The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

Shame creeps along my cheek like a spider.

Sweat is beading on my collarbone like a cheap necklace.

But what could, and should, I compromise on? How does anyone know?

I saw in myself the power to burn us down,

She was my invention, a pencil sketch from a fever dream that I now pored over for hours, days, weeks. I colored her in with fantasies and fabrications. I made her up.

in meditation: when you catch your mind drifting into thoughts rather than resting in the present, you silently say, “Thinking.” Gentle. Easy. No judgment. You recommit to the present.

I was weird, and I hoped someone would notice. I wanted to be spotted, recognized for being the kind of girl I aspired to be.

Lesbians were function over form, the Ford Taurus of women.

I was still a product of a world where what’s between a woman’s legs was only fathomable in its relation to a penis.

There are ways of living that you can live with, until you can’t.

one cannot live at one’s limits for long. One cannot stay there indefinitely, not even for love.

Does one life preclude another?

my gut turned over like a page.

I feared her judgment because it was my own.

looking for glimmers of gayness.

I think you want your story to be a straight line, but it may not be.

What if the one constant thing about you is that you’re changeable?

To love my baby was to be haunted. Ghosts filled the room of our love, kept us company.

I know what is true for me,

This truth is ugly to me, but I do not want to hide it.

when I needed a good cry, I’d play that album like a musical ipecac, to shake loose and expel a feeling.

“If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.”

felt my heartbeat thud, ca-su-al, down the length of my arms.

How does a person write truthfully about their life, when it isn’t finished?

under gender we find the bare thing, the person themself.

women’s sexuality is more “plastic” than men’s, in the sense not only of variability in sexual attraction, but also in sex drive, qualities they like in a partner, and what they like in bed.

queerness should really make us realize that the common thread is only that we are all unique.

sexuality is personal and specific, and it can evolve,

If we weren’t born this way, what ground could we stand on? How many will see an opportunity to conflate “change” and “choice”?

you can leave a relationship healthy. You don’t have to destroy it.

Our marriage transcended us, and it lives on in this weird, complicated family we make.

I’d wanted so much to have a story that behaved, but instead I have a self.

life will try to limit you if you give in and let it.”

some things stay the same only by changing.