Not damaged

I construct elaborate fantasies around sensitive men who have not consented to being cast in my lonely love stories.

I often destroy genuine connections with the unnecessary awkwardness of my impetuous imagination.

Sometimes when I agree to meet someone at a later date I place them in my masturbatory sexual fantasies and mysteriously, when the time comes, they are evasive and don't want to meet me anymore.  Apparently my ability to repel those I am attracted to with desperate intensity is telepathic and reaches across time and space.

I work so hard to be attractive and then spectacularly undermine my own efforts by being a fucking pervert.

I want nothing more than that which I know is impossible.  I want paradox manifest as flesh and I want that flesh warm and sweetly smelling like man.

I want everything I don't really want and I'm willing to sabotage it to save myself.

I'll sabotage everything I can experience, everything that is gifted to me lovingly, because there's nothing more unattractive than the neediness of another human being.

My mother knew I was a faggot when I was a toddler, finding me fast asleep in the wendy house at kindergarten where the girls had tucked me into bed.  Due to some facile religious idea she half-heartedly tried to discourage me from having sex with men, maybe knowing she would fail.

Less half-heartedly she told me about the man she fell in love with as a teenager and married, pregnant, at 18.  He was abusive and dismissive and didn't live up to the gentle archetype of her loving father.  She would tell me, "A man should never hit a woman.  A man should never touch a woman unless she wants him to." and all the weight of my mother's strength, and all my love and respect and admiration for her fell upon that phrase.  How could the strongest person in my world beg an abusive man not to leave her?

I was told that some men hurt children, doing nasty things that traumatise them for life.  So when I was eight years old and I was coerced by an older boy into touching each other's dicks, and when I played sexual role-play games with my older brother, I was convinced I had been "molested", and for ten full years I believed I was intrinsically damaged, that this damage defined me, and that I could not tell anyone.  I became good at secrets, I became good at shame.

The decade in which I kept this secret was the decade in which I realised that I am queer, alienating me from the primary institution of our culture, while my entire life revolved around the most homophobic environment I have experienced, high school.

Now I am proud to be a faggot and I'm living in Brunswick and what've I got to do but get laid and find love and build trust, right?

Do I even know what the object of all this unquenchable yearning is, beneath the images pornography have burned into my brain, beneath the infantile relationships modelled on Californian cultural propaganda, beneath the cultural norms and social institutions that I am totally incapable of participating in, that are built under the assumption that I don't exist?

I don't want to model my relationships on sitcoms and cartoons and when it comes down to it and I'm naked with another man I really don't feel like emulating that pornography that gets me off so easily when I'm alone.

These models are vapid and homogenous, they serve no purpose in my life.  I feel like a precarious line of text writing my way further and further out onto a blank sheet of paper, nothing to guide me and no one around.

My mother committed suicide within a month of my 21st birthday and so being an adult for me is to be without idols, without illusions and without role-models.

I know what's real when I experience it, I can feel it in my body, I know the difference.

But who's here to match me in my desire, who's here to confront me with my misapprehensions, who will be present with me in the shamelessness of my shame?

Will I be present when someone decides to love me?  Will I defy that love because I know I don't deserve it, or I deserve better, or cos they just want me for my companionship and my human warmth?

I can handle your pain cos your pain empowers me to help you; nothing brings me greater happiness than to see you flourishing.

Nothing generates more heat in my body than the proximity of your body.  This is physical.  I can't help it.

I am falling out of the sky right now and I just hope I land somewhere I am safe to rest a moment, cos this world we've made can be so hostile and dangerous, so gentle and accommodating.