an appetite for terrible flashy clothing and Jack Daniels. He says he loves me—or he used to—but he also says I’m going to hell because I’m a dyke. I know neither of those is true. Yeah, there was some fucked up shit in my life because of the family I was born into, but I could have grown out of those situations and flourished in a way that a lot of the adults around me seem to have believed was inevitable. It’s stupid and embarrassing that I need so many outside chemicals to navigate the rudimentary elements I’ve reduced my life to, that missing a day of pills can throw my life so dramatically off-kilter and that even on 225mg I am slipping precipitously into a fog that’s scary exactly because it’s familiar. I’d be lying if I said I was okay, really, because some days I’m barely functioning and the things that used to come easy to me are struggles I muscle through and there are constant casualties. I might be getting stronger or just more battered. I thought I needed to look for new weapons but then I read something else after that and it reminded me: if you have knife nearby, you’ll use it. So now I’m finding strength in the adage of another dead white guy, but the day-to-day fuel is all Angel Haze and Slurp’s Up and books about feminist abortion. When I get afraid of things I’m not sure if I know they’ll happen or if I make my life harder than it needs to be, creating disaster by anticipating it. I wonder if I don’t know how to be who I am without terror and inefficacy. I’ve always known the depths I’m capable of reaching, but I can’t make myself believe in the aspirations I harbor. It’s fucked up, maybe, that I think about stepping off of nearby roofs. Why would I jump off just as I’ve made it out and to the top?
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