Content Warning: Reference to drugs
Chickadee— November 14, 2021
Today at work, the radio was playing 2000s hits, and I was reminded of the time when we were dancing to ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ and Raven walked in and asked if it was Alanis Morissette. We all laughed so hard that day and we couldn’t blame her, since ‘You Oughta Know’ had been on repeat in our living room that whole winter– she was always good at humoring us. We’d scream every line, with special silly reverence on “would she go down on you in the theaterrr,” jumping from the couch, to the green chair, and back again. When I picture you, I see you in our pink house, dancing into the living room from the kitchen, maybe there’s a drink in your hand. My favorite things always happened when dancing with you in that house. Remember when we couldn't stop making lime-based cole-slaws and listening to Brazilian jazz that one summer? Or when, drunkenly dancing to Doja Cat and getting ready to go out, you and Raven accidentally realized that you’d both been hitting on the other when you’d first met? Queer people are funny like that. It’s hard to tell where our love for each other begins and ends. I feel this all the time, with you, with others in my life. Sometimes I think we should probably get married, just because. I think I want to marry so many people, (without the whole, governmentally involved, hegemonic institution of marriage thing). I’d like my love, throughout my life, to be an endless fountain. This is what I hope for myself, a wish for abundance, for no fear of scarcity.
I’ve been asking people lately what they think their strength would be in a hunger games type situation. You know, an end of the world, all bets off, fend for yourself or your loved ones kind of narrative. I think that if we were together in one of those apocalypse YA novels, we’d be the first to go. Not that we aren’t tough and inventive, but… let's be honest. I’m not sure we have what it takes. Plus, we’re too gay to survive past the first 90 pages. At least, in being with you, I’d accept my fate a bit easier: I know you’re not afraid to die.
Here's another memory from the living room floor: us laying with our backs on the carpet and our arms above our heads, bleach stinging at our armpits. I found a video from that night, of you and me blowing smoke out the window, back before getting high gave me anxiety attacks, when I’d allow myself to get all wrapped up in an evening with you, no tight chest or racing thoughts, just us with our feet tucked up, laughing ourselves into tears at “The Floor Is Lava,” our Netflix favorite. We really lose our shit at the stupidest things, which is to say, it's so easy to die laughing with you, which is to say, with you, joy comes naturally.
Anyways, in the video, you twist your body to avoid getting hair dye on the green chair that we’re both piled into. We’re dying our armpits hot pink, and have to keep our arms up in the air while the dye sets, swaying along to Julia Jacklin and bending at the elbow to bring the joint to our lips. Everything good is in this video. My hair short against my shoulders, our plants lined up all four on the windowsill, the flash and click as you take photos of me with your digital camera, standing out of frame, lighting me up again and again. Something out of a movie, something so whole and full up. Raven’s Smiths poster, the visual contradiction to her playful dismissal of all 80s music. I turn our music up and swivel the recording to face the rest of the room, setting it high on the red bookshelf, so I can film us dancing.
How many nights did we dance like that? In our living room, the orange embers of a joint tracing a line from my mouth to yours? We cough and laugh and I try unsuccessfully to lure you into frame. There’s evidence of our life together everywhere— the color chart poster, where you, Raven and I all wrote our names on the colors we deemed to be our auras. Pots on the kitchen stove from whatever we just cooked together, we were never very good at immediately doing our dishes, but they always got done! Posters for Raven's band (unironically my favorite musical artist), your oil pastel artwork on the wall, our growing collection of ginger lemon kombucha bottles. On the carpet even, we left our mark. A singed spot from where we dropped a joint, a magenta splooge of hair dye…
In one of my favorite photos you’re wrapped arms around knees on that carpet next to our coffee table on which we laid out a spread. Oh how we love a spread. Apples and brie and baguette, and oil and balsamic for dipping, and mango we’d bought special. I remember driving home from the co-op, loose lemons and mangos rolling around our laps; things with you are always orangey yellow. <3 Your favorite striped sweatshirt is exactly this color: this is your “cartoon character” forever outfit. You haven’t seen me lately, so I’ll tell you that my cartoon character outfit has been changing, like so many other things about me. The way I look, the way I want to be seen, the way I feel in my skin. The way I understand myself, my past, the looming future. You feel like a constant in this, picking up the phone with a “hey buddy,” in the way that you do.
So I’m just writing to say, hey buddy.
—Your Louise
Hummingbird and Barn Owl— November 20, 2021
Today my rings clink together and I’m thinking of your hands. (Hot, I know). Our hands are like the three beds in goldilocks: mine are the littlest, then you Barn Owl, and then Hummingbird’s– they’re one of her sexiest features, we’ve all agreed.
I always say your names like this: Hummingbird first, and then Barn Owl, you two roll off my tongue together every time. In that picture I took of you in front of the Portland house, you lean together, two becoming one. I loved that porch with its yellow-green stairs and red banister; we all belong in colorful houses.
Remember those two houses we would pass on the walk to Fairhaven? The ones we said were girlfriends, one dark green and purple, and the other bright pink? In the video I took of us walking down that block, you can hear Barn Owl say “they’re almost kissing!” in the background. They are almost kissing, sharing a side yard hemmed in by beautiful Japanese maples, blooming lilac bushes, and ivy-covered slopes. We decided on that walk, wouldn’t it be nice to buy them one day, just for the three of us? We worked it out perfectly, how Hummingbird would sleep in one house, so she could have all the quiet she needed for an early and restful bedtime. Barn Owl– you and I would tuck her in each night with a tender forehead kiss, then settle into the kitchen of the other home, knitting and chatting for a little longer. We’d string up a pulley system from one second story window to the other, sending across little notes, or chocolates, or a cup of sugar, an egg, these little things to borrow.
I have some suggestions to propose to you two now: I’ve been thinking that somewhere in one house, I could have a pottery wheel, and perhaps a print-making studio as well! Barn Owl could have a whole room full of different yarns to crochet us full wool outfits, and a room with soft cushioned walls for viola practice. For Hummingbird we’d build a massive greenhouse, with a side room full of colored paper and scissors and glue for her to cut out tiny versions of her plants, and paste them on to beautiful cards.
I’ve been thinking a lot about radical imagination recently– that idea that in order to achieve meaningful change in our society, we first have to imagine what we want our new world to look like. This involves dreaming up radical possibilities for our future, even if those things feel so out of reach, impossibly utopian. Still, I'd like to live in a utopia, wouldn’t you? And is it really so utopian to wish for safety, joy, rest, a life that doesn’t revolve around labor, basic human rights for those we know and those we don’t? Maybe so, but I’d like to believe not. Still, growing up with this bullshit all around us, it's hard to imagine what things could look like, if we “burned it all down,” so to speak. Still, I try to remind myself that ‘revolution’ might be as much about creation as it is about destruction. That's where the radical imagination comes in. What new futures would you build, if you could? Aside from our girlfriend houses, that is :’)
I was just reading this interview I think you both would have enjoyed between Ocean Vuong and another queer author named Bryan Washington, (have you read anything by him? I hadn’t, but now know I need to) and Bryan said something else that I can’t stop thinking about: “There's a one-to-one correlation between the expansiveness of what I view as being possible and my queerness.” I do think this is true, that my queerness expands my imagination, my ideas of what is possible for myself and our collective future. I think you two would say the same.
Here’s the thing: I don’t know where to send this. For as much as I wish it were true, we don’t all live together in a big warm house. We don’t even live in the same states, not even states that are kissing. It’s never enough to see either of you just for a week at a time, and so rarely are all of us together. That's part of the reason I love that porch photo so much. You two, side by side, and me behind the camera. All of us radiating a kind of ease, a joy of being in the presence of each other. My dream for the future is to kiss you both on the mouth, there, I said it! May it not be too long before this dream becomes a reality.
—Your Very Own Louise
Chickadee— November 29, 2021
I’m seeing you in three days and this morning, we both woke up to snow in our cities! You told me to pack a fancy dress because you’re taking me out to dinner, then later texted “Ok maybe not a dress it’s so fucking cold but something nice :-).” It seems, all of a sudden, to be winter here, and I am hit with the feeling of all winter things all at once. By this I mean iron and wine played over the speakers in the kitchen, the smell of cold coming through thin window glass, wet long-underwear hung up to dry in rafters, a packet of instant apple cider mix eaten dry with a finger, like that candy, fun dip, that dyes your mouth bright blue. All this new-fangled candy– I love that you are my only friend who will go in on a box of good n plenties with me. We really are a couple of old men. I see myself in you in a way that makes me happy to be me. Does this make sense? I hope you feel the same, I hope I reflect back at you your favorite version of yourself. My favorite version of you is everything, all of it.
—Your Louise (the very best version)
Louise— December 1, 2021
Rabbit Rabbit! Happy first of the month, and may it be a lucky one. I’ve yet to meet another person whose family has this tradition, saying rabbit rabbit on the first of the month. Though now, as we’ve scattered throughout Washington, we all just send two bunny emojis in the group chat. I do my best to spread this tradition among friends and roommates– I don’t know if it’s sticking, but I think they like it just the same. But you know all this, you know my life better than anyone. Still, I’m not sure it's true that you know me better than anyone. I think there are some that could give you a run for your money—the birds, maybe—but you’re working on this, working on knowing yourself.
In the meantime, here are some things I have to fill you in on:
1. I dyed my armpits pink again this weekend, and it's sticking about as well as the first time. Now Blue Jay and I have armpit hair the color of pomegranate juice!
2. Blue Jay taught me a new way to eat a pomegranate–
she taps out the heavy red seeds from their skins with a wooden spoon, emptying both halves in minutes into a metal bowl. Now several nights a week we all eat a pomegranate each, spoonful by spoonful, spreading pink over our teeth.
3. I now know that the ripest pomegranate is not the reddest one, but is the one that is heavy in your palm, ripe with juice, the weight of it revealing its sweetness.
4. I don’t know if I’m writing to my future, or to my past.
5. Is this what “queering time” is? Am I doing it right?
6. Let’s start with the past.
Future, I’m sorry if this is redundant.
7. I still have no tattoos– two more piercings, though, as of a few nights ago! This is what happens when two of your new roommates work in a chem lab and can bring you home hollow needles, while the other one has steady hands and isn’t afraid of a little blood.
8. I’m still waiting on that haircut. Will it get cut soon? How does it feel when you look in the mirror? How does it feel when you look in the mirror?
9. Both of you: Have you gotten any good love letters recently? Any good letters at all? Louise, if you’re reading this a couple months ago, I can tell you I’m speaking to Magpie again, the silence doesn’t last forever. Things are friendly, and sweet, and only some nights do I lay awake, having to remind myself that everything feels smaller in the daylight. It (the talking) started up again when they sent me a postcard that surprised me into tears on my doorstep, and I sent one back, along with a carved wooden gnome I’d gotten at the Swedish Club craft fair in Seattle. They love the gnome, by the way.
10. Our bird of paradise plant is growing a new leaf, the last one that just unfurled is bigger than my head, and so vibrantly green I can hardly bear to look at it. Goldfinch held up their hand behind it to show me, and I saw the outline of their fingers glowing through, that’s how soft and thin it was. As the leaf grows it gets thicker, sturdier, and darker in color, less electric.
11. There are so many things I want to ask you. Mostly, I want you to tell me what to do. With my hair, with my degree, with my life stretching out ahead of me. I want you to tell me, reassure me, about “the abyss,” as I’ve been calling it. But I know the postal system can be slow, and by the time I get your reply letter, I may have caught up to you anyways.
12. Our lucky number 12. I’m not sure what to say here, other than, good luck, I’m rooting for you
—You, Louise