The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one’s solitude right, this is the prize.

Words change depending on who speaks them;

the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one.

I think you overestimate the maturity of adults, he wrote me in his final letter, a letter he sent only after I’d broken down and written him first, after a year of silence. Angry and hurt as I may have been by his departure, his observation was undeniably correct. This slice of truth, offered in the final hour, ended up beginning a new chapter of my adulthood, the one in which I realized that age doesn’t necessarily bring anything with it, save itself. The rest is optional.

Poor marriage! Off we went to kill it (unforgivable). Or reinforce it (unforgivable).

One of the most annoying things about hearing the refrain “same-sex marriage” over and over again is that I don’t know many—if any—queers who think of their desire’s main feature as being “same-sex.”

But whatever sameness I’ve noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.

Being with Mary: it has been almost too wonderful it is hard to believe

As is so often the case, the intensity of our need to be understood distorted our positions, backed us further into the cage.

I will always aspire to contain my shit as best I can, but I am no longer interested in hiding my dependencies in an effort to appear superior to those who are more visibly undone or aching. Most people decide at some point that it is better … to be enthralled with what is impoverished or abusive than not to be enthralled at all and so to lose the condition of one’s being and becoming. I’m glad not to be there right now, but I’m also glad to have been there, to know how it is.

writing has always felt more clarifying than creative to me. But in contemplating this definition, I wonder if one might be creative (or queer, or happy, or held) in spite of oneself.