💾 Archived View for gemlog.blue › users › dead_canary › 1716699330.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 16:50:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I'm not used to seeing my face with so many edges. It's like the past four years have melted the softness off me. I wear my heart on my face, and it is wrapped in barbed wire. I stumbled upon pictures of myself from 2019. Pictures my partner at the time had taken of me and my crush. We were in the red-lit stairwell of the warehouse where we'd dance to techno until they kicked us out. Our legs were twined, our body language open and desiring. I miss dancing all night. I miss feeling desire without anger and confusion. I miss not worrying about airborne pathogens. I miss the feeling of being desired. Of being witnessed. I miss the possibility of night.
Most pictures of myself these days are taken in my bedroom mirror. Me, looking at myself in my phone at my reflection. So many planes of separation between me and myself. Maybe I am gaunt with the past. I am haunted by the echoes of myself. I heard a story of a house haunted by a child, its former resident, who is very much alive, older, and living elsewhere. Is an imprint of my past lingering somewhere? Is it where I go when I sleep?
The ugly, clawing feelings are back. Raking through my hair, telling me if I'm going to be tragic I should at least have a cigarette. And who can afford to be pious at the end of the world? I am sharp with hunger. I've been warped by waiting. Waiting for mirage-love to materialize, only it was equal parts a curated simulacrum and what I wanted to see.
I am bounded by skin, the mirror I exist in, the walls of my house, the fence around it. The streets of my neighborhood. The highways cutting off the arteries of the city to which every day I feel less and less allegiance. This is to say--my face is my reality. Rendered angular by isolation. I've no labrys to injure myself against*, only the whetstone of my wanting.