december 22nd 2024

when i left boston it was snowing. it hasn’t snowed like this in daylight since my freshman year. amara was from socal and hadn’t seen snow before, and the soccer girls who communed in 602 had a sled from somewhere and they took it out to the hill. the snow was too fine, a deceptive powder layer, so it wouldn’t catch momentum. amara’s friend cut her skin through her leggings and dripped blood down the white path back to the dorm.

i trained from boston to new york city. i spent the ride coordinating internships with a family friend. ana took us to madame x but i lagged behind in the medieval wing. of course i thought of daisy and the other. autism’s a social lubricant to learn the mechanics of another mind: in my earliest memories they show me the paintings they’ve printed and taped to the wall, bosch, blake, van eyck, then they land in a tangent on catholicism until i’m receiving their perspectives on life and death and spirit. an athiest and a believer, but in their similarities they would’ve torn each other straight through. i knew this much as soon as i met daisy.

i wonder if daisy has a thing for me but it doesn’t really matter. i don’t like her girlfriend—she’s a tiktok influencer with a thing for highbrow but a tendency to miss the point, and she won’t share their relationship online out of embarrassment of daisy’s mundanity, her simple british features. daisy doesn’t care to flag—she’s from rural new hampshire, where they assigned her slurs for populations she didn’t belong to—and hannah’s from an art school in texas where it was cool to be out at fifteen. they’re trying long distance. daisy’s not my type because she’s femme and prissy and blonde, but something about my latent boyishness appeals to her like a drug she isn’t brave enough to take, and when she talks about hannah i catch her wondering. i don’t prefer the unspoken, but maybe in this instance.

i have a problem where a lot of people could love me but they aren’t sure how. i’m primed for projection so when she tells me she “likes me so much” i imagine her fantasy, the romantic princely ideal. i don’t think she respects me—she’s distracted when i speak, setting up for her next tangent—but she likes when i listen to her, when i focus on her eyes. conditioned habit. i have only one model to follow. she’s unwilling to admit that she wants a man, and i’m unwilling to be one outside of private moments, both of us fearing a betrayal of our past iterations.

i don’t belong here on principle. everyone’s dressed like  sydney—jazz musicians in resold docs under cuffed black jeans, art students in bronze-framed specs who talk with her pretentious cadence, walk with her form. the street outside my brother’s apartment in astoria smells like her winter jacket. the problem’s not that she lives in the city, the problem is that the city is her, and it’s clear to me, being here, how many months have passed since she’s thought of me at all, rather melting right back into the ironwork of brooklyn subway stations. this must be how it feels to have a home.