Scott Street

I was laying in bed just now, thinking of all the ways I don’t measure up to some beautiful stranger. Healthy, right?  It’s not a particularly fruitful activity, truth be fucking told.  It has given me nothing but the belief that I will never be that thing that I want so badly to be–whatever that is.

I don’t compare myself to others in order to see how I am unique or adequate or beautiful or interesting, but to berate myself for all the things I cannot be–that would be impossible for me to be, truly–because I am not them. I am not blonde, tall, Australian, a performer, a dancer–I am not a stranger. I’m familiar. 

There is no space to hide what I might be, could be, maybe have, in the past, been. I know me too well. There is no fantasy for me to concoct surrounding what I spend my time doing–how I exist in the quiet moments of my life. I already know me. 

It sucks to not be a stranger to yourself because you know where you hurt and you can push that bruise so it never heals. You know where you fold, so you can take yourself right to the edge. You know what you cannot say, and what you always say. You know that you have a pimple on your forehead and that you sometimes feel very small and that you want more than anything to be seen and still wanted for all of that. 

I am not a stranger, I know too much to imagine perfection. 

I am very good at getting to know people. I don’t always do it on purpose, but it almost always happens very quickly. I say it’s because I have the kind of weird face that lets people know I’ll genuinely listen to them. It’s because I say the whole of a word when I mean it. It’s because I don’t want to be strangers. 

I dunno. I feel like it’s easy to believe we are stagnant and flawed because we can never have some kind of mysterious distance from ourselves, but that’s what, like, real tenderness is. Real love. Not being strangers, and choosing them anyway.