Everything I know about knowing
That thing you buried down there? It's just waiting for it's moment to surface and take you over. Let it.
non-risqué double entendres is a love letter to ambiguity. Bittersweet tensions, open-ended questions, comical happenstance, feelings with spark, brain-blasts that stick, investigations into the grey. I’ll seal and stamp my musings, however messy, and hope they make their way to you safely.
Dearest,
Unironically, ‘knowing’ started in my actual bedroom closet.
Before I wallpapered my room to look like the Twilight forest.
Before I had the balls to write to you.
I’m not in the business of rolling-around-on-the-closet-floor-and telling, but knowing started when my neighbor and I would just lay there, embraced, breathing each other in.
Did normal girls do that with their friends? Our parents didn’t seem to think so.
Sports bra bare stomach, it couldn’t be called ‘playing house’ because that’s not allowed. There weren’t words yet for beyond friendly. But I remember her laugh and her skin and the heat in my ears. And I had felt it many times after that time in my literal fucking closet.
Many times before you, Krystal.
I felt it at the movie theatre, watching Alyson Stoner and her skateboarder brother in the first Cheaper By The Dozen movie. Both, equal measure—how confusing. I could write it off as being so moved by their style (beanies and low-rise plaid pants and hoodies over collared shirts, hot!). But I know it was her assertiveness and his softness that had my mind racing until the lights flipped back on and reality set in.
I felt it in Orlando, during a coveted moment alone on a family vacation, glued to a small TV screen watching Britney Spears seduce men on an airborne plane. The explosions were a little on the nose. A Toxic combo of crystal and leather and hands and skin and shame.
I felt it when my friend would come over, and we would sit in my room image-searching ‘Boobs.’ We hadn’t gotten to the exploration part of health class—I don’t think there was one. We’d fight over whether we should for a split second, then ‘Return,’ then a giggle. Silence. We weren’t looking for anything specific, we were just looking. I doubt she told anyone else, either.
I felt it watching A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila and Next.
I was watching when we first started messaging. When I first started to ‘admit it.’
Conversation was a rally, a hushed scream, we call that longing now. We never actually swapped photos. Who…were you? I convinced myself the connection was a fluke but I couldn’t shake it. When away from the computer—away from you—I was letting a popular boy at a different school (who I also really didn’t know) shove his tongue down my throat with little savvy.
Up against the big chain fence that enclosed the community pool, two big hands on either side of my head, flesh woven into the metal behind me to stabilize his approach. I was wearing two tank tops, very short shorts, and my heels were browning from baseball field dust. He towered over me, freckled from whatever traveling outdoor sport he played. I had winged my eyeliner for the occasion.
It happened fast—like turning a corner and glancing back, half-expecting to be chased. It was hollow, like those empty promises from the dentist that the fluoride would be over soon even as it burned the back of your throat.
On repeat, different boys, never other. The same fumbling hands, the same suffocating under someone else’s expectations. It was convenient. It was easier. It kept questions at bay.
And yet, there you were.
The difference wasn’t just that you were a girl. It was that you existed in my mind before my body had the chance to react. With the boys, I was always catching up—figuring out what was wanted of me and adjusting accordingly. With you, I was already there, wanting before I had the words for it.
Body, fire. Brain, a well, drowning it. No, it’s not okay to want.
Fair to say that up until very recently, whoever had me had a locked box. I kept things pressed inside, latching it shut with the promise of later.
Later, I’d open it. Later, I’d sort through it. Later, I’d figure out what belonged to me.
Later, locked boxes age. The hinges rust. The contents shift, pressing up against the walls, warping under the pressure. You think you’re keeping it safe, but really, you’re just making it harder to face. And still I kept busy. I laughed at the right jokes, nodded at the right moments, followed the path.
It was easier than admitting I didn’t know how to hold my own key.
My faceless Myspace lover.
At first, it was easy to convince myself it was just the thrill of anonymity. Stay up too late, talk to strangers, pretend. That part didn’t matter. It wasn’t about faces or names—it was about the metaphorical undressing, the way our words filled in spaces I hadn’t realized were empty. It was about being immersed in the thought—to want you and say it, to be wanted and feel it, and for any of it to be entertained. I remember the way you typed, deliberate but teasing. The way you’d say something bold, then immediately backpedal, like dipping a toe in and then pulling back before the water could swallow you whole.
I recognized the instinct. I was doing the same thing.
What kept me coming back wasn’t the game of it. It was the way you asked questions no one else did. How you seemed to want to know me, not just the version I made most palatable. Intoxicating. Not in the way that pressing up against a boy in the dark was intoxicating—not the reckless, grasping, just-doing-this-because-I’m-supposed-to kind of feeling.
This was slower. Sharper. The turning of the key to that locked box. Not just set of lips to conquer, a body to be claimed.
Long-rusted metal giving way.
But between keystrokes, in the pauses between our replies, in the careful construction of sentences. After we’d message until someone fell asleep. I’d wake up knowing pleasure and abundance were words I couldn’t dare have in my spoken vocabulary. To be horny was to be a slut and to deviate from the prescribed path was to fail. To explore unconventionally wasn’t on the table. I couldn’t even bring myself to explore within convention.
So I kept watching people bound off the Next bus in awe.
Ridiculous.
Standing in full view, waiting for approval or instant rejection.
Even in rejection they got to stand there and be something. To declare themselves. To say: This is who I am. This is what I like. This is what I want. And if someone didn’t want them back? They still got to say it.
How could I have described that all to you then?
Here’s what I know for sure:
It didn’t matter who you were, whoever you are. I remember feeling my world cracking open, you telling me how thinking about me made you feel. Permission. I remember all of the things you said I wouldn’t like and knowing none of that mattered. Not embarrassed about you or by you, that felt clear. Flirting with the danger of discussion! Wishing, hoping, imagining what the air would do if we were in a room together.
We built something out of nothing, words in the dark.
Until one day, you were gone. Either stopped logging on, or abandoned the channel.
I kept checking an empty inbox.
I yearned.
I was eager to ignore it.
What I want you to know is that superhuman ‘forgetfulness’ has its own clever coding. The pattern repeated, over and over and over. The more I ignored it, the more it demanded to be felt. Every time I turned away, the hunger sharpened. I thought rejection would make it disappear. It didn’t.
You were still in me.
I tried to ration out the wanting in careful portions. And for a long time, I paid the price. I settled for people who embraced what was convenient and disregarded what was complicated. I looked away from anything I couldn’t explain. I made big mistakes. It took a long time for anyone to be curious about me in a way that made me curious again, too.
Krystal, I learned you can deny the knowing, but it doesn’t just go away. You can run from it, you can keep it locked away until the rust sets in and the hinges refuse to move.
Or you can let it take you over.
One day, I felt that prickly feeling again. And this time, I didn’t run. I stopped pretending.
It felt like a storm of epic proportions.
I want to feel prickly forever.
You can’t contain it in a closet. You can’t contain it in a chat window. You can try to turn away, but when the feeling flickers, when your body lights up brighter than any TV at two in the morning, you will have to look.
And when you do, it might change everything.
It might change you.
And you’ll want that. Because the life you’ve been living is only a glimmer of the life you could have.
You don’t brace for it. You step into it.
I couldn’t then. But I do now. And I will—until there’s no more ‘me’ left to meet.
I hope the same for you.
And if you have any free time on your hands,
Throw this on if you haven’t already.
Find somewhere to sit outside. Close your eyes. Listen to the birds and clock their patterns. Imagine the things they’re repeating.
Tell someone something you’ve been afraid to say. Let the thing be grey—stop trying to figure it out.
Watch Severance.
Smoke half a joint and walk around an antique mall. By yourself for a more transcendent experience. With your mom for healing. With your friends or partners for three hours of great fun. On first walk-through, take photos of anything that you think is beautiful. Mentally mark where in the store you are. When you’ve gone through it all, revisit your findings and consider making them yours. If you don’t, you have a log for next time. And if you do, it feels like a treasure hunt.
Try something new, like throwing pottery or wood carving or something you’ve always wanted to cook. Gift whatever you make to someone.
Collect pictures of your favorite winter clouds (they’re more variable and more evocative from November–March).
If you read All Fours as recommended (and even if you didn’t): Peruse Miranda July’s Substack. If I could share a starting point: You Bust Loose From Heaven And Now Your Life Starts*. Apply the advice to anything in your life you’ve outgrown.
Thank you for indulging me.
It took awhile to manage to get that out. Weeks of peeking at the door, then getting to it, then having the strength to crack it open, then all of it at once. I imagine this is common. All of this to say: My urgency and my patience feels infinite. I’m fucking restless—aren’t you? If there’s anything to wish for it would be for that continuous swell, a perpetual ‘coming of age’ to propel me, and us, wherever we’re to go. (Deeper into ourselves and love if we can will it. If we’ll let it.)
Still longing, if you’re reading or if you aren’t,
Bianca
lots of resonance in these words thank you for sharing :)
so so beautiful b