an excerpt from last winter
from the journal
I’ve arranged my journals on the windowsill at the desk in the bedroom. I’m shocked by how many were completed in Chicago compared to my whole life before that. I’m dealing with too much of a good thing, with how many days of the month that I don’t work. It’s amazing that I’ve landed in this position, but I feel a responsibility to particularly do something with my time. Still everything I do gradually adds up, like today, in the sunny afternoon, I moved the coffee table aside in the TV room and set up to play cello on the plush rug there. I played around randomly and incompletely and had a great time. I felt satisfied afterward to feel the playing in the flesh of my fingers. After that, while the sun still shone on the rug, I laid out a canvas and paints, and painted multiple layers as the day went on.
Calvin sees shapes in the painting that I don’t see. The blue in this painting, he said it stands for a bird. It feels fun and foreign to have my art as seen by another interpreted to me. Yet one fear I have about sharing my writing is that people will see something I don’t. I haven’t kept up with editing, while I feel impatient for a finished project. I want to make a ton of copies of a quarter fold zine with writing from my journals and pass them out. It feels so possible — I just need to bring myself to carry out all the steps to make it there.
Yesterday I had a good day mostly all at home. The sun was like a fireplace in the living room. I stood playing with Butch on the yellow rug, bathed in its warmth. When Andrew and Peach stopped by for Peach to get dressed and put in their contacts, I was drinking coffee and reading on the loveseat, while Demeter lay out on the piano bench and Butch reclined on a piece of cardboard, all of us soaked in sun.
After the last leaves fell off the tree out front, and the days ended so early, and the house was cozy and heated, in Demeter’s fur I smelled home in winter, and it made me so happy. It’s always dark now before I leave the library and on days off I need to get my walking done in the afternoon so I don’t run out of sunlight.
Before I caught the blue line to the Loop, I went to the Logan Square library branch to pick up a book I put on hold, “For Now” by Eileen Myles. I’m finding it as highly inspiring as I thought I would when I opened to its first page in Open Books, the feeling that I just need to go on writing forever, because this will constitute my life’s work, because when one writes in their own voice it’s a gift to others. When I got to the northwest corner of downtown, I walked to the edge of Wacker Dr and looked down on the Chicago River. It was raining and grey and I was running early to meet Sade. We met in the stationery store, and then we walked along the riverwalk from Franklin to Clark in the drizzly, dusky autumn day.
I said being downtown makes Chicago feel so small to me. I see it all around me, but I know what a small part of the city this is. Sade said they don’t get it, because for them, downtown reminds them we’re in an enormous city on a world scale when they see these buildings and all, while they don’t get that feeling in their neighborhood. I said the neighborhoods make me feel like Chicago is huge, because there are so many of them, blocks and blocks of neighborhoods, the grid you see endlessly into the distance from an airplane or the Sears tower.
I picked up Patricia Highsmith’s diaries and noticed how much I’ve been reading about New York. She wrote, “In fact, perhaps, New York could be the hero, working like a many faceted, powerful, fertile character, upon other worthy characters.” Here I am in Chicago wishing all these books I read that take place in New York could possibly take place here. Our streets and pigeons mean the world to me. I miss the pastoral feeling of the south side, walking south of Bridgeport where there are so many empty lots like fields. Not to admire the acts against humanity that created the empty lots, but to move to Chicago in 2020 and take long walks and see what there is to see, and see these empty lots like fields in the city and enjoy the view. Now I walk the boulevards.
It’s been raining all day but I don’t feel like it’s raining on me. The light is on behind the Norwegian church’s stained glass, a ruminant and a robed man. While I walked home tonight I wished I had more friends in Logan Square. I looked across the boulevard with night fallen on dark trees, the road crumbling and wet, the brick and concrete apartment buildings across the street with three floors of warmly lit windows and lives behind them.
I’ve been super motivated to type my journals for the past week. These early journals I’m typing, I don’t get the sense they’re something I can package and share. But they’re personally interesting and I still get the feeling I’m working on something big that I can’t see yet. I don’t picture myself when I type my journals from high school, I’m looking at my handwriting. In these journals, the portrait is in the words and how they look on the page, and I see myself change over the years. I find it easy to love myself in my handwriting and this inexplicable commitment of mine to write my life down.
A thought crawled in my mind wondering why I couldn’t have been a woman, wishing I had somehow traveled across the ridge between teenager and adult so I could now be 25, queer, and an adult woman. This wish feels like wanting to have it all, wanting to be sexy, wanting to be a man of lesbians like Patricia Highsmith and Eileen Myles. Somehow my gender is what it is. Can I be a woman of men? Beyond sissy, a genderless and effeminate man. But it’s not like I prefer to be misinterpreted as a gender I’m not. How I rankle when women I help in the library see my mustache and call me “they,” or one innocent boy to his grandma, “is she, is he, going to help us find a book?”
Last night was rainy and romantic. Calvin met me at the end of work to celebrate our anniversary, six years together, going on longer than I was close with any of my best friends, the shocking shape of time. A new cocktail bar opened this week called Lemon on the corner of Ashland and Grand, and that’s where we went first, dark and red with plenty of seating. Sazerac for me, 50/50 gin martini with a twist for Calvin. From there the express Ashland bus took us to the blue line and we took that to California and had gin and gingers at Cafe Mustache but they actually just tasted like gin and no ginger ale. There was a photobooth and I said if ever there was a night to use it, it’s this one, so we took some pics. Then we walked home and waited for our dinner reservation. Calvin made us a quesadilla and I rolled us a joint to smoke on our walk. We got to dinner about 10 minutes early and they seated us about 5 minutes late. In the meantime we stood on the street together in a light rain. Against the building, nearly tucked into a small alcove, we smoked a little more of the joint I rolled and we talked and kissed.
The Christmas Eve party last night was fine, fun. One guy I was talking to with Andrew and Peach, I said my boyfriend flew to his family today, otherwise he’d be here. The guy said he should come next year. I said definitely. I said that I’m the shy one while he’s more outgoing. The guy said “you’re the shy one?? Maybe you shouldn’t bring him then.” Then it was clear to me I’d talked too much to this man and I basically shut up. If I’m talking too much, it’s because I’m waiting for you to start talking.
One woman I talked to for a while in the kitchen. She told me I have a really good head on my shoulders. She’s worked a ton of different jobs and I asked a few questions to crack her open, but she mostly just left me to talk about myself and my 25 year old ness too much. Later in the backyard I said to Peach and Andrew, mostly to Peach, that I think I need to process something about men, how I feel like something else in a group of men. Peach said that makes sense, a trans man is something else. I mentioned I’m excited for pride month to do my “t boy swag” book display and speculated some of my coworkers will then learn I’m trans. The way Andrew spluttered and stuttered, just to say “yeah,” I figure he didn’t understand my gender until like the third or fourth opportunity presented to him. The closest I’ve come to saying I’m trans at work was mentioning that I chose my own name.
The pigeons over California Avenue this morning were so lively and vigorous, I could hardly keep my eyes on the road along my bike commute. Workdays make me impatient, dying to get home and type my journal. The other aspects of this project will take so much time and concentration and thought, it feels like it’s just in another league, but if anything, that will be the more meaningful work, and I’m eager to get there. ARE WE THERE YET?!
Writing can feel so simple if I consider if just to be writing in my journals and typing them up. It feels so much more complicated when I wonder if I want something else, like readers or a finished work, or wonder what form for finished work to take. I just have to take my writing seriously — time to write, time to type, time to edit — over and over again. I love to do it, but I feel lazy about it. I want the uninteresting writing to be enough and I want the process of execution to come so much more quickly. I want to get more comfortable existing in my present unknowing, waiting to grow up.
I was walking in Humboldt Park, approaching a corner where pigeons milled till they crossed the street to the other corner, flying at the height of car headlights in breaks in traffic. As I got to the corner, they all flew back, descending upon me from above, flapping and showing me their underside with their legs tucked up. I stood and waited for them all to land around me. From the ground they looked up at me expectantly. I watched them, they watched me. I accepted to be surrounded by them for a few minutes.
I had walked through Humboldt Park listening to music, remembering walking there with Sade last summer or the summer before, and I thought how winter always comes back to Chicago and I’m always here. Frozen Chicago lagoons in winter and prairie planted parks in summer. So here I am now on Humboldt Blvd walking my way home from the park. Lua by Bright Eyes came on shuffle and tears from high school instantly sprang to my eyes and I stopped to write.
Really loved this piece! I really enjoy the juxtaposition of discovering new neighborhoods as you discover and examine pieces of your own identity.
Really well done 👏🫡