I Know What I’m Doing
I don’t know where it starts.
I’m listening to you talk to me, and I want to hear you and take it all in because you are so dear to me, and I feel so touched that you want to have coffee with me. Your top is so fucking cute. But then I’m thinking about my electric bill, or what I’m going to have for dinner with a friend and how I need to be mindful that they’re vegetarian but not into soy, or a memory of playing kickball at recess in the 4th grade, or a scene from that 70’s Show that I saw a month ago and how strange laugh tracks are. I ponder for a second which word, which hand gesture of yours, which tinny smell of coins slipped into my pocket, which color of the t-shirt a server is wearing in the café brought to mind any of those thoughts.
I know myself well enough to know it came from somewhere and that each thought connected to the last in some way. I’ve spent hours in bed staring at the ceiling tracing these lineages before. Generally I’m amused and enjoy about myself the way I cruise through past chuckles and textured sensory memories. I have never once said “I’m bored.” I do not know that feeling. At times I’m terrified like when I miss a stop sign because I was thinking about how much I miss a pair of shoes I wore on vacation in Chicago 12 years ago (what a TJ Maxx score that was!), and I snap to attention because of screeching tires and blaring horns. Silent faces in windshields miming anger. The redness in their faces brings to mind my own inflammation around my menstrual cycle. When was the last time I bled? I hated those last tampons. Note to self: do not buy those again.
And in a flash, I’m back in the café with you, and I’ve missed 8 words or maybe 2 minutes of what you’ve said to me, and I’m so sad. I’ll never have that time back, even if I ask you to pause and repeat yourself, which you kindly do. You always do. You are so good to me. Jesus fucking Christ, I love you. How did we get to be friends? Oh, yeah, that party at Kirsten’s house. I wonder how Kirsten is….
….These are just the times I can’t help it.
I do it on purpose, too. This is a new revelation that emerges from conversations with you and others over drinks and smokes. I’ve told myself that I’ve been comfortable in my own body as a dyke –now 36 and greying with occasional joint pain — for well over a decade now. And I am.
I love the way I sit with my ankle crossed over my knee. I love the strong, angular feel of my shoulders in a button up, and the way my femme lover flushes when she opens the door to me standing there lookin good, smellin good and smiling wryly.
Yeah, I know what I’m doing.
And at the risk of being controversial, it was a choice. I chose this years ago when I cut my hair short and embraced the term “sideburns” for the first time. I chose this when I got rid of my last dress that I only hung onto for family weddings and funerals. Even then it was long overdue. I chose this because it felt effortless and full of joy where wearing a dress and shaving my legs to the knee felt embarrassing and futile: I was never going to look and sit like the women on TV and in my life without deep, solemn focus, and I know focus is in short supply.
But in choosing to look good, smell good and smile wryly at the world, I chose also to tune a lot out. I say “chose” because it happened concurrently with feeling better in my clothes and in my wide-hipped strut. In talking to you and others over drinks and smokes, I remembered the earlier days of feeling good and how it also meant feeling terrible because of the stares, the snickering and having the word “faggot” spat at me by passing cars. The anger mimed at me in those moments felt like an iciness in my chest that grew into an intolerable burning and itch and desire to strip off all my clothes and burn them. The thought disturbs me. Surely not everyone feels like they’ll itch their clothes off….I’d learn later in talks with you and others over drinks and smokes that many of us do.
I learned to not look at faces when I was out and about. I learned to tune my focus to the chair across the room in which I intend to sit or to the chalkboard drink menu over the espresso machines. I learned to focus intently on these things: taking in the shine of the vinyl chair and taking in the way whomever updated the drink menu puts a cross in their 7’s the way I do, the way Germans do, to keep 7’s from looking like 1’s. Later, I’ll remember the chair and the chalkboard and then also the very convivial conversation you and I had about voter suppression. I’ll remember the top you wore, too. I’ll remember these things and sometimes even the quick banter you had with the server because in that moment I chose you and aliveness and joy over the iciness of a room full of stares and snickering. I’ll later see a chair somewhere else that reminds me of the shine of the vinyl of that chair, and I’ll remember it smiling at my ceiling or at a traffic light I don’t notice change or another time in another café with another person very dear to me.
I’ll remember with some sadness that I missed seeing a woman beaming at my lover and me, walking hand-in-hand into a store as she walks out. My lover will tell me about this later with tenderness and smiles. I’ll remember with some sadness that in choosing you and aliveness and joy over the pain of the present, that it’s not always pain.
And in this moment in the café (or shouted on the patio of a bar or cuddled on your sofa,) I feel the tender power of being able to name this way of sauntering and sprinting through the past and present as my body’s means of coping with the ways our world and this political moment try to make me itch out of my clothes, my skin, my life because of how I choose to take up “woman.” This is a new revelation, but it feels as real to me as playing kickball in the 4thgrade, as familiar to me as sitting with my ankle crossed over my knee. I know with certainty that I could not know this about myself without also your stories and those of others over drinks and smokes, echoing similar feelings and describing your own journeys to loving yourselves or hating yourselves less. I revel right now in this very moment in the fresh sensory memories of you in your cute top and I with my fresh fade co-creating our collective power in storytelling and shared pain, daring each other to stay grounded in this beautiful present and imagining futures of “woman” that are much, much more than just “not always pain.”
I revel in knowing we are and can be the kind of women so comfortable with ourselves that kids looking at us feel a longing for a future they don’t have. We laugh and call it a “Ring of Keys” moment. I remember being that kid looking at that confident queer.
I can’t wait.
I’m not waiting.
