On Having A Boyfriend With OCD

on having a boyfriend with OCD

He was always turning the lights on and off,

opening and closing the door,

counting as he went: thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty.

Eventually I had to tell him that if he kept opening the door,

we’d have a whole bunch of house intruders

before the night was through. He responded by trying to kiss me once,

then ended up kissing me twenty-three times, then once more

for an even twenty-four. Then he had to redo two of them

because “our mouths hadn’t been quite aligned.”

Some nights I’d wake up with the moon soaking the bedsheets,

listening to the sound of him repeating the word “fuck”

over and over: he’d stubbed his toe on the bathroom doorway

but couldn’t stop swearing once he’d started.

I fell back asleep after staring at my pillow

until the floral pattern burned into my eyelids,

dreamt the two of us went to an opera but instead of beautiful,

tremulous voices rising high into the air,

two sopranos were singing “fuck” to the tune of La Traviata.

He apologizes the next day, says the new medication

made him feel like shit all the time so he took himself off it;

I respond that it probably made him feel that way

because it was working.

Two days later the ambulance comes and takes him away;

he’d accidentally cut one of his wrists with the steak knife

chopping carrots for stew

but couldn’t have just one cut wrist;

he had to have two.

People are art. Their skin a soft canvas of creases and bumps and stretch marks you’ve never felt, each telling their own story. Their freckled stained eyes, a constellation the skies could only dream of creating. And all of their movements, even the slightest ones, like a taking a breath of air suddenly become poetic.

Never had there been a time when sound, color, and feeling hadn’t been intertwined, when a dirty, rolling bass line hadn’t induced violets that suffused him with thick contentment, when the shades of certain chords sliding up to one another hadn’t produced dusty pastels that made him feel like he was cupping a tiny, golden bird. It wasn’t just music but also rumbling trains and rainstorms, occasional voices, a collective din. Colors and textures appeared in front of him, bouncing in time to the rhythm, or he’d get a flash of color in his mind, an automatic sensation of a tone, innate as breathing.

The Leavers by Lisa Ko. 2017. 

One morning, eleven-year-old Deming Guo’s undocumented mother Polly leaves for her job at a nail salon. She never comes home. Deming is adopted by two white professors who rename him “Daniel Wilkinson” and attempt to mold him into a truly “American” boy. Lyrically poignant and bitingly raw, Lisa Ko’s debut novel The Leavers exhumes themes of family and community, intergenerational emotion, and the oft-erased brutality of the immigrant experience. 

Told from the perspective of a growing child, it is at once a bitterly tender bildungsroman and a reflection of structural sociopolitical faultlines in a jarringly torn family. Though Deming’s tale could have been overlaid with heavy themes of immigration and despairing politics, Ko centers the narrative around the child who’s lost a parent—at the end of the day, the perplexity, gravity, and irreconcilable belief of being left and lost is the focus of this elastic, penetrative story.

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(via sinethetamagazine)

thoughts

recently I've been reading snippets of things that were originally written in Mandarin, accompanied by their English translations. and honestly I've never been that interested in Mandarin lol school killed any interest I had in studying it... but now I'm starting to reconsider it? more and more often I find myself mulling over the intricacies of Mandarin, like how heartbreak doesn't quite convey the same feeling as 心碎 (xin sui - heart shattering) (I read this in one of Joshua Ip's posts). 爱 (ai) has no tense as compared to English - love, loved, loving, loves. 爱 is timeless (this one is from something I reblogged). 幸福 (xing fu) translates to "happiness" when it encompasses feelings of not just happiness, but also being lucky, safe, etc. idk I just find it very interesting, so maybe when I have time I'll actually think about it more and possibly write poetry with this train of thought

Wang Qingsong (王庆松), Follow Me. 2003. Photography.

Contemporary photographer Wang Qingsong (b. 1966) began his art career as a painter, he transitioned into photography during the 1990s as a means of better documenting the rapid changes taking place across China’s social and political atmosphere of the post-liberalisation period. Wang’s overscaled photographs call for hundreds of models who play roles of teachers, military officers, literati members, and other whimsical caricatures. Follow Me takes its name from the first and most popular English-teaching TV program introduced by the CCTV in 1982, that for many Chinese citizens was a preliminary glimpse into so-called Western society. 

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I’ve stopped being sorry for all my soft. I won’t apologise because I miss you, or because I said it, or because I text you first, or again. I think everyone spends too much time trying to close themselves off. I don’t want to be cool or indifferent, I want to be honest. If I love you at 5AM, I’d damn well rather that you know I felt it. If I love you two hours later, I’ll tell you then too. Listen, I won’t wait double the time it takes for you to text me back because I don’t want to. I don’t care enough to be patient with you. I’m happy, you made me feel that way, don’t you want to know? So that’s how it’s going to be. I’m going to leave myself as open as a church door. And I’m going to wake you up before the crack of dawn to tell you that I’m fucking joyful, no pretending, not from me, not ever. Would you like some coffee, would you please kiss me? Here, these are my hands, this is my mouth, it is all yours.

Azra.T “Don’t Wait Three Days to Text First.” (via goodquoteco)