The narrative I had to avoid at all costs, lest I find myself unable to continue: you tried to show her all sides of yourself, to evade the paternal stance of unfeeling decider/owner, to let her evolve/act autonomously outside of you; only she, as a non-speaking female unable to find her voice on her own, turned to the first daddy available: Z, seven years her senior, even more committed to this role since she lacked the genitalia/T-levels to have to struggle against / mistrust paternal tendencies.

Z didn’t know what it was to respect/fear where paternal impulses could lead.

To understand what paternal impulses have done.

She was play-acting at being Daddy.

Out-daddying dudes with her metaphorical strap on.

How convenient.

How fun!

In any case, she’d out-daddied me.

When, months after telling me Z had texted her saying I (whom she’d never met, even seen) “was probably just using you for sex”—told me this jokingly, like haha hear how silly she is—ex bae then repeated the same thing, that my affection seemed contingent on when we’d last fucked, and then pleaded ignorance when I brought up this fact, that “that’s what Z told you months ago, remember?,” this felt like evidence of the above.

When, late in the year ex bae and I lived together in Oakland, spring before she moved out to Philly for grad school and I didn’t move with her, instead moved into my van and went to Humboldt to do weed stuff, abandoning her on her cross-country quest with our kitty Winnie all shook in her cage in ex bae’s stuffed-to-the-brim four-door, and we visited lil sis, who lived across the bridge in SF with C, her ten-years-her-senior partner, and ex bae kept insisting that the way C spoke to lil sis, told her to do this and that, exercised power over her by providing financially “woulda been sus / controlling / lowkey abusive were she a dude, if she didn’t have the immunity of being a woman,” to which I kept disagreeing, saying I don’t know, lil sis seems happy…

But no.

Fuck that.

It wasn’t that simple.

Nothing was.

2

OUTDOOR DUDE

August 2018: Week One

Big cuz E hit me with the gig deets.

Four days to a week at a farm just outside of Bennington, way up in Vermont.

Probably shouldn’t have signed on, how fucked I felt.

How things didn’t look like they were getting any better.

Cysts popping up on palms and soles, didn’t know why.

Cuts on forearms aligned with skin lines.

Looking like a damn parched-ass desert.

With grooves that never healed.

So like hella infected-ass rivers running through em.

Woulda seen someone, but I had negative money and no health insurance.

Owed roomie bro hella bands, plus had been smoking all his weed since I felt I needed it, and couldn’t afford any.