Until Then

The Eileen Myles and Gertrude Stein Post

Felt it fall in earlier today, in strains of pickle juice that trickled down my throat. It all felt lost, hard, and consensual. Thought mostly about movies this week, movies and bathrooms. I thought about the way i kissed a girl in a lady’s bathroom stall and how it had been the first time i didn’t belong there in a really long time. She thought i was gay but i wasn’t, she thought I was a gay man. It’s funny because it was so sweet, like why wouldn’t I be that, it’s funny because it’s a breath of relief for that to not be the way things are all the time. You were dancing with someone whom you thought was a gay man. A casual assumption that isn’t entirely soul-destroying, like dinner. Not being wrong. The slow gauze-y wrapping in swathes of the past.

i finished “Cool for You” by Eileen Myles today and I thought about how much I respect this writer. This person who wasn’t a girl, and isn’t a woman, no matter what she says. She is an Eileen. I think maybe some of the greatest people were genderless. People like Gertrude Stein. Just large, wide American presences who put their heads to the pages and practically blasted words out of guns onto them, like that was their poetry. Because really neither are writing so much as intuiting from the bottom of pits like alphabet soup. Gertrude Stein was dredging, dredging up dead bodies through the muck in order to re-consider them. She was doing it because no one else would. She was doing it because she had to, it was like she was a detective and it was the only thing left to do. She was doing it because “Tender Buttons” was a sumptuous feast that demanded being served.

Everyone is just a text message or phone call these days it seems, maybe an e-mail if you’re lucky. And it’s not that I’m opposed, more just open. I feel laid bare, not knowing if I can take this. The expectation of someone wanting something from me, another person or body believing it would be I who could hold them down. I don’t know. I still don’t believe in love anymore I guess. I guess to me love is just this thing that I never thought about, or thought around about so much that I finally realized it’s just like a stop sign. It’s just this thing planted in the ground, entirely conceptual, that I’ve been circling around for years. Taking laps around the block, on our way to a WaWa at 3 am. Computerized sandwiches. I’ve slammed into this plain wall of existence lately and let things crumble. No red stop signs. I want to hold someone down, but I think love is in the practice, and I spent enough time on soccer fields as a child to fear that kind of green totality.