Theo
Being Here
Once my father cried out for death and I always think
he was asking me. I didn’t kill my father but I could have
called more. How do you distinguish a gift from an apology?
A bruise from a bruise? Saltwater to slough the raw
from your throat. Turmeric paste and a butterfly bandage
so your cheek won’t scar much. The language your mother
kept like a cipher hoping to save you the burden
of unlearning. The gold you didn’t know about,
sold for a camera. Your father’s tuba, sold for a house
that sold at a loss. No one lives there anymore
but a broken birdsong clock. My apartment is only clean
because it’s empty. Sometimes I have to think
about what I would miss most about being alive.
My mother’s cơm sườn. Mashed potatoes and half a grapefruit
at the place setting for my father’s ghost. Don’t tell me to relax.
It’s always life or death. Lies in my diary. Hiding the sharps.
Trying to call back an ambulance. I’m tired. I’m prowling Chinatown
ordering frog legs I can’t finish alone in the in-between tongue
I use with my mother. I’m crowing a name into the waning light
and I don’t know who I’m singing to and I suppose that’s always been
the problem. What I’m trying to say is: sometimes when I listen to a song
I love, I panic and I imagine a time when I can never listen to a song again,
no matter how bad I need to. Canary in a coal mine. My mother in white
for the rest of her days. Bitter squash climbing a trellis for roses.
Imagine a room all ache. Imagine a room with nothing in it.
Imagine a room with no door. That’s this, almost.
--
Throughout 2020, I’ve been struggling with grief and fear and a feeling of powerlessness. Sometimes the dread is paralyzing. At the same time, it’s impossible to forget how fortunate I am to have the stability I do have: a job, healthcare, access to mental health resources, solid relationships with friends and family. This time has been simultaneously re-traumatizing and affirming. I’m no stranger to unhealthy coping mechanisms, but I’ve found myself falling back more and more on the tools and strategies I’ve learned in therapy, particularly during my hospitalization, to cope. I’m making active efforts to keep in touch with friends and family, to find ways to show up for the community as much as I’m able - whether through giving time or funds to mutual aid resources. I’m back in therapy for the first time since my hospitalization, and it makes such a difference. More than ever, I’m realizing the critical importance of reaching out, of asking for help when I need it and giving when I can, of being gentle with myself and with others. It’s going to be difficult to move forward, but we are all we’ve got, so we need to take care of each other.
Nate
I live in PA now. We tried to get an apartment out in New York, it was like a basement one bedroom apartment, and there were so many issues with it. So we ended up just leaving and we went back to her mom’s house. So, we were kinda out of options for New York because everything is so expensive, so. She has family out here, and um, one of her aunts is like a landlady? She just rented us an apartment out here. It’s pretty chill…It’s pretty okay. It’s different. It’s very different….I can walk down the block and you can see the mountains from like, any view from the street pretty much. It’s really nice…I work at TJ Max…..
Oh my god I have not wrote in so long. I just feel like my brain is very scattered….This is the first time in years I’ve actually been able to like, relax and own something and have things fall into place. So, as far as writing, I haven’t really had the time to like, gather my thoughts together and come up with something, come up with ideas and really like, write. But I think now, being here and being able to be settled and think about things that I wanna talk about, I think I’ll be able to get back into it. I also wanna start painting again and all that cus I haven’t really been able to do artwork. Living in other peoples’ houses, it’s not easy to like, be artistic, cus you need a lot of focus….Before I moved here I was at Aaliyah’s mom’s house. And I was basically in between her mom’s house and the shelter. So I was like between the Bronx and Jamaica, I was constantly traveling, staying at the shelter sometimes, staying at her mom’s sometimes. So. It was just… constant moving. Moving my stuff, moving where I sleep. Everything.
I was staying at my mom’s with Aaliyah, cus she was goin’ through a rough time like when I first met her, so she moved in with me but then my mom kicked us both out. So once she kicked us both out, um, Aaliyah moved back to her mom’s, and it was at that point that I started drifting from her mom’s to the shelter and back and forth, until we found that apartment, and then we had to give that apartment up. We have a domestic partnership.
I’ve actually been doing a lot of thinking about where I came from and where I am now. Um… I feel like… like obviously my struggle with mental illness has never stopped. Um. I know that after Kings Country I did struggle a lot. With breakdowns and suicidal thoughts, and… um… a lot of things have happened to me in between this time, this three years. Um. I went through a lot of different traumas that I didn’t think I was gonna experience. And that kinda reshaped my mind even more. Um. Honestly I think now I have more PTSD than I did before. Um. But my coping is a lot better. I’m a lot stronger in being able to fight off feelings of wanting to die. And um. And I think a lot about what’s going on and like what I went though and everything, but I try to stay positive and I try to stay more on the side of like… y’know, every day’s a new day, it’s gonna get better, things will change. Um. Yeah. I don’t really speak to my mom as much anymore. Um. It’s just… it’s been a battle.
The trauma’s I’m talking about… One thing that happened to me, was like, randomly at work I was attacked, like some guy… he came up to me with his friend and they asked me for a cigarette, this happened like a few years ago. But um, one thing just lead to another and he just started like, punching me. Like, in my face, everywhere. Um. He attacked me, I went back to work. I was on a fifteen minute break and I went back to work and told my boss what happened and he sent me home, and y’know security came and everything. But that was something that really, like, scared me. Because… nothing like that has ever happened to me before where someone just comes up to you and starts randomly like, pounding your face in. Um. And then the other thing that happened to me that was… life-scarring… was um… I was raped. Um, in 2019. I went to the hospital and everything and I called the cops and there was a whole case about it. Um. I don’t know, like, where that person is or what they’re doing right now. But I did something about it at least. Um. But I think about it all the time. I tried therapy. Um. During Corona virus I got a therapist, I was doing like over-the-phone sessions. But that wasn’t really working for me because I have a lot of anxiety about picking up phone calls already. So, every time he called I would just get anxiety and I wouldn’t pick up. So at first, like I was at first, but then eventually I just ended up stopping because… like it was weird for me.
[Nate has nearly 100k TikTokfollowers @lonewolflost ]
“My Tiktok blew up after I made a video about both men and women having xx chromosomes before xy, joking that all men are trans men basically. I attract a lot of baby trans people and binary people that learn from my content or can relate to it. I try and bring up things people don’t usually feel comfortable talking about.”