i've been thinking a lot about this really lovely fic i read recently, about skz changbin and ateez wooyoung and there's this line in it that's like... hang on let me look it up... yeah. "Because the thing about Wooyoung is that while he likes sex, the sex he has isn’t casual. Wooyoung himself isn’t casual... Wooyoung could fuck someone once and never see them again and it still wouldn’t have been casual." 

yesterday c and i were at the cafe and she was like 'should i fuck my penpal' and i was like 'yeah i mean if you like her' and c was like 'it's not about whether i like her, sometimes its just nice to make good on an option' and then looked at me and said 'oh right you don't do options' which made me roll my eyes so hard they might as well have rolled down the street. i'm like wooyoung, i wanted to say, which would have made zero sense to her whatsoever in pretty much all the ways.

it's true, i am not a very casual person, which is not to say that i don't like or can't do 'casual sex' in the traditional slutty sense of the term. i do, i can. more like... i like 'casual sex' but i don't think the sex has to be casual. it's so boring to me otherwise. i'd rather it be a transient thing, with no feelings or expectations or romance or hurt and yet not casual in the sense that you meet each other fully as humans and then let each other go. i like talking. plenty of folks i know and love prefer the opposite, when sex can just be sex and bodies hit bodies and presence isn't required from them at all, which tbh makes more sense to me. that's a whole other kind of knowing. what i prefer seems just plain hard to explain and kind of confusing and contradictory. but it is what it is, i've learned that much about myself. 

seeing a sometimes-hookup i hadn't hung out with in upwards of a year a few days ago, i sucked his dick in his car late at night, off our usual cliff round the bend up in the hills. he told me its not really working for him. i'd seen that one coming. we both laughed. it felt very chill for us both to stop. what i didn't expect was how he explained it to me. 'it feels good to be liked,' he said. 'it feels really good to be liked by you. your attention is kind of special. but you only like me when we're already looking at each other.' 

'yeah duh,' is what c said, bumping my shoulder, when i told her. 'what else does he expect. he's not your fucking friend.' 

"i'll be honest and say i had to wait a few days to collect my thoughts before responding [...] because i found myself a bit spiritually freaked out. most of the snakes in this story once appeared to me in dreams and the way that these creatures somehow carried over to your psyche feels like an indicator of it being right that you came into my life when you did, and i into yours. there are things held in this text that are in some ways unspeakable, and to be able to share that with you—in whatever way— is quite special."

a few years ago a friend betrayed me deeply in a way that had a huge impact on my personal and professional life. a few birthdays before that, she'd made me, out of the remnants of an antique chandelier from the junk, a lightcatching charm, crystal pendants and a pink bow, that i pinned to my bedroom window. it doesn't often catch the sun like it should, but when it does, it scatters tiny rainbows across my ceiling. it did this morning, and i woke up to their refracted sway. love is strange, the way sometimes it's hate. i will never forgive her. i could never bear to take it down. 

 there's a fight i got in with my friend, a, a few months ago when i had covid. i told everyone not to bring me soup. 'are you sure,' everyone said. 'positive,' i said. 'ss is here and testing negative. they can get me whatever.' my best friend c went to the jewish deli and got me a big container of matzo ball soup, 8 chocolate rugelach and a pint of beet coleslaw. she left it on my stoop with a note that said 'shut up, bitch. feel better soon.' she didn't even text me to come get it. when ss brought up the package, it made me laugh so hard i coughed for a half hour. my friend a, upon seeing the photo of a giant matzo ball on my instagram, texted me, upset. 'so, you'll let c get you soup but not me?' she typed. 'i told c not to and she did it anyway,' i texted back. because it's the way it's always been with c and i, that we know when we have to push with one another. something really satisfying and validating in the unspoken mutuality of our care. it doesn't mean we don't communicate or don't miss the mark sometimes, or that it happens automatically like magic. just that we happen to want to care for each other mostly in the same ways we each prefer to be cared for so, instinct lines up with what turns out to feel apt. we still have to calibrate sometimes, but i don't know, it's an asian thing, it's a romantic friendship thing, it's a two flip sides of the same queer coin thing, a 'our other friends call us mom and dad thing'. it feels good, it makes our specialness more material. 

i know people can't read each other's minds. i've learned that. i don't expect what i don't ask for from other friends who aren't c. i have realized that there is something else, also special, more earned, about making a request out loud and then receiving it. but it's hard to ask for things when you don't know exactly what you want. there is something so beautiful or relieving about someone you trust knowing better than you. i didn't want the matzo ball soup but c knew i needed it. this is also an s/m thing. 

i talk to myself intensely about these sorts of questions at this point in my solar cycle every year. 

 kevin, come back is the title of the poem jacob read last night, celebrating the release of his new book, alongside jean's new book, two generations and forty years between them. it starts:

"the creamiest sun rises and sets over
San Francisco, the city can see out
my bedroom window, scattered w/ undies
and socks
and the pink jacket that's
good to wear on the windy edge of a lake
on Mission and 3rd
that's good to wear to meet you in front of the museum
to go get naked at a dead poet's grave."

i miss kevin too, dead now for 3 years and older than so many of his friends lost during the AIDS crisis. jacob was part of his Tagged project, which was a shy excuse to get beautiful young men to let him take photos of them semi-naked. jean and the rest of the older poets in attendance at this reading were part of another set in the 70s, straighter, more puritanically political, they're all alive in the same Berkeley enclave and talk, work together even fifty years later; still friends after years of personal and aesthetic conflict. death barely touched them. but i told jean about the nyu adjunct contract. looking at an old photo of her, we lamented together the return of denim flares but not of tight leather vests. her book a young recruit is important to me. this line "interiority coaches a wry person / everyone's out of the house, walking or whatever." the sense of being conscripted as a young person and partially ventriloquiloquized by a poetic cadre. jean has started carving spoons with a lathe in her garage.

i miss kevin's lack of cluster or lineage, the way he spared no one from the indiscriminate shine of his desire, its dangerously edged sun. something tattered about his social neediness, manifest into power. the way he held court at the bookstore, the theater, the movies, outside the CVS with a bottle of Tab. that line in brian's eulogy poem for him—it's about them visiting jack spicer's grave together and kevin says something akin to 'are we flirting/do you think i'm cute' and brian is like 'maybe or maybe you were just on my undergraduate english syllabus' and kevin loves it, of course, its like the perfect shade/compliment response to kevin's whole queeny shade/compliment deal. so perfectly the kind of not-entirely-affirmative-but-affirming queer genealogy. what is it to have elders? what is it to be an elder? this is a question i ask myself often.