tender-horror

[tender-horror]

september 20, twenty twenty four

amid all the paranoia-fear-anxiety-wretchedness of the reality i live in, i seek the comfort and safety of your arms once again

there are so many songs. (just like) starting over.

i still have the same weaknesses as ever - i'm always scared of asking too much. and after a week of being a guest in your home, settling in to your graciousness, revelling in the preciousness of coming home to you at the end of the day, i'm scared i still need to ask more of you. scared of showing weakness, over and over.

my own apartment feels wrong, for the same reasons i fled it. and it makes my brain feel wrong too, obsessive and out of control-helpless. i feel dismissed by those who have the power to change it - i get scared that they're right to dismiss me and my paranoia, all my worry. i feel contaminated all over, i feel unworthy of touch and feel.

all i want is the comfort back. all i want is the idea of safety i once held in my hands.

you make my birthday so special amid all of the turmoil, all of my nerves, all of my crying. i cried when i realized i needed to accept you as my boyfriend for a second time, because i felt, for the first time, that i was the one doing the betraying. and i cry, at your kitchen table, the day after my birthday, reading what you burned into the wood on the back of the shelves you made for me. i cry while trying to eat the perfect breakfast sandwich you made for me - you tell me to eat it before it gets cold, i cry as i tell you i have such big feelings, big feelings for you. i cry now, because i love you and i haven't said it, not since we were first breaking up, and i realized i felt it, and i told you without expectation, just knowing i wanted you to know that i did. you treat me with such preciousness - it's been a week of fear and preciousness - and avoidance - and confrontation - and waking up from nightmares just to eventually fall back asleep in your arms.

sometimes i think im too sad for everything. sometimes i think i'm too sad to be good for you. sometimes i think i do everything wrong.

i'm so grateful - for this second chance at us, for the care you give to me. and the faith you have in me, that i get scared i don't deserve. and the sweet words you write to me, in texts, in emails, in handwritten notes, and say to me, to my face with warmth in your eyes, whispered in my ear as we lay together in the dark, over the phone when you call me wanting to hear my voice.

i just want to be. this could be a longer sentence, but i think all that needs to be said is that i want to be.

[tender-horror]

themes of summer 2024

long candlelit baths

friendship

reconciling with painting

reconciling with the self

reconciling with perceptions of love

making money

spending money

early 2000s rom coms

melodrama by lorde

ideas of perfection

ideas of perpetual solitude

chronic yeast infections

laying in the grass

limiting my world to the five block radius around my aparment

nostalgia for 2018-2019

long-form written communication

listening to records while laying on the floor

full bush

discovering new forms of life in existing forms of life

forgiveness

[tender-horror]

excerpts from emails from a half-estranged lover

[tender-horror]

august 7, twenty twenty four

things you, in prague, say on the phone to me, in montreal:

i'm missing you

do you not want to be my girlfriend anymore

i'm sorry, i feel like it's my fault we're in this situation

i want you to tell me all the little things

i like talking to you

i'm going to rent a car and camp by the sea

yeah, i think we did sweep a few things under the rug

i felt really close to you, the last few times we saw each other

it feels good to laugh with you again

last time we talked on the phone i was sad, and lonely

writing you emails is like sending you love letters

it's nice to hear you say you love yourself

i get back in two weeks, maybe i can come meet you wherever you are

i miss real hugs, close hugs, i want one with you, i miss you

[tender-horror]

a poem about the songs played at chey and drew's wedding - the old tudor mansion and the wedding guests moshing among the string lights. this must be the place by talking heads. halah by mazzy star. the father-daughter dance to wild world by cat stevens. the punk band taking the stage at 10, all the slam-dancing in the english countryside. the horses across the road at sunset. the rose garden, the graveyard. the old painted portraits in the room with the vaulted ceiling and chandelier where the ceremony takes place, and thias crying like a baby next to me as soon as chey starts walking down the aisle.

a poem about all of us twirling, smoking, drinking, fall in love again and again and again and again.

[tender-horror]

july 10, twenty twenty four

it's been pouring rain all day and i'm sick to my stomach with nerves, and i'm shaking on the couch in anticipation when you text me that you're outside. i get into the passenger seat of your truck and look you in the eyes for a second before i have to look away. i tell you to park somewhere else, i can't do this right out front of my apartment, so you drive, and we park, and you say the glow of the streetlamps through the rain on the windshield makes the light ripple on my face.

we have the hard conversation you tried to have with me on friday morning, when i couldn't stomach it, when you pulled the rug out from under me. i think we understand each other better this time. you're crying when you say you want to kiss me. i'm crying when you tell me you think i'm stronger than i think i am. and we feel so close to each other. and i share some of my anxieties, the big ones, and the insecurities too, and when i say i didn't know how to tell you any of this earlier because i didn't want to ruin things, i didn't want to change the way you see me, you say no, it wouldn't have changed any of that, you start crying again as you say you think i'm amazing, i cry again too. i recall when we started seeing each other and you asked what i liked about you, i tell it to you again, that i like how you navigate the world, and you say that has always meant a lot to you, that it's a beautiful thing that i put into words, that you think about it. it's still true.

the timing is really tough - you're leaving for your trip to europe next week and you'll be gone for a month. and there's so much to figure out. i guess we're trying - i think that's what we landed on. i guess we're not together but we're not broken up either, it's a strange thing, like being in limbo but not the anguishing gut wrenching limbo we've been in the past four days.

you start your truck and it makes funny-scary sounds. we drive to the park by the overpass. we hold each other. you say you want to come over and sleep in my bed with me and i want it so bad, it's so hard to say no, i can't, i can't. we understand each other a bit better now, and i feel so close to you, you feel so close to me.

it's hard, because there are still no answers. there's no miracle solution. but it feels like there's this wanting, you want, i want, and we can't give it up yet, the wanting. there's a lot to figure out, about ourselves.

you walk me back to my door, where we hug the kind of hug where i wish we didn't have skin and our essences could just wrap around each other. you hold my face in your hands, pinch the apples of my cheek, say i look so cute. we say we will see each other again before you leave, and i hope that's true. you want to come up and tuck me in and it's near impossible for me to say no - i do anyways, because you don't push. and it's probably the right decision. and i have to sleep, because i have work early in the morning, but i want to write it all down so i don't forget, and my heart is full but my head is spinning. there's still a lot of uncertainty, but at least i know the situation better now, at least we see each other better, at least i'm not crying so hard i throw up.

we kiss, and it doesn't feel like the end yet.

[tender-horror]

june 16, twenty twenty four

the fatherless girl inside me rears her head at the worst of times. it's so funny sometimes (when julien meets my mom and says he's good with moms but dads don't like him and i laugh and say that won't be a problem) and not funny at all most of the time (but i still laugh as if it is.)

like, okay, we went to the casino, but he and his high school boy friends lost money while me and his more recent female friend won money, and it was a shining night for me but not at all for him, and we lay in my bed together until i get overwhelmed by the feeling that i'm an intruder in my own home.

the feeling that i'm an intruder in my own home. that's so Something. Something i should be over - or thought i'd be over by now - but it creeps up on me like a leech suckling my joy - because i'm still the same - despite it all - i'm still the same - smoking on a balcony at the casino wearing a nice dress i bought years and years ago - worrying about my breathing being too loud when we lay in my bed - worrying that i'm too much - and a burden - and of course, my therapist was right, and how i hate to say it but it all comes back to my childhood

i've grown up learning how to make myself small - and to put others first - my care for others first - i spent so long minimizing myself and i've realized this but yet i seem incapable of taking of space without shame -

it's such an embarrassment - needing someone like i need you - or - letting such a peculiarly shiny night end this way - with you in my bed and me on my couch writing this - with me wincing with every creak of the floorboards as i creep into my own bed to join you in your slumber - with me unable to sleep and unable to tell if you sleep next to me - all the cars can be heard from my open window - i hesitate to turn the fan on and i end up leaving it off - i sit up in bed - i think you're asleep because i whisper to you and get no response - i put my head in my hands - i get up and leave the bedroom - nest - holy space - sanctuary - that doesn't feel like a nest or holy space of sanctuary right now - because i feel cracked open - not like the night you slept over before we were dating and i left the bed to cry hysterically on the couch where you rubbed my back and taught me how to breathe - but cracked open in a different way, not good, not bad, but so awake.

everything was so beautiful two hours ago. everything is so romantic. i hang my head out of the open window like a dog, smoking a cigarette. it's so highschool, me in the backseat of a sedan with two boys in the front seats that i barely know.

there's always too much to say but nothing at all because i don't want to honour all the fear - which will be my demise. if there's no trust where does a heart go. if i can't wake you to share the insecurities than why are we together - but i can't wake you, not because you don't want to be woken but because i'm so afraid - of bothering you - of being too much - of robbing you, of sleep, of what else you could be doing - other than dating me - this fundamentally fractured being - and i need security i've said this before - and i think i have it but i'm too scared to ask for reassurance

i can't help but revert to making myself smaller to fit you into it all

i can't help but indulge myself in shame

i can't help but strangle all my wants and needs into a husk that lays in wait around my heart - where i don't see it - or feel it - until it suffocates me and i wake up at 3:50am unable to process it all

i want it all and i want so much and i'm not sure i'll ever be able to ask for it, you breathing in my ear, and all the sweetness and all the holiness, and the arms around me, and the beautiful spinning, and us lit up by all the glowing lights, and a kiss on the cheek on the mouth on my back so divine, us in the ether and us in the nether, and us in it all, i want to feel it all, i want it all for us but maybe i'm not the one who gets all that

[tender-horror]

yesterday, may 25, twenty twenty four

we meet outside the brutalist university building at the school you graduated from and i still attend, you put your hand on my knee and say there's nothing to be worried about, and we walk up the street so i can meet your mom. we all see the georgia o'keefe and henry moore show at the musée. she kisses my cheeks goodbye like the francophone she is. i can't tell if she hated me.

we smoke and climb the steps partway up the mountain, we stop at a gallery, one that showed at the art fair in new york, i see an old classmate wandering the show rooms and she knows you too, she invites us both to a rooftop party at her painting studio in the garment district.

we climb the mountain to the top but we don't go to the cemetery, where my grandparents are buried. we see the racoons playing in the daylight like an absurdist performance piece. we climb back down the mountain through the dirt paths and trees and bugs and rocks and roots and you grab me by my waist and we kiss as the forest sings.

we walk up parc avenue and stop at a yard sale in front of the laundromat, where another old classmate is selling clothes, you buy me a t-shirt with the virgin mary printed on the front. we go to the busy grocery store and buy arugula, cucumber, and apple cider, walk to my place, wandering hands as we lay in my bed in the late afternoon - early evening. i cook you dinner, i wear you on my face.

you say, i should meet your niece. i say, when a child laughs its like a thousand doves being born. you smile and look away and your eyes start welling up with tears and i laugh a bit and say, are you crying, and you get up and wash the dishes and laugh and say, yes because you're so right, it is like a thousand doves.

we walk again, we stumble upon a band playing a gig in the alley way, people dancing, children smiling, it starts to drizzle. we find another yard sale, you buy me a dress and a shirt. we run into someone else you know, a girl who you later tell me has messaged you recently, trying to fuck you, and i laugh, and you scrape bits of yourself off my face in the fading sunlight.

i go home and try my new clothes on, send you photos, you say gorgeous, you say darling, you say dear. you go to the studio and then to the parc to hang out with our mutual friends, and i regret staying home, but i wake up at 6am today to go to work, walking on the empty sunday morning streets before the city wakes up in earnest.

and when i get paid i'll cook you a steak dinner, i'll teach myself how to cook a steak dinner and i'll make one for you.

[tender-horror]

in early may, 2024, we took a trip to new york city

watching the exit signs go by on the interstate. i point out paradox lake to you as you drive your truck. we name your painting after it, tangentially, and now the painting is known as the bog of paradox. i help you name your other painting after a chamber of the human heart.

i remember laughing as my friend said that going to new york city with a (new) lover is romantic -- but how could they not be right about that? about halfway through the trip i realize just how right they were, and that it is so romantic. and i feel so close to you.

we shake so many hands. we hang your paintings on the walls of the gallery booth at the art fair, the gallerist lets us stay at her apartment in ridgewood with her old cat. we buy a carton of marlboro red 100s and share each and every one, drag by drag, fingers kissing as we pass cigarettes back and forth.

gallery openings, heart openings, eyes opening. you buy me a mini disco ball in chinatown and make me the happiest boy in the world. i meet more of your friends, we go to a strange comedy show in a strange gallery space, we sit on the floor together, we get espresso martinis, we go sing karaoke at a bar in the east village with black and white checkered floors and colourful string lights across the ceilings and zebra print couches and a photo-booth we forget to take pictures in before we leave, get in a car home with your friends and drive over the williamsburg bridge at 2:30am on a thursday night, a wednesday morning.

we play wrestle in central park on saturday after a morning at MOMA. you carry me on your back, i carry you on mine, i'm laying on my back laughing in the grass, then you ask if i'm in love with you, because you're falling in love with me. i burst into tears, i tell you i feel so close to you i feel so close to you all week i've been feeling so close to you.

love is a big word and a big feeling. and i know love, i have love, but would i recognize it if it's romantic, and mutual? i don't know that kind of love, i feel like a newborn baby, everything is new and wondrous, everything is new and scary, i lack the language to articulate myself. all this time i've been obsessed with words and i still don't know which ones to say, which ones would ring most honest and true. but, you know me.

on the drive home, six nights later, we pass a sign for augur lake.

[tender-horror]

when a friend plans their birthday to be at your place of employment so they still get to see you even when you have to work. when you train a new employee who tells you about her time train-hopping and living on a bus with a glass blowing studio built into it with her boyfriend who has a felony charge. when your favourite coworker has her last shift next week and you'll miss working with her so much but you talk about the future intersections of your lives together, prophesying the unknown time to come. when the boy you've been seeing for a month asks you to be his girlfriend last night, in the middle of watching the grand budapest hotel and you don't have an answer because you've never been asked that, really, not since high school, if ever. when you don't know what to do as a girlfriend, when you don't know what to do with a boyfriend. when your friend whose birthday it is kisses you on the lips at the bar as she leaves, and she tells you to let her know when you're ready, and your other friend hugs you soul-crushingly tight when he tells you he's leaving the country, maybe forever, at the end of july, and that all his final ceramic work of his bachelors degree blew up in the kiln. and he tells you you're so special and he's so happy to know you and in your head it's wild that your relationship has ended up the way it has, and you try not to let it go to your head. when the guy you've been seeing arrives at the bar after they've left, and it's just you and aforementioned favourite coworker and other coworkers and strangers, and you keep talking about the trip you're going to take together to new york in a few weeks, if your time-off request is approved, and he keeps calling it "our trip to new york". and you text your favourite coworker after she leaves to see what she thinks of him and she says he seems cool, he seems very sweet and somehow her approval means the world even if it doesn't really mean much. and you walk home with him, and he's so tired, and he falls asleep in your bed as you get up to walk to the living room in your apartment that you've lived in for almost a year and you're so awake so you open your laptop and start writing, and you hope he's asleep and not listening to the clicking and clacking of the keyboard as he lays among the pink and blue bedding.

[tender-horror]

april 9, twenty twenty four

the transient, mutable, liminal self that blossoms in the borderlessness. a sunset in the middle of the afternoon with friends in the parc, the divine ring of the sun and moon meeting in the vast universe in which we all exist, here, and now, on this one planet we share, so lucky so lucky so lucky. fateful totality.

my transient, mutable, liminal self, so easily moved and transformed, touched by the sun in a place deep within me that may have never been touched by anything, ever. a stirring happening beneath the encasement of my skin. spurred into cosmic movement, i start to feel god in everything as if god was something i ever believed in (maybe it is something i've always believed in, and names are just names, and words are just words.)

the romance of the sun and the romance of the moon. i feel romantic about it all. i do so much i do so little i am so big i am so small i am so happy to be here on this plane of existence where we serendipitously know each other and are known by each other. i fulfill all the prophecies i once painted. i paint new prophecies in the soapy bath water, in the hair on the shower wall, in the wax dripping from the lit candle, in the skin i run my fingers over and kiss on the shoulder on lazy weekend mornings, in the paint, with the paint.

my transient, mutable, liminal self in the transient, mutable, liminal world that i love to hate and hate to love and love to love and hate to hate. there are so many things i have. there are so many things that i want and i teach myself not to be afraid of wanting them. the sun teaches me about purity. the sun teaches me about all of our pure hearts and i become fully ensouled on a monday.

[tender-horror]

march 24, twenty twenty four

sweet berry on the vine - you find the glow when you go looking for it. having a home that you love being in, and doing work that you like and are liked for, having someone to wake up next to a few times a week, seeing green flower buds popping up from beneath the snow, it can all be enough on a sunday afternoon. like kissing in a truck, like nothing else. like a city full of reminders but the reminders don't consume you - on a sunday it feels like the memorial ephemera can't hurt you anymore.

[tender-horror]

march 10, twenty twenty four

when i wanted romance i don't think i meant all at once everywhere all of the time because i'm timid and scared and easily overwhelmed. but it is romance all at once everywhere all of the time and it's like a hot bath in a nice tub that i'm having trouble getting out of even as my skin shrivels up and the water turns cold.

something about french toast with blueberry compote for breakfast at noon. something about telling people please don't kiss me on my forehead so they kiss me on the shoulder, on the back, on the spine instead. something about rushing to the store to buy some flowers before catching the bus, something about a bouquet as an accessory. something about playing dress up at a friend's apartment in the beautiful building downtown, something about things feeling a bit like high school in the ways i miss, the nervous excitement of it all.

something about playing with clay as we sit on the floor at the birthday party. something about my best friend telling me about someone else who's been asking about me. something about taking the night bus home in good company. something about free shot of jagermeister at the bar right as the beautiful bartender is about to lock the doors.

and when i get home i brush my teeth and get two texts at 3am from two different french men with buzzcuts and moustaches. and i love to kiss. i love when people love my lips, and the smell of my hair lingering in their bed. and, oh, he's on acid i don't think he should drive home why don't you come stay at mine for the night? in the morning you wake up and re-park your truck further down the street, we fall back asleep. you leave, i get up, i put on my overalls, i put on my orange construction coat, i walk through the pouring rain to get to work. when i get home late on a saturday night i take everything off but cover myself in my grandma's fur coat, i look into my own eyes in the mirror and understand it all.

then sunday, misty and cold and i'll stay inside after a week out in the world making a mess of all things.

[tender-horror]

shelly makes me soup and grilled cheese for dinner and i bring a bottle of red wine the one with the rooster on the label and god forbid it remind me of the times i was invited over for grilled cheese by a Kerouac in 2018 and he would make two grilled cheese sandwiches and eat them both by himself and not give me any at all.

[tender-horror]

i said i wanted romance but hold on i didn't say that; i was actually content, or barely, and my tenuous grip on everything felt good for once and how dare the full moon bring all this amorphous romance-sex-romance-companionship into my life when i'm in the midst of grappling with the very essence of my own being-mind-soul-heart and the pathways i carve in my wake as i navigate the wretched-beautiful-abject-sublime-world-universe and why are the patterns patterning but i know the answer when i don't even want to know the answer because the answer is always an answer i don't like because of how true-real it is and in class i learned a term for this feeling it's called disavowal, theoretically, in regard to the Anthropocene but in regard to me it feels worse if that's even possible.

it's a feast when i'm not hungry i'm always saying it's feast or famine and when it's feast i become trouble i become the troublemaker that i was once troubled by

[tender-horror]

february 29, twenty twenty four

leap day, recount, reminisce, remember, restart re-engage re- re- re-

a flash freeze, sitting in the warm breeze in the morning and shivering in the cold wind at night. someone's power is out and someone's power is on. i feel love in the school studio courtyard, rose hash from vancouver, shared among friends who are all wearing plaid. a new pack of smokes that ends up nearly empty at the end of the night.

the 8pm bus home, wishing i carried a toothbrush around. put on a warmer scarf and walk 20 minutes in the dark, wind so wild that when i stand at the intersection waiting to cross it almost blows me into the street. i hold on to the lamp post. i feel like a cartoon of me, an unreal me.

the big loft studio building on the side street. i duck into the entry way as it starts snowing and he comes out to greet me, i stand two steps below him and he lights my cigarette for me. he left his key inside, we walk through the dimly lit alley way to get to the back entrance. he pushes me up against the wall and kisses me.

when we go inside he shows me his paintings, his airbrush, his studio-mates work on the other walls. he asks me to respond to his work and i tell him i knew he invited me here just to have his ego stroked. i'll still stroke it. i say words like spacial, atmospheric, an archeology of shape and colour, a sensation of carving out. i ask if when he closes his eyes he can imagine the image in front of him.

a dirty couch and a newly sore throat. long dark eyelashes i want to take off of him and put on me instead. i think deep brown eyes are like mirrors, like portals.

men are always telling me these slightly awful things. i guess it's done in the same way i tell people these slightly awful things about myself. a warning, a fog horn. we still devour. we still look into each others faces and try to say sincere things, nice things with meaning. there's this trustlessness i keep trying to shed, at what cost, at what cost, i have 2 dollars and twenty five cents in my pocket.

as always it feels like i'm letting the wrong things sweep me away but i still like to lose myself to the creature comfort and the animal desire. as always i joke about collecting teeth minds and cum. he gives me a painting and spends five minutes writing a note on the back of the wood. at 2am he drives me home in his truck, we crack open the windows and smoke and shake as the frigid air comes in.

[tender-horror]

sometimes, as a painter, you are faced with the truth that the thing is better unpainted. that you have nothing to add by painting it. that the truth of the object is more moving than if you made a painting of the object. that maybe the painting should stay a photo instead. that maybe the painting should be words. that maybe the painting should be sound. that maybe the painting should be the idea of the painting and not the painting itself. that the desire to paint the painting is more than enough, more poignant than the act of making it, or seeing it. and as much as we talk about how anything can be a painting, or a drawing, or a line or a form, it doesn't have to be. sometimes it shouldn't be at all.