#She's cis but gets a thrill out of confusing people and being called sir

[stardustedknuckles]

There was a woman sat on the curb with a typewriter when I left taco bell, with a sign taped to her folding table advertising personal poems written for you on the spot. And you know... Sometimes you have to let people surprise you. I stopped, in my Dyke shirt with my caduceus clay book in one hand, and I told her I've never seen a poem about asexuality that wasn't sad.

We chatted for a good fifteen minutes, in which she - self describing as hypersexual - asked me more about my experience. She had friends who were on the ace spectrum, which was a relief on my part to not start from zero, and I just told her what I could. About growing up with friends who would stop talking to me once they got partners and tell me I would understand one day, about how it feels a little like being in a musical but never having heard the words everyone else knows or learned the steps to the dance they're all doing in unison. We laughed together at the way I'm mystified by story plots that revolve around bad decisions made due to being just that horny, a situation she was intimately familiar with and having a 43-year life full of those stories.

At the end she asked if I happened to have a title in mind and at first there was nothing. I hate titles. I tend to default to song lyrics for ao3. But as soon as she asked, I remembered standing in the cafeteria in eighth grade and being annoyed that all the Greek gods of love were of that kind of love. I remember wondering if there was a god/dess of friendship, and I remember the closest I found was Philotes: goddess of friendship, affection, and sex. In eighth grade I took the last one with a kind of "that's close enough I guess" attitude, but at 30 I think it's perfect actually. Lack of attraction has nothing to do with what feels good. There's nothing out of place about it to me these days.

I hadn't thought about that in years, no idea why it came to mind except I was also thinking of eighth grade me when I talked about my friends fucking off one by one to be with their partners. She wrote down the spelling, thanked me warmly for the talk, and returned to her typewriter.

I spent the next half an hour with a delightful Dyke who gave me a business card, on which her title was printed - no joke - "Lesbian Mayor of (neighborhood)." She was my parents' age and when she remarked with the utmost sincerity and approval that "you're kind of a weird big bang theory" I choked down the feeling of being directly assaulted and said hey, my dad watches that.

At some point Lisa finished her work on her typewriter. When I arrived it was fully light out, but by then it was getting dark. She stood in front of the bench where I was, fumbled on the phone light, and read to me what she had typed. And damn if the first two sentences didn't take me right the fuck out immediately. "I thought in middle school that if I was ever going to write a poem it would be an ode to Philotes," I had told her, a memory that comes with the affectionate sort of cringe reserved for your twelve year old self, earnest as they still were. And the same feeling came over me as she read the poem out to me - but it wasn't cringe I felt. It was the feeling that I had started something in 2005 that was only taking real shape nearly 20 years later.

I don't know if it's a "good" poem. That was never my strength. But it was written for me and for me, and the opening line "build me an effigy that transcends flesh" knocked the breath out of me immediately. I have the paper here beside me on the couch, and it feels like the kind of thing that goes in a treasure box, or maybe a frame.

I also had to remind her to give me her zelle so I could pay her - clearly also affected, she had turned to start on the next poem (a raunchy sex limerick as requested by a guy in a backward ball cap and boat shoes) and had forgotten entirely.

It's gonna overdraw my account when an auto payment hits next Wednesday, but honestly... Worth it. I just wish the fee would've gone to her instead of the bank.

Let people surprise you.