Daily Archives: Tuesday, April 15th, 2025

azure, feeling ancient and calcified and decrepit: “oogh ack urrrg, i am turrrning to dussst…”

the Internet:

i swear someone has their thumb on the scale, because this shit feels so incorrect to me

…

thinking again of how my then-spouse didn’t allow me to shave my scraggle that made me so unhappy, because when i did, i “looked like a girl,” which filled them with disgust and sexual uncertainty, which instead of processing they would turn into rage and take out on me for making them feel that way

and it’s like,

• you’re the one who married a girl
• you have always had a type
• you knew what you were getting before i even did
• your fears and your desires were there decades before i came along

it’s not my fault that you’re ashamed of who you are; that’s no reason to shame me for who i am

it’s more than the shame, though; it’s the one guiding terror behind every choice a narcissist makes:

what might the people you’ve been manipulating your whole life think of you, if the web came unwound and they ever saw you for real?

what if you had no other recourse, but to trust?

i’m pretty sure my bipolar college roommate roofied me one evening, for reasons i can only guess

was it a prank? was he doing a test run?

he was a really charming guy, and we got along well—which made an impression, because that version of me was very hard to get along with

but that semester was very strange

he also bought me expensive things, some of them kind of personal, which confused me at the time and puzzles me more all these years later

after thanksgiving break, he returned to our room for a moment then i guess had some kind of manic episode, left all his stuff behind, and disappeared

there was a whole todo, his parents and police got involved

days later he turned up on the canadian border, in bad shape, without shoes, his feet almost frostbitten off

he had suddenly decided to go camping alone deep in the canadian wilderness, the night of a major blizzard

no wallet or room key

he put on a cheery face the rest of the year, that the person i was didn’t understand enough to see through, even as he hobbled around on crutches, both his feet and lower legs in cartoonishly thick casts

i met his parents—his mom, dramatic and overbearing; his dad must have sucked all the lemons

there was something going on with him, that i wasn’t the right person to see

it comes back to me sometimes, always with more questions than before; always something else to kick myself for missing, even though i never could have caught it back then; i just wasn’t cooked enough

he was in trouble.