Warming my hands at the freshly burned bridge

I had that queasy feeling I sometimes get, or maybe it’s more just an anxious feeling, like it felt like something was going on right under the skin, like what, in the subdermal layer. This guy was talking to me in an overtly male way, he was pointing himself at me with words as if he were a gun. I thought of him as the kind of guy who would gesture with a drink in his hand, not worried about spills found the next day or whatever, but actually he was really conscientious about it, and the carpet stayed dry of his crown and coke while he asked me if I was a faggot.

Which I was not a faggot, and really I was one of those people who understood that a word like that had an unacceptable weight of hatred because words kind of made the world, gave things form, you know like will to power or whatever. This was about as good as I could have explained it at the time, and so when she laughed nervously and didn’t get boily angry along with me I kept quiet and stared hard into my drink and felt the feeling I was talking about at the beginning.

Look, nevermind, some things aren’t worth cataloging. Someone made me feel like a middle school chump at a party and I am here assigning blame like it’s fair. Like I’ve not said my own hateful things. Like she could even say or do anything to change this dumbfuck story that she’s not even really the issue of, by the way. So look, you can scratch all of this, scratch driving home shitty with drink, scratch the feeling of knowing we were not talking at that frozen moment at the red light while a bit of defrosted ice ran down the windshield like an escapee, scratch how upset and apologetic she was about a guy she didn’t even know who just happened to be at her friend’s party, how she bore the responsibility and shame and anger that belonged to someone else, and she bore it for me. Especially scratch that.