driving-at-night

[driving-at-night]

Last night I went to a show. I picked my friend up from the bus station and we drove to the venue. We got lunch at a nearby restaurant and then joined some of her friends in the queue to settle in til doors. We got to know each other a little, just some basic socializing, beginning the ritual of every punk show I’ve ever been to. Having the common ground of a favorite artist is a great starting point for event-specific friendships. It’s a community you already know you belong to, everyone already wearing the same badges. It’s a safe space, at least for that limited time. The hours dwindled and the venue security came out to line us up and distribute wristbands to any who would be drinking this evening. Doors opened at 7 sharp and as we entered we broke into two lines to have our bags and persons searched, our tickets scanned, our hands stamped. And then we settled in to wait again.  The openers came and went, a projector screen lowering between each one to advertise coming events and block our view of the stage. Whatever secret last minute sound checks and equipment adjustments were happening were not for our eyes and ears. We waited in increasing excitement, the floor space coming at a premium as the headlining act drew nearer. My spot on the barrier compressed, hands reaching around my ribs to grasp at the metal bar I leaned against. My friends to my left, a polite stranger to my right, and behind me the press of bodies, the space filling with others who came to worship as I did. The projector screen rose for the final time and the lights went out, signaling the end of our wait. The band strolled across the stage to a tinny version of one of their songs blasting through the speakers, and each took up their instruments before launching into the song themselves. Laura Jane Grace grinned down at us from behind her mane of hair, the lights flashed, and for the next hour and a half we were a step away from the everyday.  At one point early on, the blue shirted venue security in front of me had to step in to peel a drunk woman away from the man next to me. She had overestimated her alcohol tolerance and needed assistance being removed from the crowd. This is a fairly typical occurrence and after a brief pause from the band to make sure everyone was safe, the show went on.

Some of the songs were older and less familiar to me, and so I couldn’t sing along, but I was still part of the community in that moment, still welcome in the crowd and still moved to the beat of Atom’s drumming. The lyrics unknown, I could still recognize the swell of anticipation before we dropped into the chorus, still participate in clapping along during the bridge. Laura above us, backlit and screaming about gender, about anarchy, about loving and being loved in ways that are too big to look at closely. Standing shoulder to shoulder with people there because like me, they feel the crush of the crowd, the thrill as the lights go down, the shattering moments of silence between the notes when musicians know their craft and each other perfectly. Because like me, they know the need to search out others who will understand, to go looking for those who are never quite at home, who have felt lonely or grotesque or angry or frustrated by a world that will not live up to their demands. The crowd was rowdy, and the boys in the blue polos had to step in from time to time to catch a crowd surfer. This, too, is part of the ritual. Security spots an incoming body, steps forward onto the barrier, the crowd heaves forward and dips, the surfer rolls harmlessly into the buff arms of a college kid and his grizzled roadie buddy to be deposited on the floor and shuffled to the back of the room. Toward the end of the show, just as it was hitting me that this gathering was just as religious as any Mass I have ever attended, that the words we were reciting were somewhere between prayer and sermon and spell, that we were the living spirit of the world we could have- A man pushed around the side of the barrier and jumped on stage. The blue polo security in front of me was distracted scanning the pit for crowd surfers or fights and didn’t see the man climbing over monitors to join Laura at her microphone. This has happened at other gigs I’ve been to. An overzealous fan wants a moment, and usually gets an arm around the shoulders for a line or two and is then beckoned offstage from security in the wings.

Last night I saw something different, something I’ve never seen at a show. An armed and uniformed police officer in a bulletproof vest ran onstage, grabbed the man’s hands, and guided him off in a rush. This seemed like an overreaction until I remembered what could have happened, what will always be at the back of my mind now whenever I am in a crowd.  The venue I was at holds 700. It was an all ages show. The kids I was talking to in line were a full decade younger than me. If someone had managed to get an assault rifle into that building there would be parents waiting forever to pick up their exhausted, ecstatic children. There were couples, young queer kids, trans kids out and proud in one of the few spaces they can be in that’s not a bar or club, where they know there will be others like them. People using that space to find a little hope and comfort in the world.

What happened in Las Vegas is fucking abhorrent. It’s an act of terrorism, privilege and toxic masculinity and our stupid useless gun laws combining to allow destruction on an absurd level. And it will not keep me at home where I am isolated and easily ignored. It will not stop me from going out and finding my people, finding my community and making connections with others like me. And it shouldn’t stop you either.

[driving-at-night]

On leaving

Living in a college town, you see a lot of changes that come in predictable waves. It’s easy to accept and equally easy to let go of new people, new shops, new traditions. I worked a job that dealt with the public, so I got used to seeing the same faces, and new faces facing the same challenges. The first year students and their over-concerned parents buying a futon and a mini fridge and boxes of ramen. The off-season teachers working on their gardens. The friends I had class with and never will again, buying their weekly groceries. The guy in the white baseball cap and sunglasses who never smiled or said hello. The woman who bought cat food every first and third week, and cat litter every second and fourth week, who memorized her totals. The inverse of this is of course that, having moved away from that college town, I am now a missing face in someone’s routine. The girl at the coffee shop who knew my order. The coworker whose shifts always ended as mine began. The girl at the fast food place across the street where I’d stop for my breaks. I can always go back, of course, but college towns are almost a liminal space. You’re not meant to linger there. The town itself is timeless. Shops move out, new shops move in. The seniors graduate and the freshmen move up a year. I could walk the streets and pass by houses my friends used to live in. I would know the buildings, but not the faces in them. The more things change the more they stay the same.

[driving-at-night]

I'm most comfortable with sex when I'm on my period. Something about the nature of my body making itself obvious and demanding that I pay attention to it flips a switch in my head that allows me to consider intercourse from a simple biological standpoint. Tab A into Slot B. B for Bleeding all over the place and making a mess anyway, so you might as well play in it. It's natural. It's what the human animal does.

When I'm not menstruating I find it more convenient to simply ignore my body for the most part, and pack all practical considerations of sex into a box that gets shelved until the next time I'm graced with the evidence of my uterus, whenever that may be. In the meantime I go back to believing that sex is this mysterious, emotional, romantic, significant Thing that deeply impacts who I am and who I will be. Sex becomes a mental game: Could I be vulnerable to her? Could I be open with him? What if no one actually wants me? What if I make a mistake? 

But when I'm already bleeding, I am invincible. There is nothing anyone can do to me that my body is not already doing to itself, and it is already moving on from its perceived mistake of failing to become pregnant. It is casting off the bits it no longer needs, the parts no longer useful. It will not carry them around and become bitter and damaged with them. It will spit them out and defy anyone who claims it should do otherwise. 

[driving-at-night]

Everyone I talk to has exactly the same response- "I believe in you!" "You can do it!" What they don't seem to realize is that I am not being humble, I am not merely expressing insecurities. I am drowning, and trying to shout for help as I go under, and instead of a lifeline they are throwing out meaningless encouragement. "Just kick a little harder and head for the shore," but the cold water has paralyzed my limbs and there's salt in my eyes. I don't even know which way is up, let alone where the shore is. 

[driving-at-night]

When you share a room with someone, the bathroom suddenly becomes one of the most private places you can have. It's good for all sorts of things- phone conversations spent sitting on the side of the tub, reading late into the night, crying jags you'd rather weren't overheard. It's also where I find myself tonight, standing in the shower with the water beating down, hot enough to steam and turn my skin pink and red over my ribs and arms and hips and thighs. Not hot enough. I turn the knob a bit farther, until it doesn't turn anymore. I almost regret that later, when I'm back in my room and my skin has dried, dried out enough to pull tight, and I can feel the sting of it across my back, like it's splitting open over the ridge of my spine. It feels like I imagine growing wings would, great giant wings unfurling into poisonous orange and acid yellow, warning everyone who sees me to stay away. I am toxic. I am dangerous.

[driving-at-night]

There are salt tracks drying on my face. It is 2:30 in the morning. I climb down off my bed and step over the bag I'd packed earlier, yesterday evening now, when I'd still been looking forward to the night. But now it is night, and there is nothing, and I am so tired. I am tired of it being night, and of crying when people speak kindly to me. This fragility is grating, and I'm shivering because it's fucking January, and 20 degrees outside, but I'm flushed from the tears and the embarrassment of feeling them. It is the kind of night where I want someone to pin me into the corner of a sofa and rest their heavy head on my shoulder, weigh me down physically the way I feel weighted emotionally. But there's no one. So I step outside by myself in my flats and my sweater. The sky doesn't even have the decency to be crystal-cold-clear and sparkling with stars to remind me of my place. It's cloudy instead, the incessant snowfall movie-perfect, invisible except where it catches on my eyelashes, where I breathe it in, where it blows through the glow of the street lamps like handfuls of glitter thrown from just off-screen. The sky is bright with reflected light pollution from the sleeping town, and my lungs are prickling with the cold air while my heart is burning hot and thumping away in between them, even as my fingers start to ache. I'm really not dressed for this weather.

[driving-at-night]

You're not here. I want you to be, I want to be where you are, so I can take your hand and rewrite every bad thing that has happened to you. I read that he touched you, but didn't love you, and I want to replace every memory he forced into your head. I want to break his fingers and tell him he does not speak to you, look at you, or think of you because he will never deserve that privilege. 

Sometimes I scare myself with my wanting. Am I going to frighten you away if I say I'd like to push you against a wall, so so carefully, and kiss you until you're unable to remember your name? The word trigger is tossed around so casually but you've got reason to use it properly, and I'm terrified I will do something that will trigger you. I'd like to believe I'm special, that it would never happen with me, but real life doesn't care and the mind will have its way. I desperately want the chance to earn your trust.

You aren't here. Sometimes it feels as if you will never be, because I must have imagined this. It is inconceivable that you are real, that you are flesh and blood and may someday allow me to be near you. I plan our dates in my head and chastise myself for being so stupid and for wanting to be fucking romantic. But I can't seem to stop. Your hand in mine, I will rewrite every bad thing that has happened to you.

[driving-at-night]

I want to know you, intimately and without reservation.

I want to know the bits of you that you hate, and show you how I can love them. I want to find all the flaws you fixate on, so I can love how perfect they make you. I want to see if your face gets red in the cold. I want to know how my hands rest on your hips, what your fingers feel like intertwined with mine, the varied textures of your skin. I want to count the moles and freckles and silvery tiger stripe stretch marks. I want to know every one of your scars by sight and by touch, and I want to know the stories of how they got there. I want to know what you're like first thing in the morning, how you react to being woken up unexpectedly and if you can still sleep well snugged up next to another body. Do you prefer being the big spoon or the little spoon, and are you ticklish, and where?

I want to know how you are when you're frustrated with me, or when you've stayed up too many nights in a row, or when you're nervous and trying not to show it. I want to sit beside you as you are devastated by the death of your favorite character. I want to see what you do when you're annoyed by your family versus when you're annoyed by the idiocy of strangers. I want to know how your face crumples when you cry, and if it shows afterward and for how long. I want to see if you blush or pale when you're angry or embarrassed. I want to know if your eyes tear up when you laugh, if you throw your head back or if you cover your mouth to muffle it.

I want to know if you chew on your pens or tear the labels off of plastic bottles or tap your feet when you have to sit still too long. I want to know how long that would be. I want to know how you type, what your handwriting looks like and how you hold your pen, if you prefer blue ink or black ink or pencil, if you ever get frustrated by your own speech patterns. I want to know if you sit upright when you watch tv, or do you slouch back against the couch, or would you lie down with your head on my lap?

I want to know if you go with the first picture you take, or if you redo the shot until it's perfect. I want to know if you put salt on your food and do you like marshmallows in your hot chocolate and do you take milk in your tea? I want to know if you sleep in a cold room with heavy blankets or a warm room with light ones. I want to know how you wear scarves, if you do at all. Do you wear jewelry? Does it have to match the other jewelry, or your outfit, or is it simply sentimental? 

I want to know if you'd be offended by the way I feel protective of you, or angry at the jealousy I would work so hard to contain. I want to know if you'd be patient and forgiving enough to sit by my side when I'm too angry to speak reasonably, if you'd be too frustrated to realize it wasn't directed at you. I want to know what you'd do if it was directed at you. I want to know if you could actually do anything to deserve my anger. I want to know what our fights would be like - loud and raging, or quiet and venomous? - and who would break the stalemates. 

I want you to know that I would, every time, if the alternative was never knowing the rest.

[driving-at-night]

Things I Can't Tell You

You looked up when I came in, asking for a hug. I mumbled it though, so your deliberate misunderstanding made sense. I repeated myself, and you obliged, asking only if I was all right, if something had happened. It hadn't, but how could I explain it anyway? My skin didn't fit right, too tight here, too loose there, and slipped on wrong around the corners. The pressure of your hands alleviated it though, smoothed the wrinkles and sanded off the rough bits that snagged. And I thought it would be okay.

But you found yourself distracted and I couldn't hope to regain your attention. You can't understand what it was like that first time, to feel my bones shifting under the grip of your fingers on my side and to realize that I could have that without the rest, without the pain of twisting limbs or the fear of worse.

You don't want me. You want gratification and diversion and amusement, and I simply serve the correct purpose until I don't. You won't hear that, though. You won't hear that we should stop. That you don't want me. That you demand I make decisions about where to eat, but won't acknowledge my autonomy when I ask it of you.

[driving-at-night]

We pass a small, tree-filled place between streets, and a squirrel darts past and comes back, cautiously. Instinctively I kneel, holding a hand out. He wanders nearer, until he reaches out and grabs my index finger with his tiny paws. I worry for an instant about rabies, but he doesn't scratch or bite, just pats my hand gently with one paw, like an apology.

Because of this delay, we miss the last train back.

[driving-at-night]

The beeping cuts through the insipid Top 40 hit, urgent and insistent. As always, I wait nervously for the message. Years of conditioning to it have made me anxious, even when I know it's likely as not just another Amber Alert, or a flash flood warning after a brief storm. This time, though, is different. After the beeps, the music resumes as if nothing happened. Maybe it did. Still, I'm uneasy. There's been no dangerous weather, no flooding or hail or wind to warn us of. An Amber Alert, then, or just a malfunction. I push it out of my mind, there are more pressing concerns.

Except it happens again the next night. And the one after that. That third time it goes on a bit longer and something like voices crackles through the beeping. Too staticky to make out words, and I might be imagining the tone, the panicked but swift cadence that speaks of desperation and planning. I'm tempted to ask my neighbors if they've heard this, but it's been a while since I've seen anyone. Even if there was someone, what would I say? "Have you heard anything suspicious on the radio lately?" Right. I'm one of the few lucky enough to even have a wireless radio, how could I expect them to have been listening? The blackouts are becoming more frequent, and people are getting nervous. They have more pressing concerns. No one is listening.

[driving-at-night]

The lightning isn't what wakes her, but it's the sort that precedes only the loudest cracks of thunder, the crashes sharp enough to shake the ground and rattle windowpanes. We both snap to wakefulness. My heart is pounding and I can feel my pulse racing in my throat. My hands are shaking. She whispers that a car alarm is screaming, and in the silence between thunderclaps I hear her proven right. There are sirens wailing too, far off in the distance. The rain finally starts to fall, and against the constant flashes of lightning and incessant rumble of thunder, the gentleness of the drops is surreal, like we're watching a play. Like we've suspended our disbelief and and agreed that this is just a summer storm. It's not. The streetlight's gone out, and I can no longer see her eyes gleaming near the window. The sirens are getting louder.