“It’s just half an hour, / it’s just a marriage, just a week’s worth of sex, it’s just / easier to move my thumb along the screen protector / like it’s tender, it’s just grief after grief after / your kid at a baseball game after grief after gif / after grief”

And, yes, even now, even for me, there is joy in seeing the rainbow flag in public, in one of the last places I expected to see it. There is joy in not quite knowing why it’s there, but knowing that it means something to the person who chose it.

“Much of this is simply a lifelong tendency on my part to notice where the crowd is running and then run in the opposite direction.”

I have stopped dressing to be seen; I dress for walking. I cropped my hair and allowed it to go salt and pepper. With the mask and the hair and the tennis shoes, I am unrecognizable, sometimes even to myself.

You people read about our town in the news—first the rape allegations, then Dolly Molly, then the car accident—and you think you know what happened. You think you know something about who we are.