This isn't a response to your last post. I'm just writing this to take a break from studying.
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I still follow J---'s brother on Instagram, who liked me a lot. Apparently, the standard was for him to hate all of their boyfriends. He seemed to enjoy my company. At family functions, we would hang out. I remember being in Ponoka and rifling through his grandpa's* old Bollywood soundtracks and country compilations. He moved to Edmonton right when I did to study music. He could play a mean piano and apparently also ripped as a trumpeter. He dabbled in writing his own pieces, which I never got to hear. He reminds me of Kate, if she were vaguely online closeted gay guy. His stories are just him being like "me when i bomb a major C" or whatever, which makes me miss him, and you know who. They talked in music theory all the time. Neither of them ever got my punk rock and noise, but I really like their Broadway musicals.
*They would refer to him as their "nunajun." 5 minutes of Googling have yielded me nothing in the way of an actual spelling of that word, let alone an original language. I know their grandpa was Indian and then fled to Central Africa thanks to the fact he was Muslim, where the residual Belgium occupiers rocked his shit good. It's probably becoming clear to you by now that India and the Muslim world are becoming things I'm intensely interested in.
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I was at the campus bar today with the fellas. Picture a caravan of shockingly attractive, unsentimentally nerdy twentysomethings in thrifted button-ups who are all either talking about wasting money, having autism, early Christian church writings, and Barbara Streisand. There were three tables of us, and none of us would be here every week if this place wasn't close, because the food sucks and beer is like $7. But there we were, hanging out. N----- flicked some water at me to get my attention for something I never ended up catching. J-----, then beside her, smiled at me. Everyone wanted me to be there. I was called a bunch of times to get my ass over here. This week, I couldn't have felt worse. These nights have given me the worst ideas. But, then, and right here, with their smiles and voices, their awkward-ish hello and goodbye waves, I'm completely fucking safe, man. I'm home here, no matter what the night sky gets me to think of. The North Saskatchewan in its eerie lull can never make me give this love up. Thank you, friends near and far. Without you, I couldn't do this. You people made me.
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I texted Dr. Ryan asked him about what I should do with my life at the peak of my I'm-going-to-drop-out freak-out. He told me a lot, but I'll only share one thing: "Write, Ben, write." One day, I'll thank you properly, man.
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N----- and I showed each other photos of our friends in high school, who bore an uncannily resemblance to each other: battle jackets, septums, long hair, blue hair dye. She shares my sense of nostalgia, which is a feeling that will never not remind me of you. We waxed lyrical about those kids, how they sucked, how they hurt, how they were beautiful, and how they wouldn't believe that in a million years. There's a Joyce quote I remember from class about history being a nightmare one struggles to wake up from. Those days were more like a bad dream, but a dream nonetheless. Playing Kiss covers, beautiful and stoned.
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I like R----- a lot, but I feel like she's hiding something. She appears defensively insincere, in the sense that she can very starkly change the way she acts and talks to acclimatize to everyone around her, which I totally get. I'm just hoping it's nothing I have to worry about.
We hung out in my apartment alone the other night, arousing the suspicions of J----- and E---, the former thinking I scored and the latter thinking the former had done something stupid again. We exchanged stories of conquest, of which I have none, and she has a few. She used to have a buzzcut, be filled with righteous anger about her parents' then failing marriage, and hang around exclusively "Gay Emo Trans kids" (or "GETs" as she refers them to me). I'm sure you're starting to notice a pattern here.
She's snarky in the way B---- can be, just without the zaniness and a fair bit of her doubt. R---- maintains B---- always sarcastic and impressive command of Internet slang, which she has seemed to double down on upon discovering I immediately got "horse famous." She sprinkles the fuck out everything she says with an occasionally awkward, slightly endearing amount of "Essentially," "Honestly," and "Right!" She's very aware of the fact she's attractive, which I don't know if she factors that into our brand new friendship. She strikes me as someone who would have to, and I don't blame her for that. I wondered a lot if she was attracted to me the night we hung out. We used puppets from the UofA puppet library (this exists apparently) to pretend to make out as two E---s. That felt like reading into, even just a little bit. Later that night, during our exchange of conquest stories, she told me she'd never date another white* guy (in the context one of her two doomed relationships she had while living in England). None of this bummed me out or anything. I was just confused.
*She is Bengladeshi in case you didn't know, also an ex-Muslim, because, obviously. Bengladesh.
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The women of my circle of friends get really excited to meet each other. They'll always say shit like, "I was really afraid it was just going to be dudes here!"
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The sun screams against the glass of downtown. The earth is saved for a moment.
