january 7th 2024

jai guru deva

nothing’s gonna change my world

nothing’s gonna change my world

i did not occur to myself before i met you. i saw you for the first time in a tufts medical center covid testing facility. you wore a white tank top—scissor-cut at the hem and also in a diagonal line from the neck to the bottom, saved together by black safety pins, an aesthetic choice by jaya—and black jeans that you trashed a while ago. the most memorable was your checkered belt. i did not know who you were, although i had a feeling. you knew i was me. we had introduced, officially, some time before in august over zoom, which i don’t count because you weren’t in front of me, but spare pixels going on about your new york city performing arts school while i leaned back, attentive, in my desk chair. how effortless you desired me: adolescently tossing your hair back and forth, adjusting the cadence of your voice for more inflection, ever nervous but casually suave. as you considered the implications of living with an attractive single femme in her prime, i was caught up with much i hated the posters on your ex’s bedroom wall.

i did not exist before i met you. when you confessed i stared at my knees for a while. not for a moment in my life had i expected eyes to fall on my body other than my own. on my first dating app, messages appeared from gluttonous night-seekers disguised as suitors, praising me and most adamantly, the way that i looked. i curled my phone into my chest, but while we were watching game of thrones with the guys across the hall, you identified the swiping gesture. guilty as charged—but it’s true that none of their flatteries could get under my skin at nearly the same proportion as you on my mattress in the dark, whispering by the glow of twilight 2.

at every moment i stand outside of my childhood bedroom, i am worried about how good i look. this is why i dress the way i do. i had the realization, after this night, that i could be wanted. and how good that was: a night, just for me; a hand, intending mine; something that was undeniably my own, which no one, nothing else could take from me. you wanted. if i could choose, this is love: to be pursued, to reveal myself, and—like you are reading me off of a page—to be justified by you. and this is where i become a character. you read me and that is pursuit, not flirting or dates, but a devoted attempt at understanding. how do you understand a form on a screen? could you love it—could you love her? i invite, then, everyone on boylston street, brisk on their way to class or work or lunch, to take me in. i grab their eyes, i commandeer their thoughts until i pass. love me, love me, love me. could you love me? i flicker and i fail. only right a moment—i am the shallow end of the swimming pool. i am the low-hanging fruit. you wanted me for that reason. i forgave you, i offered you a second chance, so then you saw me for what i am: coy. i give myself. i always knew. this is my terrible game. everyone would love to take me—and i’d love to be taken—but neither of us do. all their hands hang loose in their air, too far for me to reach for without fooling myself, making them go, but too close for me to neglect, making them go. i lose at the finish line. i didn’t for you. it would be the last time. 

and then i began to properly be. my first assertion about myself, since i gained this sudden consciousness, was that i was not real. but—! i could find her, in you, if i was exquisitely good. 

we watched the yellow submarine movie on your carpet floor. george was your favorite—you incorporated his face in your wall collage—with ringo at second fiddle and some inexplicable vendetta against paul. you hadn’t bought your guitar, that was over the summer, but you were loyal to marceline, the bass you’d stripped of gloss to paint pink yourself. you strummed her—you preferred to strum, because you were learning, and grateful i didn’t know enough to notice—and we got a kick out of the tripped-out animators, and you provided album release lore like paid commentary, and i sang. there was your head where i wanted it. 

you used to say no one else could tell us what we are. sacred treasure, the unspeakable we, held above: you said, part of me will always be in love with you.

any decision i’ve ever made has been to suppress the gnawing in my head. it is some animal sustained on a receding appetite. it must eat, so it may eat, so it may keep eating. i spend all day in a cage-fight with the thing that’s up there. i do not have time to be happy. how did you put it to bed? where did you find the key to get in? where did you come from? i was floating desperately in the sea and then you wore your checkered belt to the covid test facility where they gave us our student ids, and you kept risking glances at me but of course i didn’t see, and my parents were arguing as they do, and i was focused on my haircut or my outfit or finn, because why would i expect a visit at this fucking hour? could you ever know how many nights i lay there, age 13, age 17, becoming acquainted with the probability of my suicide? i could never tell you back then. it was always now, and now, and now. my life began when i met you, there was nothing else. i can’t find the rest anymore.