Welcome to Excerpts From My Super-Secret Diary, a new A+ feature for Silver & Gold members in which we publish for you the incomplete and/or highly personal thoughts we’ve written on paper with actual pens. Today Heather is sharing some blurbs from her diary from 2009-2011.Â
1.
I feel like Sam Weir all the time. “I don’t need another friend. I already have two.” “Just because a girl is pretty doesn’t mean that she’s cool.” “Just keep climbing, Wonder Woman.”
2.
I bought ten pounds of chicken at Costco, and left all ten pounds in my car overnight. I guess I’ll order pizza.
3.
Well, they put onions on the pizza. I guess I’ll STARVE.
4.
He says these things like conclusions that have required a lifetime of research and critical thinking, except for I know he’s regurgitating Fox News from ten minutes ago. He wants me to help him write a letter to the editor of the local newspaper protesting marriage equality. He says “feminazi.” I keep thinking about how I found him crying while watching those Frank Capra WWII propaganda docs I brought home to write my senior thesis. I keep thinking about how he taught me to swim, to read, to walk.
5.
Her wild, unpredictable sadness is a comfort to me. Like seeing my reflection for the first time.
6.
“INFPs reveal themselves and their feelings through metaphors and relationships with fictional characters.”
7.
I’m holding onto her so tight and she’s crying like the ache of bone-on-bone, and all I can think is if my mom has ruined me for comforting the people I will love most in the world, I’ll never forgive her. Real love is not like trying to fill up the Grand Canyon with spoons full of water, is a thing I keep saying over and over in my head while I rub her back.
8.
Here’s what I did. I sat in the hotel room for about two hours pep talking myself in the mirror. And then I watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to hail a cab. I practiced that in the mirror too. I walked outside and there were about 600 cabs because it’s 5th Ave. and I’m right near Rockefeller Center and there’s the tree. The Tree. So I walked outside, bought a pretzel from a street vendor in front of the hotel, walked back inside, took the elevator up to my room, ate the pretzel, and watched a Top Chef marathon until I fell asleep.
9.
She kissed me and I did a victory air punch kind of behind her head and she said “did you do an air punch” and I said “yeah” and she said “you’re an idiot; you could have kissed me at any time.”
10.
My dad says it’s going to be a lonely life if I can’t work for people who don’t share my principles. You’re getting to write for a living, he said. And that if I keep cutting loose everyone who isn’t guided by my own sense of morality, there won’t be anyone left. I said I didn’t cut him loose when he called me a “sad, sad adult” for waiting in line at midnight for Harry Potter, which is obviously the guiding virtue of my life, so there? So there!
11.
She’s like, “What do you want from a partner in bed that you’ve never had before?” And I’m like, “Reading a book while she’s reading a book and nobody’s talking.”
12.
There’s always this moment when one of them asks if I’m seeing anyone and it’s like whoever asks it casts a Slow Time spell with the question, and it’s an echo-y tunnel and everything is desaturated and there’s no decipherable talking and everyone in the whole place turns reeeaaaallllly slooooowwwwlllly to look at me and see if I’ll still say I’m gay. Such hopeful faces that this person they see once a year will have finally folded herself into a shape that fits neatly into the family narrative that lets them sleep at night. “Still gay,” I always say. Which they hear as “single” but which means “I left my girlfriend naked in bed watching football. I told her I’ll bring her a sandwich.”
13.
Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1.
14.
Sometimes I feel like I’m losing everything I ever loved, and sometimes I feel like if I don’t let go of this whole thing I’m never going to figure out what I really love. Keep hanging miserably onto these monkey bars, or let go and hope it’s a bouncy castle down there and not like a pit full of clowns.
15.
I still cannot figure out why people put number signs in front of some words on Twitter. I’m never going to figure out Twitter.
16.
But like, if you read on my blog in 2005 that key lime ice cream is my favorite and now it’s 2010 and I’m telling you coconut ice cream is my favorite, who cares? I don’t even care and I’m the one eating the ice cream. I don’t have to send you a memo every time I change my mind about something. I don’t have to explain to you the process of how and why I evolved when you realize I have changed. “Baby step me through how you got from here to there so I can feel comfortable about putting the jar of your personality on a different shelf in my library of How Other People Make Me Feel About Who They Are.”
17.
My mom thinks I’m keeping a record of all the ways she’s threatened me because I don’t love her, and what crushes my spirit (and will forever, I guess) is that she doesn’t get that I love her so much, so goddamn enormously, that I have to keep records of those things so I can go back and read them and remind myself to stay away, because my heart wants to forget it and comfort her and give her everything she needs and wants, because of stupid fucking love, and my head needs the reminder that I won’t be safe if I do. She’s never even apologized. “I have a mental illness. I have not murdered anyone.” is as close as she’s gotten. “I’m sorry but I’m tired of waiting. I will find you!”
18.
I keep having these conversations with my stepmom about how I don’t want kids and it’s like every time I tell her, she reacts like it’s a brand new piece of information, even though she always leads with “Are you sure blah blah children whatever kids hulu hoop thing,” and, like, the fact that you just said “Are you sure…” means we’ve had this conversation before, so how can it STILL be shocking? After I had dinner with them last night, I had a dream that I did have a baby — and on the way home from the hospital, I traded it in for two kittens and a turtle.
19.
The dishwasher is still broken. How long can I be expected to live in this prehistoric hell?
20.
[Person] sent me a Facebook message that just sad “I’m sad,” and I normally wouldn’t have responded to some emotional baiting like that, but it was kind of the middle of the night and so I said “What’s up?” and she said she was sad because of how I’m “gay now” and she doesn’t get how I could be “all right with God” and still be “gay now.” I’m like, girl, you have an advanced degree in chemistry and just graduated from law school, how can you be such an idiot? (I didn’t say that.) (I definitely unfriended her, though.) It was my fucking birthday, dude. She used the Facebook reminder for my birthday to remember to harass me with her sadsack brainwashing. And then, get this, HER MOM friended me today. I was like “DENY, NO THANK YOU.” I honestly don’t even remember her being that dramatic in middle school. (Her mom was always that dramatic.)
21.
This support group for adult children of people with Borderline Personality Disorder is depressing as balls, man. The tears to donut ratio is like 5,000 to one.
22.
There was a grey hair in my head today! It was shocking in its greyness (silverness, actually) and shocking because it was a weird texture, like coarse and squiggly. I yanked it out. Amy said if you pull out one grey hair, seven more grow in its place, and I was like “Bullshit” but then later I definitely Googled it.
23.
Look, I’m sorry, but if you think I’m going to jump in front of you and not my dog when we see a rattlesnake on the trail, there’s not going to be a second date.
24.
I just don’t think it’s rude to take the meringue off of pie!
25.
It’s weird that in the bottle the shampoo just smells like shampoo but when I’m smelling her hair when her head is tucked under my chin the shampoo smells like heaven.
26.
I was standing in the backyard listening to Sigur Ros on my iPod and juggling some tomatoes I picked off the vine (still green) and it started raining and I kept on juggling because I was trying to sort out if I love her. Love her-love her. And I guess I do. Guess. Ha! I do.
27.
(Alternate theory: I am terrible at friendship.)
28.
First date, she’s like, “I tend to take things really personally” and right then I know I should be like “It’s not you, it’s me, even though you’ve just told me you’re not going to believe that.” But then I’m making out with her in the parking garage and why not, okay, but here is why not: Three dates later, she’s crying because I didn’t ask her what she thinks about a TV show but I asked everyone else on Twitter. Tell me on Twitter, then! It was a group ask!
29.
I ask her how to pronounce so many words. I’ve never had anyone to say them out loud to before. I’ve only ever read them in books, written them on the internet.
30.
She doesn’t make me tired. Talking to her, being with her, listening to her, chatting online with her, emailing with her, sitting across the table from her or next to her on the couch, lying beside her in bed, I never need to walk away to hide away to recharge. She fills me up with energy, but not the frantic kind. Her presence in my world sustains me. What a weird, shocking, wonderful thing. I didn’t know this existed. I’m not prepared. Thanks for nothing, Shakespeare!
