june 25, 1:00am | 3m | bars

my computer has a battery life of 10 minutes. pride weekend feels like a kind of holiday. i celebrated today by wearing a tank top and sunglasses. and getting a haircut. the barber caught me cracking my knuckles and said, “you know, you’re going to get old and your fingers won’t work anymore.” we also went to the museum of natural history. but the celebration lights the rest of the city up in rainbows. i saw an image of a construction worker painting a crosswalk in rainbow colors. i remembered tonight, going out. how i used to. kind of a lot. the smell of a bar—the cheap vodka, mints, secondhand smoke and dried cranberry juice. limes. that smell. i remember it vividly. i don’t not go out now, but i used to more. okay, honestly so i remembered this time when i puked in a cab. winter time, and this person i had recently started dating, and who drank a lot himself, had me drinking shot after shot of Patrón tequila. in the cab from the east village to west, i bobbed in the backseat until it came bubbling out. i don’t totally remember how the situation ended. unhappily, for the cab driver, i imagine. actually, i think i had almost left, in my humiliation, without paying. but that memory has nothing to do with pride. still undetermined if we’ll go to the parade tomorrow. tonight, practiced and dared to check at least a couple metronome markings. lately, practicing doesn’t make me feel better, but rather quite worse. but then, i keep fostering the faith that it will indeed all come together. i have this fantasy that the engineers in london will hear me and say, ‘no way.’ or that i’ll simply crumble under the pressure. a husband of a friend once told me never to voice my insecurities. “now they’re out there,” he said. but not ‘out there’ in a positive way, but rather, out there and gaining strength in reality, i suppose, as opposed to remaining inside, and thus a fantasy. not real. anyway, i don’t know if i buy it. said goodbye to the dancers today. while i frowned and congratulated and thanked, they seemed, as they had most of the run, pretty indifferent to me. even in goodbye. but to a gentleman who opened the backstage door for me over the course of these two weeks, named brandon, i said “i’ll miss you.” and he said, “i’ll miss you too.”