Filed under: related to, that weird feeling i like to call attraction, the island (home)
home is strange to me. familiar and unfamiliar, but no longer a place i belong. my parents are here, the house i grew up in. but i am not really part of it. i don’t feel the connection i felt from the east coast, pulling me home. i love the forest, but i keep looking around at the town wondering how i grew up here, where monster trucks thunder down the streets, the jr. high school kids giving hostile looks as i pass. i come here and i feel, suddenly, like a kid. i can feel my bones lock into positions they occupied a long time ago. ever since i arrived my legs have hurt inexplicably, the backs of my thighs and my knees, like i am in a space that is too small for me.
i watched my family yesterday, parents, my uncle and his roommate, my grandpa and his wife. i thought about how the self i have in the presence of my family feels like a lighter copy of who i really am, as though someone has done a gravestone rubbing of me and used the faded print to tell people about my life.
this is my first time being out and at home. the other night my mum asked me why i had waited so long to tell them i was gay. i said it is because i am private person- and i am, probably more private than is fair. but also because up until a couple of years ago i didn’t believe anyone could have feelings for me so telling my parents that i was gay seemed like a moot point. it doesn’t help that i fall hard for people who do not feel the same way, so i don’t generally have anything to tell them anyway.
(or that at this moment my thoughts are back home with someone who is never going to think of me like that and i’m trying to brace my fragile little feelings for the day (sometime soon, i’m sure) they fall for someone and i have to watch it happen. and right at this moment, all i want to do is go talk to them, even though this distance is necessary. very necessary.)Filed under: a city called montreal, observations, related to, that weird feeling i like to call attraction
i’m sick today. i woke up with lines from a poem i haven’t yet written in my head, sat up and wrote them out slowly.
i had dreams last night that there was a gigantic protest/riot in montréal, surrounding a building that looked suspiciously like the whitehouse. i rode around the police tape on my bike till a cop tripped me up by the river, almost pushing my friend in. i grabbed her close to me, and a cop grabbed my arms. “homosexual activity is grounds for arrest.”
“i’m just saving her from the river!”
“you’re both under arrest.”
i jumped away from him, screaming about how i was proud to be a homo anyway and he couldn’t catch me. he caught me and threw me in a wagon and suddenly we were driving through back roads by the ocean where the police had stopped whales, frozen them in ice.
sick dreams are strange.
i came out to my mum via skype the other day. actually, i told her i had a date with someone, no gender, and she asked immediately what her name was. i grinned at the screen… mum knows i’m queer. i mean, i knew she probably knew but we’ve never really acknowledged it out loud. then i explained non-gendered pronouns to her, how the person i’m going on a date with doesn’t gender themselves. the point is, she knows i’m seeing someone and we’ve both acknowledged that i’m queer. that’s good, it means i’m out to almost everyone important in my life, am definitely not in the closet when it comes to my family, my close friends. older friends don’t know, exactly, but i think if you scan my facebook profile you can tell…unless they don’t have that awareness. i’m not sure if non-queers really pick up on the cues, the indications that someone might be queer. so maybe these old friends look at pictures of r and i and see friends, nothing else. it doesn’t really bother me because i never see them, but the next time i see, say, my oldest friend and she asks if i’ve met any nice boys…i’ll set her straight, so to speak.
Side B is my sister and though she is twenty, we have only known each other for six years. this is because we are not biologically related, though that doesn’t matter…to us. many others seem to think it matters a great deal. the thing is, we are sisters. biology has nothing to do with it and Side B is as much my sister as Side A (who is related biologically, if you’re curious.) when they are told Side B and I are sisters, people seem to think it is alright to ask a multitude of questions about our relationship and our families and Side B’s “ethnic makeup” (real quote there) as though it were their business. it is not. i don’t appreciate their scrutiny, their disbelief when they look from her to me and say “no you’re not!” as though we had decided to joke with them. yet the moment some people discover that we fit outside of their typical idea of familial makeup they decide our relationship is not as valid as that between siblings who share genes. i assure you, it is…but it still bothers me that people assume we’re lying.
i experienced something like this a few weeks ago in regards to my sexuality- disbelief because i didn’t fit into the person’s idea of a gay woman. i was in montréal’s gay village with some friends, waiting outside of a pizza place for Side B to get herself some food. i was hanging out with lamb and s, leaning on our bikes watching my sister who was mired in a line of equally drunk people and trying to negotiate her way to the counter. there was a man sitting outside on the raised cement ledge just below the big storefront window, eating pizza and trying to talk to me. i was ignoring him because he was drunk and i wasn’t really in the mood for being either insulted or picked up. but finally, after he repeated his question for the fourth or fifth time, i turned to him.
“what did you say?”
“i said…are you gay?”
“are you asking if i’m gay?” i asked, a little wary. he nodded.
“yes, i’m gay.” i told him, brushing aside a longer explanation of exactly how i identify because i knew it wouldn’t matter to him anyway.
he laughed “you don’t look gay.”
“i’m comfortable with that.” i told him. he pointed to s.
“she looks gay…you, you don’t look gay. i like your style…are you sure you’re gay?”
“yes.” i told him, before Side B came out of the pizza place and we left.
the point of this disorganized rant is, i suppose, that i am tired of identities resting on preconceived notions. there are so many varieties within identities that assuming all people who share those identities are the same is ridiculously limiting and dangerous. no group is that homogenized. sometimes it bothers me that i am not visibly what people associate with queer (mostly because i feel slightly erased when people assume i am heterosexual) but it bothers me equally when people invalidate my relationship with Side B. okay, so we don’t fit into what you believe a family should be…but this isn’t a game to us or a joke we pull out when we’re drunk and i’m sick of having to over-explain our relationship.
dear skeptics: stop invalidating parts of who i am just because you haven’t encountered them before or they don’t fit into the tiny little mold you believe people like me come from. there’s a whole lot of variety in the world.
(i know people’s assumptions really don’t affect who i am. but it still bothers me.)
