my trinkets

I wrote this in January, but I only recently rediscovered these words. I’m learning I might have even more trinkets, and autonomy over them, than I originally thought 🙂

My mind tells me that I struggle through love. 

You do not realize the power of the mind until you see how you are capable of thinking your way out of your feelings for someone. The real trouble for me was seeing how even with distance and my attempts to remove this person from my thoughts, they remained. 

I have been struggling with pockets too. Perhaps it’s realizing women’s pants have none, but they fit me best, and make me feel like I finally do have a body. However, in the same way that they are not men’s pants, this is not a woman’s body. Perhaps that’s why I am cautious of love, thinking myself out of it because there is no room for liminality in love. 

There can only be definitives, otherwise, there is bound to be pain. 

I’m wondering if I ever had the capacity to do so [to love]? Did I ever have a “gender” as well, have I simply lost these trinkets somewhere along my journey? 

The one certainty is the pain, the hurt felt by someone living in limbo, someone just a little too complicated to love.

What does one do? 

You try. You try to make sense of what you can grasp. For love: all I could do was think about the moments of time we had spent together. They were pockets of time where it seemed I finally was doing something right. Moreover, even in the aftermath, when the touch and scent of love was no longer on my skin, I still found traces of it: in songs, the way the Sun shone through a particular window, or maybe even their name appearing on billboards stories high. These were reminders, despite my brain’s efforts to reduce this connection to nothing, that it had been real. 

In the right place, at the right time, perhaps this love could grow and be more, but my mind and weary heart continue to tell me to run away. Yet, it seems like running away only gets me so far, and love sticks to me like something on the bottom of my shoe or a dust bunny under my bed. 

I similarly seek to evade categorization or labels in regard to my body. Yet, gender remains my companion. Even though I hate to look at all the ways its construction discredits my existence, I need it for now.
How else can I tell you what I am not? 

I still wake up wondering if there is some way to teleport and be blissfully unaware; back to wherever it was that I could rest without feeling that I must be missing something. 

It has struck me, deeply, to know there might be things I simply cannot give to myself. I thought they were mine, but these trinkets have not just evaded me, they have corrupted me, and tarnished my best efforts to enjoy the bits that make my queer existence so desirable. So I continue to wage a war, all in the hopes of proving this inkling wrong. I tell myself, “I will not alter, shrink, or change.” The alternative is to succumb to treachery and the loss of my identity. I think losing this battle somehow inherently means reducing oneself, shrinking to fit a puzzle piece from another set. Let’s pray these trials and tribulations will grant me unimaginable bliss.

In the meantime, we talk on the phone: me and this lover, who has shaken my world and made me feel so whole and yet so empty. I tiptoe in this space of in-between while I try to figure out how to love and be loved, how to not be a man and not be a woman, how to be a woman and be a man, how to be seen and feel seen, all without losing myself. 

The days etch on, some days I think I find little answers. On other days, I purposefully cover my tracks and throw my bounty away. 

One day I will look back on all the ways I yearned. I will think of how I simply wanted pockets of time where I could be unbelievably me, maybe life will grant me buckets and truckloads. My little trinkets will sit on a shelf and my mind will no longer push love away. 

Simply give me time.