object orientation

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Other ¦ for hotpinktie ¦ 417 words ¦ 2025-11-12 ¦ Personal Poetry

Unrequited Love, Limerence, Heartbreak, Identity, Sexuality, Friendship, Tropes

It's an issue of access (deflected, declined, denied).

Chapter 01: gentle tender
Chapter 02: wall of text

i heard you say it, in your wonderful voice, your particular cadence, that it's okay, i'm okay.

not quite that, but something with an effect, something to call and calm the spinning thing down.

you're so easy. you're so nice.

i have to get away somewhere from how perfect you insist to be.

i understand it, now, when the cackling fiction tropes say you hate the object of your affection.

how they terrorize you, with their perfection. their effortless swagger. their cowboy shirts.

their ways that you know because you memorized them. you could have seen it coming. you should have. oh, your aggravation.

i could never not love you. i could only ever hate you.

i could only ever look at myself, so bleak and dull, and know that we are an ocean apart, all of twenty post-northeast minutes.

by whose road? in whose car?

who's driving you, baby?

i love you, friend. i love you.

your smile. your winning smile.

you won me, with your smile. and i won...nothing. myself, alone.

i won my peace, they say. i won my own fantastic sense of self-choice.

i can choose myself, in the flannel blazer of a bucket-hat percussionist. i can choose being so popular i can't stand myself. but you can only choose that all so freely in so many weeks of the year.

these weeks. these grueling weeks. six of them, i guess.

and you're everywhere.

everywhere.

i wish i were nowhere at all.

Let me see if I can't make this funny, though. Imagine the sitcom: 24-year-old high-demand freelance violinist who's constantly carded as a student throughout substitute teaching. 42-year-old super-involved community bassoonist whose flawless skin completely conceals and belies his actual age. One is a small butch lesbian. One is a tall just-this-side of flamboyant bear (question mark). They're both sort of famously unpartnered, sort of not. They're both their families' IT guys. They wear tuxedos together - Bear gave Butch one of his old bowties - and have the same taste in suspenders, oxfords, ostentatious socks. Bear's mom hears Butch has nowhere to go, upon first meeting, and immediately collects a stray for Thanksgiving. Bear takes Butch to the bar between concert and rehearsal. Both have a natural line of sight to the other. Bear winks at Butch. Butch dreams of watching Star Trek TOS and borrowing Bear's sweaters. Unfortunately, Butch breaks her own heart in the end and remembers that the winking was only because she was so good at being gay.