draft m

in fifth grade, there was a new girl in our class named princess. she was tall and had cornrows. around halfway through the school year i finished not-eating, left the cafeteria, and walked down the hallway to go outside and play. i opened the door and princess and four other girls appeared from around the corner yelling my name, and princess shouted "will you go out with me?". i froze, and in utter confusion said "yes" before running away at top speed, up a nearby grassy slope, where i just sat down. i have no memory of ever talking to princess again.

in eighth grade i liked a girl named shauna. she had a blue streak in her hair. she told me about doctor who and sherlock, and then later told me to make a tumblr account. we never really talked that much. i joined the district marching band because she was in it (i played bari sax). there was a clarinetist named maria who had previously attended our school, but left in the 6th grade. she told me she liked me. in panic, without really thinking about what i was saying at all, i told her that i would be fine with going on dates sometimes if she wanted, but that i just didn't want to be "dating" due to the drama it would cause in our friend group. although not in so many words, we agreed to date in secret. one time we were with a friend of hers on a curb and maria wrote in a notebook that square root thing where if you divide it in half along the horizontal it says "i love you". i pretended not to understand, and maria was too embarassed to explain it, despite her friend's encouragement. at some point people at my school heard about it. my best friend at that school was named caden. he had long brown hair past his shoulders, and always without fail wore track pants, running shoes, and longsleeve shirts with hoods in solid colors (or tie-dye). one lunch shauna and some others asked me questions about maria and how it was going. i refused to acknolwedge. later, caden told me "the things people will make up, huh?" i was so ashamed, and i couldn't tell him it was actually true. towards the end of the year emmett and his new girlfriend invited maria and i on a walk on the levee up to mori point. we went to 7-11 first and decided to skirt the edge of the sharp park golf course and access the stairway from behind, where the little pond is where you can see all the frogs. this took us to a very quiet little residential street right before the frog pond, where everyone stopped walking. i turned around and maria said my name. i said yes. she walked up to me and kissed me and collapsed into my arms. "you! you did this!" i said, laughing, pointing at emmett, and realizing that the route and this outing had probably all been planned for this moment. emmett and his girlfriend laughed and tried to run away. i ran after them. maria ran after. they didn't try that hard to get away. i forced them to walk between maria and i, maria in the front and me in the back. they pointed out lots of good places to make out and continuously made like they were going to run away again. maria didn't say anything. i marched us along the levee to emmett's house where i called my mom and went straight home. i didn't respond to maria's texts after that. i remember seeing her vaguepost about me on facebook: "i just want one day with you. is that too much to ask?" eventually she texted breaking up with me.

in high school, on a long bus ride back from a basketball game our school played, i sat with a girl named yuying. in front of us was a boy named calvin. the three of us talked the whole way back. calvin and yuying already knew each other a little bit. i didn't know them, but i recognized yuying, as we happened to share 5 out of 8 classes. yuying and i became friends. we spend a lot of time together. she was a superwholockian too. on valentine's day we watched a scary movie together in the lower hallway of the school. she put her elbow up on my shoulder and leaned her head into the crook of her arm. "your shoulder is comfortable." she said, and it made me feel sort of nervous. towards the end of the year, i was working in the metal shop (it was a very rich high school) during a free period, and yuying's friend mia ran up to me and told me that yuying was really freaking out and i needed to come with her right then to be with her. i remember the flushing reverberation that passed through me then. raw fear. what happened, is she ok? i asked, and mia said no, she's not ok, something happened with calvin. i hesitated. and i said i couldn't go because i had to work on my lamp. it was a thin excuse and mia could see that. the judgement in her eyes when it was clear i wasn't going with her was brutal. but it was just too scary. at this point in my life i had yet to experience any particularly strong emotions about anything besides my grandma dying when i was 8, and the propsect of someone /else's/ was unfathomable. and even so, after the period ended, i went straight to the lower hallway and found her there with mia and her other friend. she saw me and collapsed into my arms, sobbing. i held her like that for a few minutes. mia was still upset with me and still looking at me like that. then we all had to go to class. i didn't learn what was actually going on until next year - that calvin had been stalking and harassing her for weeks following her rejection of his romantic confession.

after that we were best friends, inseparable. we joined a friend group of boys who did cross-country; misha, jordan, john, max (aka "faf" = "fast as fuck"), and alex. they assumed we were dating. months into knowing one another, we clarified that we were not. they were shocked. our imagined relationship became a running joke in the group, called "the train" (vs "the ship"). it was a daily topic of conversation. i remember quite clearly the specific moment i acknowledged to myself that i probably actually did have a crush on her. i was lying in bed in the dark, feeling my ribcage squeeze, and i said "fuck" out loud and covered my face with my hands. later she dated john, and it was painful. one time she asked me if i had ever had a crush on anyone. i said twice, thinking of shauna and her (although truth be told, what i had felt about shauna had been nothing at all in comparison). "the first one didn't go anywhere, and the second one I don't want to talk about." keep in mind that my engagement with romance before this was pretty much limited to the inkheart series, percy jackson book 4 (the part where they kiss), and destiel. so i wasn't clued into how textbook that is as a statement. she pursued the name relentlessly. she shared her google doc of notes on it with me once. later she broke up with john. later still, in the summer after our sophmore year, she suddenly applied ruthless pressure in order that i reveal my crush. I spoke honestly and as though confessing a mortal sin. after that we barely talked for a year or so. we both became much closer with misha. we reconnected after yuying fell out with him. she apologized. i told her i was past my feelings for her. my chest still hurt sometimes.

when i was in college the first time i met a girl named naomi. she was short and she had locs. we happened to sit across from one another at a welcome dinner for freshman. we talked a bit; i was pretty dissociated. apparently she liked me. we exchanged phone numbers and started hanging out a lot, doing homework together, listening to music together, etc. She put me onto telefone by noname, which was the first piece of music to move me to tears, and my favorite album for years. I put her onto thundercat and tyler the creator (this was 2017 just after flower boy, so his stardom wasn't quite as widespread). i always felt like i didn't know what to say to her when we talked, and whenever i would say something, i would always think it didn't really sound like me. one day she invited me to watch moonlight with her in her room, and i said yes because i wanted to see that movie. on our way walking over from the dining hall she asked me if i thought our relationship could be romantic. i said i didn't know. we put on the movie and she leaned her head on my shoulder. she started slowly, slowly, by millimeters, moving her hand to take mine. "do you want to hold my hand?" i asked. she nodded. we held hands. the movie ended. it was so beautiful. she turned on the light. she sat next to me and asked me if i wanted to kiss. i said "i've never kissed anyone before." i thought about maria and wondered if that counted. "oh, thats ok!" she said, looking touched, and came closer, and kissed me. we kissed a lot. it took me a second to learn how to do it. i didn't realize you actually need to apply slight suction in order for it to make the right sound. we went to her bed and fully clothed she grinded herself on me roughly to the point of climax. i wasn't aware at that point of what sorts of actions tend to produce pleasurable sensations for people with vaginas, and I wasn't sure what had happened. "sorry," she said. "for what?" i asked. she laughed, but the question had been genuine. we were together for about eight months.

i told her everything she wanted to hear and kissed her and touched her and let her touch me in all the ways she wanted. she was 20 and i was 17. i joked about the illegality of our relationship at one point and she reacted with genuine discomfort. at one point i thought how much she would probably like to hear me tell her i love her, but I wasn't sure whether she would consider it "too soon", so i googled how long I should wait, and set a calendar alert according to the first result. later, lying in bed, i told her she was beautiful, and she smiled and rolled her eyes exaggeratedly to the left to look away, before covering her face with her hands and laughing. she always did that when she was embarassed. she told me that she hoped it was okay for her to say that she feels like she's falling in love with me. i told her that i had googled the right time to say it and set a calendar alert. she laughed and cried. it never occurred to me in the slightest that i was doing anything wrong. i just thought that i was doing what i was supposed to. at times i even thought i wanted it. one time we were making out on my couch and i was being more forceful, pushing her back, biting her lip (which i knew she liked). she said "oh, you're into this today!", and i immediately apologized and pulled back. no, no it's ok! i like it! oh, [name]... she said, as i covered my face. i didn't understand why her saying that had made me suddenly so ashamed. it was like it all at once came rushing back to me how just /off/ it all was. and it was guilt too - that i had behaved like this and led her to believe i wanted her in that way, when in fact i felt very little about anything. i was depressed (not just about this). when i was at a particularly low point i texted jordan on snapchat a huge amount of text about things i was thinking about. jordan and i weren't close like that at that point, but he was there for me and listened. my most vivid memory is of watching the texts turn grey as david saved them, feeling apprehension, and then him saying not to worry, he was only saving them so he didn't miss any. after that i texted yuying and i said i was sorry and that i had never stopped loving her. yuying had started saying "i love you" to me at our graduation and at that point it was normal between us, but i was talking about the pain. i don't remember what she said. i stopped going to class, and eventually i was placed on mandatory academic leave, which became a medical leave after my meeting with the dean where it became clear i was depressed. soon i went back to california. i didn't tell anyone except her and my parents, and i didn't tell her until the day before i left. at dinner that night we were quiet. then she looked up and asked what was going to happen with us. i hadn't thought about it at all. i said we could still be together if she wanted. she was so relieved. i felt outside of my own body.

after that i started having a really hard time responding to her texts. it was still the case that i just couldn't think of anything to say when we talked. she visited me in pacifica twice. both times we spent a lot of time having sex. the more we did it, the more i actively disliked it. i was good at hiding it, but sometimes she could tell, and i'll spare you the details of her attempts to excite me. rest assured they failed. i realized that sleeping next to her was uncomfortable. i was too hot, and her head lay too heavily on my arm, and i would wake up in pain. i couldn't listen to music to fall asleep. i stopped holding her as we slept, which i could tell she disliked, although she didn't say so. i had no time to be by myself, which i hadn't quite fully realized at that point was necessary to me. i started to feel her presence as a weight, and this made me feel unimaginably guilty, for i was supposed to love her and find her beautiful. one time we were walking and she tried to take my hand, but we were by the ferry building and it was winter and windy and freezing cold and i didn't want to hold hands with her, so i pulled away and put my hands in my pockets. i instantly felt a physical wave of disgust at myself pass through my body, like the chills you get when you have a fever or suddenly realize something isn't right in your surroundings. around this time, i was starting to think about my gender, and soon after this i started buproprion and remeron, and i was talking regularly to [PLACEHOLDER] by now, in short i was starting to become a different person. it's all things i needed to do and that im glad i did. but that doesnt change the fact that in the process of doing them i deeply hurt this person who cared about me. after she left after her second visit i more or less stopped responding to her texts, save for sporadic responses filled with apologies for having not responded to other texts. eventually i stopped altogether, and a while after that i sent a text more or less breaking up with her, and trying to explain myself, unsuccessfully because i just had no understanding what was happening to me at that time. i didnt read her response. what i did to her is maybe my deepest sin. i think about it all the time. i imagine how she might have felt, believing i loved her as she loved me. i imagine the ways she might talk about me now, and how it would be exactly what i deserve. i imagine her reading the previous sentence and laughing at me for that i think she still thinks about me at all. i think often that i should message her on facebook, because she sent me a few message requests over the next few years after we broke up, and i imagine they were attempts to find some sort of greater closure or understanding of what happened with our relationship, and i surely owe her that much (but im not able to do this yet). i have learned no moral here. i hope i never do worse than i did to her.

i visited jordan in palo alto a lot when he was very manic, which i didn't know at the time, although if i had known mania better i wouldve been able to recognize it. once i went down and just before i arrived he had found a cricket outside and trapped it in a glass jar, and now felt he needed to create a habitat for it in the jar and feed and water it. he assured me he would only spend a few minutes on this. the entire day passed. it was time for me to go home and he offered to drive me in a zipcar. on the way to get one i cried and told him i had been looking forward to spending time with him and that my feelings were hurt. he said he was sorry and that he would make it up to me next time.

once jordan and i visited yuying in LA together, and jordan came down with strep throat the day after we arrived. we stayed in yuying's apt in the living room, and in the middle of the night jordan got up and vomited everywhere. that was the trip where I met yuying's boyfriend. yuying later told me he told her he didn't like me, and she told him "that's bullshit, yes you do". we became friends and played dota together a bunch.

in 2017 i started regularly DMing a person from a facebook group named [PLACEHOLDER], which had only happened three times before, despite hours every day spent in them and countless friends made. years passed and i became a different person and i fell in love with them. they were far away, and it was torture, and led me to again become a different person. one time i decided i wanted to tell jordan and yuying about them. i couldn't stand being alone with everything. they comiserated. they said they could only imagine what it was like. they said they hoped i would get to see them someday. i could tell they didn't really understand our relationship as i described it, but it was okay. jordan and i got high. jordan's rommate tom came back to the room. jordan demanded tom cuddle him. after a few minutes of that tom went back out and jordan fell asleep. yuying doesn't get high, but she does drink, and drink she did, and she started crying very hard. she cried for a /very/ long time, and talked about a lot of things, but mostly about me and [PLACEHOLDER] and my feelings towards her and my feelings towards [PLACEHOLDER] and also her ex. It was very hard to follow. eventually she wound down. having given her several hugs over the course, i was sitting directly beside her. she laid down and rested her head on the pillow she had been lying on. i laid down as well. she pulled her blanket up over me. we looked at each other for a while, and then i asked was she planning to sleep here (at davids place) after all? because if so i was going to move to the couch so i didnt fuck up my back. and she said oh; no, i think im going to drive back, so i can take you. are you sure??? i said. yes, she said, flatly. she drove me home. (months later she confessed that she hadn't been sober, just desperate to go home. luckily there had been essentially no cars on the road so late.) the next day i texted her to check in and get clarity on the things she had been saying. she explained it as a sudden flight of intense anxiety that she had been replaced by [PLACEHOLDER].