the motherfucking internet you don't grow up thinking that one day you will find yourself attracted to androgynous women, that your sexuality will gravitate towards women who blur preconceived notions of gender in everything they do. you grow up thinking yourself a failure, asexual, broken, because despite your desperate attempts, you cannot find it in yourself to be attracted to any of the boys you are surrounded by. it takes years to occur to you that the reason you experience sexuality so late in youth is only because there were no examples of your sexual preferences in your environment whatsoever. you met people whose souls you found yourself falling into, and later people whose bodies made yours unarguably aware of corporeal existence, but never at the same time. you spent years convincing yourself that you didn't need both, that you could be satisfied with one or the other, or that you could divide your needs between multiple people. it never occurred to you that it was possible to find everything you need in one being. it is only now, lying naked in a field of tall grasses in central alberta in the middle of a tuesday afternoon, framed by abandoned and dilapidated buildings, that you become aware of how wrong you have been. everything you have done before this has been in preparation for the greatest adventure of all. you had to find neverland to be able to leave it in the arms of a giant in wolf's clothing. you had to be so lost you weren't sure you would ever get out again before you could be found. while you were drowning in drugs, booze, dance floors, flashing lights, reckless bodies, open wounds, tears, death, broken glass, fist fights, bathroom stalls, full moons, unfamiliar bedrooms, concrete, despair, bathtubs filled with blood, unidentifiable kinds of love, she was drowning in a different scene altogether, a bleak landscape shaped by boredom and the erasure of true self, a complete loss of connection to anything real or important, because there was no apparent alternative. while you spent a decade in chaos, she spent a decade in inertia, both things pushing you forward at glacial speeds until you found each other somewhere in the middle, a feat only made possible by the strange and unfathomable invention of the fucking internet. |