More Nineties! Pagan Boy Part One

Word choice note! I’m usually only comfortable describing myself as “fat”, meaning it in the most up-to-date, celebratory, body-positive way. (For very good writing about body positivity, see The Body Is Not an Apology: https://thebodyisnotanapology.com Sonya Renee Taylor is such a treasure.) I don’t think Pagan Boy would mind me calling him a hot fat man, so I’m going to learn to write that way. Wish me luck!

 

A draft of this entry has been in the to-type pile for a couple of weeks. I lost Pagan Boy to Covid at the beginning of this year, so every sentence, no matter how cheery, is a little molasses-step through grief. I hope I can do justice to this miraculous on-again-off-again friend and the lust for life (and pop culture!) he helped me to cultivate. In my own, snotty, irritable way, I loved him, and I hope to make that clear.

 

After Perfectly 1993 Guy broke up with me, I had even more room in my working-at-Burger-King-and-getting-ready-for-photography-school life for…something? That roller coaster summer, I’d started making poems in a black-and-white speckled notebook with doodle-y lilies drawn all over it. I don’t remember anything except one of the poems had a reference to Blondie’s Heart of Glass. (#onbrand)

 

I fully fancied myself a beatnik, so the early-Nineties coffeehouse craze was EXACTLY the thing for me, even pre-Friends! So I dressed in a polyester turtleneck day-glo psychedelic maxi-dress and headed to the newly minted Cake Place (not its real name) with my no-doubt melodramatic poems. (Side note: The featured poet that night became my mentor ten years later post-California. Magic night! Synchronicity!)

 

I sat down next to Pagan Boy after my poem and he said something catty-complimentary, reminding me of Perfectly 1993 Guy’s best friend. I looked at him and my heart said OF COURSE.

 

Fat, expansive, queerish, a little goth. So. Much. MAN. Plus, these really fluffy dark eyelashes. Pretty and handsome and musky in a way that went perfectly with the buckets of patchouli I used to wear. (Okay I bought some a few weeks ago. Still smells SO GOOD. Gonna put some on now.)

 

Jeez I really miss him. I always wondered if we should be together and kinda took our friendship for granted, even let him become a Bernie-bro facebook casualty through most of the Trump years, but he came back. (The ONLY man in my life who apologized for Bernie-and-Russia-fueled madness! He gets all the stars,)  It was like he never left, and right before he died we were texting through bad movies together. I miss him so much, and I hope I can make these paragraphs the reunion we deserve. Of heart, wish me luck.

 

 

Oh Quarantine Crush, Ugh Anniversary Effect

Maybe no more “On This Day” in the fb for me. I’ve been curious to see if the poems I wrote in last spring’s quar-madness/denial/crush mode were any good so I’ve been dipping into the OTD maybe more than I should.

 

The post that gets to me doesn’t seem like much. Just me having a whole face, dressed up in red for Zoom poetry, one pic of my face and one of my for-no-reason pretty shoes. But my face is full of love and hope (or at least full of having-showered-that-day!) and he is tagged. Of course, the link is broken because I blocked him in my heartbreak panic later on that fraught year.

 

It isn’t new to me that everyone who was ever dear to me is still dear—even my awful Q-a-mom is still in my dreams every night, trying to drive me crazy and/or give me virus hugs.

 

But the PANGS about Quarantine Crush. They’re probably not surprising at all. We were friends for 20 years before I had the following thought at the beginning of lockdown (COVID lockdown, not the police-are-terrorizing-our-cities curfew in the summer):

 

“Now seems like a good time to just go ahead and fall in love with (Quarantine Crush).”

 

He was my friend in my mid-twenties, a powerfully prolific few years, sunshine-filled and dramatic as the Pacific Coast Highway. I walked up hill by the beach with him belting out Ani DiFranco songs. He held me and I wondered why I couldn’t just fall for him, the best one.

 

And then he was there for me in those first COVID months, when everything was dark and impossible and I was crying into Zoom and wondering what life could even BE anymore.

 

My “Liked Songs” list on Spotify is still kind of a monument to those quick/forever 2020 months, though of course I’ve added songs since. The only solution to the pangs is to put the songs on and walk around looking at spring trees, or sit around doodling/perfecting my Animal Crossing island, letting the feelings just exist with me.

 

So many people live in my heart forever, there’s plenty of room for him to stay.