I wrote a letter to a friend. I’d just woken up from a coma. Literally. And I took this notebook I’d used when the tubes were down my throat to flash things in front of nurses like icechipsplease. icantbreathe. gottapeegottapeegottapee (kidding, catheter. lolz) because I wanted my hand to reclaim power. I wanted to scrawl these words in glorious, mercurial fashion in ways that fingertips to computer sensors could never neurotransmit. When the deep sleep kicked me out, I thought of three people: my best friend in the USA, a glorious political activist in Guangzhou, China who is one of the few people I’d let hold my heart, and my only real male friend. Ever. I was letting go.

I owed him words. He’d written me a string of ‘I feels’ in that manner that only we could talk to each other like. Like 5 months ago. What can I say? I’m a stilted asshole. I’ve dated my fair share of men. Were they my friends? No. I lived with one for two years. Was he my friend? No. They loved me, but they couldn’t control me. Not like my friends. I don’t get male energy. Males fucking hate me, unless they want to fuck me. Women have always been my saviour. I was that weird ass child that didn’t have friends until his late teenager years. Women socialized me. They saw somewhere beneath the pain, I was sensitive. And I thrived. Women talk, they talk and they don’t stop talking. Life is a collaborative vision. An exploration of you.me.fuckingeverything.andyourheart. It’s an outpour, an outcry of all that’s in your head. Men find me squirrely. Intense. Toofuckingmuch. Standoffish because I don’t know whattofuckingsay. Foreign species, I swear.

But not with him. Straight dude in my summer research program on Empire, admiring not each other’s crotches but the same Neil Brenner book on critical urban governance sitting in our backpacks. We ate pupusas at my favorite El Salvadorean restaurant; and.the.words.flowed. They flowed. They flowed. And they continued to flow into this monumental friendship. I felt collaborative with him in ways that I’d never felt before. What we said mattered, it made the world a place of possibility. It mattered. It mattered. It fucking, mattered.

Then a confluence of fuckery hit us. I shut down. I hid away. I lost that connection. Until he opened the door again. I wrote him back once 5 months ago. It was insufficient. I’m glad that Laotian shitty intertubes lost it in their land of dropped wifi connections. It never reached him. But either had I in that letter. I still had work to do.

Waking up from that coma, I know I needed to let go. And it just spewed out on that notebook. Too intense. Honest. I don’t want to feel like this anymore. I don’t want to live like this anymore. I have these scars now. Let me rip them from me. I’ll reconstruct the positive parts of me in our next set of letters to shoot across oceans. I just wanted to bleed my brain of being alone. Of not being intimate in the words to the people I love. I loved him. I love him in that way that people who fucking matter, who change you kick around forever in your heart. Let go. Let go. Let fucking go.

FOLLOW FMLYBAND ON SOUNDCLOUD// FACEBOOK. ALSO CHECK OUT OUR FEATURE OF THEM IN THIS MONTH’S BEST SOUNDS WRITEUP. AND CATCH A FREE DOWNLOAD AT THEIR SOUNDCLOUD.

42

Add to the story...