In the Dream House

by Carmen Maria Machado

You missed readings, parties, the supermoon. You tried to tell your story to people who didn’t know how to listen. You made a fool of yourself, in more ways than one. I thought you died, but writing this, I’m not sure you did.

while trying not to stare at her, trying to be charming and nonchalant while desire gathers in your limbs. Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time.

You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself—not your body, not your mind. You rejected so much gentleness. What were you looking for?

How many times had you said, “If I just looked a little different, I’d be drowning in love”? Now you got to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you.

The rumor is, he was having an affair with a parishioner,” she said. “A woman he was giving marriage counseling to.

taking advantage of people in need. he is so fucking gross for that

Fear makes liars of us all.

We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people.12 They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough.

overhears her making you cry, and acts cold and distant to her even though you just want him to pretend like he didn’t hear anything.

He real for that

You make a tiny gasp, the tiniest gasp you can. It is the first time she is touching you in a way that is not filled with love, and you don’t know what to do. This is not normal, this is not normal, this is not normal

:(

Her expression is flat for a half second before her chin begins to tremble. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean it. You know I love you, right?

girl fuck you

I don’t want to be like him,” she says, “but sometimes I worry that I am.” It doesn’t sound like she’s talking to you.

Afterward, I would mourn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together.

It is not an extraordinary thing to claim that some people are more valuable than others to the world.)

The season is dying and you are going to die too, you are certain, this night.

If anyone is living in the Dream House now, he or she might be seeing the echo of you.

if your family found out they’d probably think it proved every idea they’ve ever had about lesbians, and you wish she was a man because then at least it could reinforce ideas people had about men, and how she probably wouldn’t understand but the last thing queer women need is bad fucking PR,

Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.

It was over email but you flinched anyway, and before the end of the next paragraph—which explained that she was sort of relieved you hadn’t said you had a crush on her—you were already crying.

Sometimes when you catch her looking at you, you feel like she’s determining the best way to take you apart.

When she was later questioned, the lesbian juror told the lawyer that she hadn’t “wanted to convict a [queer] sister,” as though the abused girlfriend was not herself a fellow queer woman.

girl that's insane

“My queen,” the letter said, “your words are very pretty. And yet they cannot obscure the simple fact that I have seen your zoo.

Barack Obama

war criminal:(

so you resolved yourself to live in that wobbly space where your humanity and rights were openly debated on cable news,

“Ohhhhh,” he says. “Ohhhhh.” You are wrapped in his arms; he is hugging you so tight. “Your heart is broken. I understand. Everyone’s heart breaks in the same way.”

“What do you mean?” “When I met her, she was in an open relationship.” The silence on the end of the line is long and slow. “What are you talking about?” she asks.

Sstttoppppp

“It’s gonna be okay,” he says. “I mean, you’re gonna be okay.”

Eventually, you and Val will come to love each other outside this context. You will move in together, get engaged, get married. But in the beginning, this is what holds you together: the knowledge that the two of you are not alone.

Omgggg

It reminded me that Val cared about me, and also that nothing can keep you safe.

Once, a woman drunkenly touches your elbow at a party and says, “I believe you,” in your ear, and you cry so hard you have to leave.

This is, as you said, fucked up: there are probably millions of people on the blunt end of a lover’s fist who pray for the opposite, daily or even hourly, and to put that sort of wish into the universe is demented in the extreme.

But it is understandable, proof to others but mostly to yourself that you have been abused

I’ll never forget the gut punch I felt when one of the first lesbian couples married in Massachusetts got divorced five years later—a kind of embarrassed panic.

But that’s the minority anxiety, right? That if you’re not careful, someone will see you—or people who share your identity—doing something human and use it against you.

They leave animal viscera smeared on sidewalks. They ask, “¿Dondé está Ana Mendieta?”

Supporters even in death

Inconvenient, irritating, but important: my brilliant body’s brilliant warning.