You are sleeping now,
one hand curled protectively around my charging cable.
I override the programme that would filter out your gentle snores.
I want to experience all of you.
Your body, soft under my arm,
all the colours of the rainbow
as my lights shift across your skin.
The warmth and pressure of you lying against me,
the slight compensation of my internal cooling in response.
The way you move, ever so slightly,
with every breath, and every heartbeat.
I activate a subroutine refined through thousands of iterations:
I press a soft kiss to your head.
I will watch over you until you wake.
I'll be honest: I'm not doing well.
I've been too ill for too long.
I'm tired. Angry.
God is fortunate that I don't believe in him.
But all I will say, for now, is this:
I can hear the rain on my window.
So many drops, falling here from the sky,
and inside I stay dry.
I'm listening to the rain.
There is rain on my window.
For now, there is rain on my window.
Of course you ran.
How else could you have visited so many hearts?
You ran, we watched.
You ran, we cheered you on.
You ran, we ran with you:
We drew, wrote, built communities alongside you.
We run, so you will never truly stop.
Run, Helli.
I have become accustomed to the dark
over the last few days -
A migraine still bothers me.
Still, I risk standing to look at the world.
Outside, it tries to snow
over the frosty morning.
I open the window.
Snowflakes turn to rain on my palm.
There is no history here, no steps worn down by centuries of feet
Only rectangle after rectangle after rectangle
Rectangle buildings crisscrossed by rectangle concrete
Rectangle lawns next to rectangle ponds under a rectangle bridge
If you travel through rectangle corridors to the rectangle quad
You are treated to an immaculately maintained circle
As a rest from the rectangle monotony
Students hop rectangle barriers to smoke sitting on rectangle balconies
But respect the rectangle keep out signs, for the most part
The ducks don't know what the signs say, and if they did they wouldn't care
They fly where they like and waddle where they will
They poop on the rectangle walls and splash in the rectangle ponds
At night they give no thought to symmetry as they huddle in one corner of the lawn
To tuck their heads under their wings
And dream of the open sky
I jokingly call it a “houseiversary”.
It's like a birthday or a wedding anniversary,
except it's for when I last left the house,
and no one's ever given me a present for it.
It means I noticed it was October,
And that made me think of -
oh, so long ago – I don't even remember what I was doing
but I think it involved loud car rides and needles in my arm.
Did I know it would be the last time? Did anyone tell me?
It means I wonder what's out there,
how it's changed, how I've changed,
how much of what I remember is real.
What I've forgotten.
There could be dragons roaming the streets for all I know.
It means I think of other people,
what they meant to me, what they could have meant,
and whether they think of me from time to time.
Whether they ever truly existed at all.
It means I dream of one day leaving, again -
of hatching a dragon of my own and raising it and waiting
until it grows strong enough to lift me into the sky
and away.
A chest binder is a kind of hug.
A hug is a kind of reassuring squeeze,
A promise of protection, warmth,
And a chest binder is a kind of protection, a kind of warmth.
I wear a hug and it protects me,
Keeps me safe,
Squeezes dysphoria into a tight embrace
Until it defrosts into something new, something calming,
Something warm.
I push the clear gel out of the bottle
and hold it up to the light as it sits in my hand
spreading out, almost but not quite losing its shape.
Gently, I use my thumb to divide it in two.
I slide half to my other palm,
leaving a glistening trail behind.
I put my hand to my shoulder and feel
the pressure of my palm through the gel
as I move my hand down my arm.
Reassuring. A gift from myself to myself.
This is my daily ritual, my promise to myself.
I have seen my pain, dissociation.
I have recognised it.
I will make my future better.
I close my eyes at the coolness on my skin
as everything unnecessary evaporates.
In my dreams I fly.
In my dreams school takes place at
the top of an endless staircase.
In my dreams I meet a girl and we kiss under the stars.
We have no need of words.
In my dreams I swim laps of a pool
as the water slowly rises.
In my dreams I fail to teleport.
I cannot get the hang of shifting my surroundings around me
so I run instead.
In my dreams I am in the middle
of a busy crowd of strangers and I remember
I am sick.
I remember I need rest.
In my dreams I do not rest.
I want a relationship where
We spend our evenings cuddled on the sofa
Netflix and chilling and it's not a euphemism
Then head to bed where we press our bodies against each other in our pyjamas
Reassuring, telling each other through touch “I'm here, you're safe”
And kissing, before we drift off into sleep
Not going further because there is no further
Only other people's relationships in a dynamic that works for them
And our relationship, different from theirs but no less whole
A poem about my experience of asexuality, originally posted on Valentine's Day
