I keep thinking about the day after I lost my virginity.
We were sitting in perkins with a cup of hot chocolate between us. Kati was working. She couldn’t stay to talk because she was getting pulled away to serve other tables. The sun was setting. It was August. I haven’t set foot in that perkins since then. I’m pretty sure.
I’m only ever about 86% sure, and what I really want is to write a poem about that moment. About the sun setting and how I felt like smiling even though it had honestly been an unpleasant experience. I want to write a poem about all the times I thought I was older, an the clarity of surviving something dawned on me, and that feeling of a silver lining piercing through the windows of the sky. But I’ve been writing a lot of poems recently and I think what I need to do is not hold myself to that format so I can figure out what I really want to say.
I chose to move back to Berkeley even though none of my friends are currently here, the Bay Area is one of the worst places to be health wise, and I’m literally sheltering in place alone, 1400 miles from my family. And I feel like my mind keeps returning to that decision, like I’m in orbit around it. Why am I here? Why am I here? Why am I here?
I kept trying to make myself feel stupid for choosing isolation over my childhood home because that was the choice everyone else seemed to be making and I’m frustrated I always treat other people’s choices like a how-to guide because the truth is no one else knows jack shit. There aren’t right answers, or right ways to live, or universal choices that can be applied to everyone.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how I grew up. About being twelve and walking a mile from my front door just to pretend I was running away. About stealing the car when I was fifteen and only had a permit. I’ve been thinking a lot about why I am living 1400 miles from home while everyone I know would choose warmth and security in a heartbeat. And I want to say that it’s not my family. I grew up with parents who are together, and loving, and supportive, and my decision to be here has nothing to do with them.
It’s about me. I’m here, and I’m eleven, perched on the edge of the roof of our house, trying to see past the rocky mountains. I’m eighteen on the roof of a fifth floor apartment in Lyon calling my father on the phone. I’m fifteen hanging out the window of Kati’s red colby, sixteen wandering birmingham palace alone, I am watching my long hair blow out the window as we fly down county road 21 to make my curfew, watching the car windows unfog from the heat of our bodies; I didn’t cum the night I lost my virginity. But I felt alive.
I felt myself, making a choice. Like the roughness and the pain of my first tattoo, or getting my nose pierced, running for my life on baker beach in november or linking arms outside of wheeler in protest. I have never felt alive in comfort. And maybe it’s because I’m mentally ill, or a writer, maybe I crave experience because I need something to draw from but I only feel real when I’m making choices with consequences. When I’m pushing myself to be more than I am. When I’m deciding I’m going to live in complete isolation for six weeks and it’s gonna fucking suck but the things that fucking suck are what push me to grow, to learn, to challenge the way I see the world and I’m not saying you should choose to suffer, because that’s not what I’m doing. No one should choose suffering. I’m saying you should lean into discomfort, because otherwise you’ll have no fucking idea where your body ends and the world begins.