Shower empowerment

it’s 11:03 am.

i should be in class, but

it’s like my body knows it’s a holiday

and somehow, i can’t get out of bed

on valentine’s day.

today my valentine is a country away,

but it’s been done before.

overpriced danish shampoo –

for “normal” hair –

squirts into my open left palm

my square palm, earth,

according to those palm memes

suds spring up as i scrub

my palms together, then

pull them apart to stare.

these are the same palms that

pressed sweaty against yours

at that potter con in 2010.

these are the same palms

that gripped a cold, wet can of coke

forgetting my hatred of cold, wet things;

i was too preoccupied with your calm face

on that white porch swing

with the big cushion that kept sliding off.

these are the same hands that trailed

along your waist

freshman year, room 302.

and my pride grows wings larger than a phoenix’s

thinking of conquered chemistry worksheets,

algebra exams, internet fights, and

the way your eyebrows crumbled

all under my fingers

when you said you weren’t sure

if you could live how you wanted.

you couldn’t come out, but now you’re going

to german pride.

with these hands i couldn’t catch

a football in seventh grade,

“i’m vegan,” i told mr. munson.

“what’s a vug-an?” he replied, eyebrows

knitting as he chuckled.

these hands wrote novels, stirred 4 am pasta,

stitched my bleeding heart back together again.

they picked up the phone and dialed you

to tell you i needed to hear your voice.

i am just taking a shower,

kneading suds in my tangled, windswept,

slept-on hair and feeling the power of doing.

because i can do everything on my own

with these two hands.

just tell me when, and they’ll be there

ready to mold and shape life

to how we’ve always wanted

it is valentine’s day

and i am just skipping class

but i am lucky to have these hands

on this earth

with this “normal” hair

and 6 months until i see you again

the future

i am writing this on 3:35 am november 23rd, 2012. it is thanksgiving break, and we are home from college. you are sleeping hundreds of miles away and i am laying on my back with my laptop propped up on my legs. safari tells me that my tumblr and facebook and vegan recipe and goodreads and musiciansfriends tabs are waiting for my attention. just now i was trying to get some sleep, but then i thought of your warm body behind my back and i had to write this down.

i doubt these will be complete thoughts, but they will be thoughts nonetheless.

we are sophomores in college. i only chose to go to our school thanks to a desperate last minute search on collegeboard.com. ours turned out to be not too far from my house, in an area familiar to me, and they had a good english program. they accepted me past their application deadline, and i almost peed myself with excitement.

and then we started talking on facebook and i thought "this is one cute lesbian and i am scared i may have feelings for her some day." but you know that. you know all of that. you know how i knew before you came out to me and you knew how i fell for you because we've talked about it a dozen times already.

we've been dating for over a year, and our future is not too far away. and when i say the future, i mean the "real world." that scary faceless entity that i've feared for as long as i can remember. and that "real world" is barely 3 years away. whether we choose to go to grad school or not, wherever we choose to live, whatever we choose to spend our lives doing, it's all so close. decisions are zooming toward us like it's no biggie. and though i doubt i'll get over my fear of death any time soon, i think i'm starting to get over my fear of the future.

in college, we take turns buying groceries and cooking and washing dishes and doing laundry and making the bed (ok, that's mainly you) and taking the trash out (pfft mainly me) and other chores. we both get lazy sometimes but we push each other to get the hell out of bed and do our work. and it seems meaningless, all of our school work, because when you're there i don't know why i'm writing about jane austen when i could be telling you some little story about my childhood. and yes, women's studies is relevant, but if i'm not sharing it with you, what's the point? but there's not time to share everything about our homework, and it makes me sad that so much of our time being together at college is spent doing... well, college things. but when we're not at college, we're 7 hours apart and it hurts.

but you know what? fuck that pain. because i have you, and that forces me to realize that we have a chance in our crazy futures. i have you, and we've already made decisions that could take years for other people. i have you, and i have made decisions that i could not have come to without you.

we will get an apartment in some city that has a lot of gay people. and we will try out a lesbian bar and laugh if there's any shanes or alices or helenas. we will look for tumblr meetups in the city and meet all the weird foodie bloggers and doctor who nerds and liam hemsworth lovers and i'll laugh and go "yshisha marryyyyy" and you'll crack up and we'll get weird looks. and then we'll leave and try to find vegan cupcakes but there won't be any so we'll go back to our apartment and plan our own vegan bakery. and then we'll open it and get rich from all the vegans who desperately wanted more cupcakes in their lives.

and every day we'll wake up and i'll be sprawled out with my left leg on top of your stomach and your arm pressed up against the wall - oh, wait, no, it won't be that way, because we'll have a real bed and not a mini college twin mattress with egg crate foam that slips off every so often. it will be a king sized bed, set up in the middle of a room that could be a closet or a master bedroom and i probably wouldn't notice because you'd be there. we'd have 3 cats. one of them would be calico and two would be black cats from the shelter, because black cats are cheaper on black friday and we'd be jumping on that as soon as possible. and we'll have a framed map of middle earth on the wall and an endless supply of candles.

and i will dye and cut your hair and you will rub my feet and read me to sleep and i'll clean our room and it won't be perfect, but i won't care. i will love you until i lose my ability to love, and then some.

and when you get home from work, i'll smile and say "baaaaby" until you come over and lay on top of me and we smile and roll around and hug until we're smiled and rolled out and we will just kiss because words will be too overwhelming. i will rub your belly and be glad to see you and we will be making our own living and our relatives will visit us with advice and we might take it or we might laugh it off. and we will have published books and go on book tours and play concerts in the local bookstore sometimes and we will have comfortable furniture

and an exorbitant amount of gay books.

and the rest is up to you.

i can't wait to live the future with you.