A letter from Jul 20, 2025

07/20/2025 hello, hello, hello, you prehensile-tailed porcupine, you wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing, you lover you— my god, the letter i last wrote dripped with indulgence. too many semicolons, too much love of language & not enough attention to form. perhaps at least this letter will all end up readable by the end. what is there to say when i think of the past twelve months? it feels, mostly, like i’ve lost myself. i don’t try to convince myself that i have gotten better. what’s one haircut to another? if only it were so easy to change myself completely, to shed a lifetime of treating myself & my body like repulsive trash. the testosterone helps; it feels good. & yet it is still terrifying for me to buy a new pair of jeans. how to square that? how to consider my terror at trying to become more than a waste of time? i had spent so much effort in the formative years of my life trying not to see myself (which i’m sure is obvious in past letters); now that i am seen & inexplicably desired despite it, i feel i must in some measure measure up. this is the terror: that it’ll turn out to be impossible in the end, that my old habits will turn out to be too powerful to resist. or, more likely, that i’ll be too weak to fight against them. the stakes & thus drive come from amy, obviously. i want to be a real person for him; how could he be with someone scared of their own shadow, flimsy & uncertain & embarrassing? i worry about embarrassing him often. i don’t think before i speak, i don’t think before i put three clashing patterns on, i don’t think about competing necklines & my proprioception is awful. for all the self-awareness that these letters are supposed to represent, i cannot conceptualize what it must be like to have to wrangle me down. i sense it from most of my friends, muted shame or irritation, a wish that i could just change. i don’t know where to put it. the steady, poignant optimism with which i wrote last year seems to be merely beginning to sprout again after a long drought. it never fully went away, of course—if it did, i think i would go away with it—but it has been a grueling, difficult sophomore year. it grinded me down & i hardly even noticed the little flints of self flicker away until a whole life eroded from me. i lived in a suffocating room; i laid, anguished, for my twentieth birthday; i slept little except when i slept excessively & i clung onto amy pathetically like a lifeline. i hated it & i got used to treating myself like an animal with zoochosis, pacing around in an area too small. when i went to williamstown again, when i felt amy against me for a month-&-some-days straight, it felt like i could unfurl again. i think i’ll be in this process of unfurling for much longer. it was difficult at times. i was difficult, uneasy, afraid & foolish. somehow he loves me, still sends me letters with perfume & lipstick stains. the year has taken much from me. my habits, my hard-earned habits—all crumbled. i wanted to be better to myself; this is difficult again. i wanted discipline to journal; i’m a month behind. i wanted to be thoughtful, kind; i turned sour, jealous. things do not come easy to me anymore. i cry often. many days i feel a lump in my throat because of some large emotion i can’t throw up. for the first time in a long time, i wanted to **** myself. no concrete plan for it but the mere feeling made me afraid again. how much longer that i should have to bat away its encroachment when i have a bad day, when i am tired or when it strikes 11pm? this feels the largest step back; i thought i had finished with this, that suicidality was only a bad dream, something harmless now, defanged. it aches again from dormancy. it’s funny how i expected an upwards trajectory from last year. i say that i expected to find myself small in the 2024 letter; i feel, if anything, it was grander than i deserved. it reads almost like affirmations. i put my head down & try to get myself to believe it; it’s much harder, like everything is. i regret, on a smaller level, that i have shuffled visual art by the wayside; i have not seriously drawn anything in months. there has been no time, no desire for images. i’ve lost my eye for form & color has escaped me entirely. it will cost much to build it back up. i don’t know if i ever will, if i’ll first have to move out with an easel before i ever draw again. but the unfurling—i have other projects i want to undertake, ideas to externalize. i’m working on an essay on translation, which is slow-going, laborious with research. a short story (yuri, of course) comes easier, some frivolous undertaking that came from notes of a crocodile & a night where i missed amy so much it felt like blows rained down on my skin when i thought of his touch. it will keep me going for a while longer. & there are my finished essays, the aesthetics & politics paper that read like a love letter, the old stories & poems i finished; these too are noteworthy. & i have work—a first coop at the archives. everyone is kind to me & i am dutiful in my daily work, pleased to be useful to the public, helpful in some small way. i crave being competent. i do not think i will reach that by my six months but my god, i want it so badly; i want to be useful, to pull my own weight, to be more than the cost. it is still difficult to see myself as worth the trouble. that has not gotten easier this year. i am afraid of feeling pleasure, of wanting & having. i want tenderness & i want to earn it. this is not how things work; i know this & i must change. it’s just that i don’t feel i have quite the glint in my eye for it anymore, the zeal. it is more something i must apply myself to daily, a necessity that asks for no spectacle, no reward but itself. at least this suffering has pushed me to lean on amy more & more out of sheer necessity, which is what he wants & has been asking for for as long as we’ve been together. it doesn’t feel so daunting now; he manages to say the right thing every time & i have been letting down the bravado; i haven’t thought about it for a while. summer makes it easier for these things; i suppose maybe it made it possible for me to fight so vividly against self-destruction last year; but i know it was difficult then too. i know there were fears, the same neuroses. & even now i enjoy the long hours of daylight, feel rejuvenated with work & leisure & time, so much time. i am only afraid of what is to come, the winter setting in. amy tells me that he is afraid of the future, of my time at work & his possibly studying abroad next year. i cannot say that i am not worried the same. i still believe amor omnia vincit, but there is no cure for missing him except he himself. & there is so little we can have of each other sometimes; there is no time. we make it despite everything but i am afraid things will be more difficult than they have been, & although loving him is easy, loving him well is harder than anything. what is to be done with my own future? i am more unsure of it than anything, although it appears to be promising. somehow things keep falling into my lap. one day this luck will run out. i wish i did not feel so certain about it. this letter has been difficult to write—i keep saying this word, difficult—& i don’t know where to go next. i still hope that things will be better; i think the work & the change in living space will do me good. it will just take time to swing back up again. time is all i have. & amy will be there always; not in the sense that i will take him for granted but because i trust him & would do anything for him the same way he would drop everything for me. my last letter read like a love letter to him in some parts. i think this one is too navel-gazy self-absorbed to be much of that. how can i tell him all that he means to me? i try my best in everything outside this. i need the rest of my life to figure it out. godwilling he’ll let me have it. there’s nothing i want more. i love him in ways i didn’t know i could love anything. & i love you too. jamie