you used to get it in your fishnets, now you only get it in your nightdress.

I was told to write about love, to write about identity, to find and define the relationship between them, to record my thoughts on the matter. It intrigued me. My teachers are passionate and talented and they do not cease to amaze.

You have an identity and who and how you love are parts of it.  There may be a million more components, but love is a part of it. Do you have a “type” of person you can love, romantically, sexually, as a friend? This type is part of you, your personality. The patterns that appear in the people you love are patterns in your own emotional choices.

Sexuality and “orientation” comprise an identity all their own, for some.

The way you treat the people you love and the way you let them or want them to treat you is an identity. For some teenagers it is definitive: you are the slut, you are the prude, you are the childish flip-flopper flirt, you are practically married.

There is also family. Most people love their families, and if you don’t, you appear as an exception to a rule. There’s a reason, no doubt, and that reason is part of you, who you are. Both cause and effect affect how you identify yourself or how others identify you.

The truth is that the love-parts of identity can be found only in answers to questions, only in opinions, perspectives, definitions, patterns of action. Do you define all love in certain relationships, certain types, or do you let it exist, ambiguous, indefinite, changeable? Do you think sex belongs to marriage? To “true love”? Do you believe in true love? Do you believe in “love at first sight,” “soul mates,” and other cliches?

Will you let your lovers become your only definition? Will you let how you want to be loved define what you want in life? Will you use love as a tool to find yourself? Will you use your journey to yourself as a tool to understand love? Will you let a lover change you – how you live, act, are? Will you let the emotion itself change you?

Are you unsure about love, fluid, flexible? Are you certain, with goals and a checklist, of what you want? Do you know what love feels like?

What do you believe of love?

big hands, I know you’re the one

I lay in the grass, sprawled under the sky. The air around me is enormous, going up forever as it fades into blue, going out and weaving between trees and birds and grasses and fields of corn. I am small. I find a minuscule purple flower by my face, an aberration in the evenly cropped green. I am tiny. I am a point on a sphere that is bigger than I can imagine. Just a point, a dot, a drop of water, a grain of salt. Too small to be seen, too small to be noticed, too small to leave a mark, too small.

It feels wonderful.

I am all of a sudden terribly lonely, an ache spreading through the ecstasy of warm spring air and infinity. I imagine that someone is trying to know me and trying to love me and I whisper to them. “I am tiny,” I tell her, incarnate in the purple flower. “I feel like a point, insignificant, one step from nonexistence.

“I dare you to make me feel infinite. I want you to make me everything, the world. The sky is endless and I want to be.

“I’m a drop of nothing and I like it and I want you to be not afraid to make me an expanse of everything, because I will like it.

“I want you to be unafraid because I am afraid and that is what love is for.”

They do not notice me and my flower. If they ask what I am doing, I will tell them, “praying.”

still around, the morning after

I know a girl who fears regret. She confessed this five months ago. We are friends but not really, for myriad reasons, mostly circumstantial. I like her, she likes me, we get along. So somehow we ended up in an icy study together with five others, playing truth or dare and never-have-I-ever into the darkest parts of the night. It’s always those games, isn’t it?

*

I didn’t say it then but I realized I am the opposite and the same. I regret fear, instead. The same emotions, different actions. She does everything because she’s afraid to regret not having done it. I do nothing because I am afraid, and regret it later. She wins. Yet I am addicted to that morning-after feeling, an unbreakable pattern of idiocy.

**

I regret leaving things unresolved. I regret still wondering. I regret not fully explaining when she asked me why. I regret gluing the three of us together last night with a pinky-swear dripping with honey.

*

I also regret how closed off I actually am, how it seems like I’m not because of ridiculous bravado. I regret that when I try to open up and explain in words things that normally exist in my mind, and my heart, and in held hands, only mistakes come from my lips. They still do not understand. Then again, I do not think we are very understandable. As such we are a source of curiosity and this is why there was even a question to answer.

**

I do not regret that now we all hold powerful hands of cards. We each have i.o.u’s and other forms of leverage and for some reason this is delightful. Intrigue and power are exciting. This is corrupt and terrible because friendship should not be about power or secrets and yet we let it. It is, and we are. We crave these things.

*

I do not regret trying to explain some things. I do not regret choosing to be a tearful mystery about others.

**

I choose to love the memory.

grass-pulling

I am frustrated, futilely fighting this strange contagion. Everything is blooming and I feel like Janie, a beeless blossom. I’d like to blame beautiful girls and “glass closets” and mysteries of the mind but I know the truth. Regardless, I’m lonely and wanting and understanding my cell phone slut more and more and not understanding other people. With some I wonder how they live, never loving or crushing or, alternately, screaming and crying. Others I envy for either the same ability, or the benefit of not having to. And there are specific people and specific confusions. How can you tell me you love me and know me the way you do and not see that I’m about to explode so please, don’t touch me? If you see me “as a little sister” then why do you act the way you do? The only thing between us besides the sexual tension that is thicker than cold honey is that phrase, those words you say with that contradictory look in your eyes. I offer my apologies for my insanity but please, get over yourself, I am here and so are you and our bodies are screaming. I woke up this afternoon and sighed. There is a spot on my stomach that itches, another by my hip, another on my leg, another on my back. One by my collarbone, one by the curve of my waist. Scratching is not a viable solution. Nothing I can do is a viable solution, grass-pulling or less meta. I need hands, someone else’s hands, someone else’s hips, someone else’s lips.

65 days till (some) freedom from inhibition in a place with people who aren’t scared.

sacrilege

“…and the children of Israel sighed in consequence of the bondage…” They sighed, you see, in ecstasy. Thus, the roots of kinky Jew-types like so many of my friends (and perhaps myself but the word “kinky” is intimidating).

“…and the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied…” We Jews, you understand, have much in common with Tribbles.

“‘And with an outstretched arm,’ this refers to the sword, as it is said: ‘His sword was drawn, in his hand, stretched out over Jerusalem.’” “Wait, stop! None of this was happening in Jerusalem!” “Well, it was a really big sword!” “Yeah, ’cause god-swords are big enough to cover the whole Middle East!”

“…and he sojourned there – thus we know he went there not to live, but only to sojourn. They said to Pharaoh, we have come to sojourn in the land…”  They sojourned! Jacob sojourned! He did not immigrate. This is very, very important.

“I just got the tears of our forefathers all over the table…”

“It says fill the fourth glass of wine! I’m going to have a fourth glass of wine, dammit!”

super wacky adventure club

Today I wiggled my way to Calvert School through a tunnel with the boys. We drew small, biblical graffiti of the Snake God fighting Jesus, the Jaguar King. Dated and initialed by the two high priests, the normal priest, and the Female Sacrifice, we moved on in the dark, shuffling, bent over, occasionally slipping and splashing in the shallow stream of water. I bumped my head on the concrete ceiling and talked to hear the echoes. We emerged, blinking into the sun, in a damp, wildflowery patch of grass and weeds. We sat in the gazebo and then half-heartedly went roof-topping but really only ended up a few inches from the ground. We bought pizza and sodas and buffalo wings and fruit snax and sat on the wall high above the stream to picnic. I watched the boys as they crossed the stream, scaled the hill, and climbed atop a graffitied concrete monolith. From the dirt coating their pants and the way they slipped and slid up and down the hillside, I decided I much preferred my place on the sunny concrete wall. We walked and talked back to the house, and sat on the porch doing nothing for an hour, then two. We were happy and lazy in the hot hazy air. Bumblebees buzzed around in their slow, silly circles and one of the boys went home. One tried to find some inner balance or peace or silence and his body turned into a symmetry of angles. There were companionable silences that weren’t really, because of the insects and children and cars and bicycle bells. There was laughter. Icewater and diet coke, cuffed dirty damp jeans, sticky socks on hot tired feet taken out of boots. There were cherry blossoms and pansies and clover. Invitations to a Greek Easter party.

I am a sun-warmed kind of tired and a drama-free kind of happy.