My best friend doesn’t generally identify as kin. He doesn’t keep a kin blog, and he doesn’t, generally, write about his experience of being outside the norm.

But when he does write about his experiences, he writes about them in such a way that I think it is impossible not to be moved. His writing, his experience of being OTHER is so powerful, and his words so intense that I feel them in my bones.

Here is some writing that my best friend asked me to share with you.

– Felix

***

There is something romanticized and melancholy about the night time.  Something comforting about full dark.  Something safe about being blanketed.  Feeling small, as though the great eye of the world might pass me over.

I had meant to write something else.

I had meant to start somewhere different.

But here I am, as always, lost somewhere between memories and musing.  Someplace I live but never really understand.

I talk a lot about knobby fingers.  I reminisce about someone’s hands I’ve never seen.  The way they feel in mine.  The way they gripped me.  The way his joints ground my joints and it was uncomfortable and I didn’t let go.

Let me talk about something else, tonight.

You don’t know me.

I could tell you anything and you could believe or not believe me, but you couldn’t prove I wasn’t really what I said.  Tonight, then, if you’re still here– if you’re still with me, reading, please.  Tonight, give me the benefit of your uncertainty.  Suspend your disbelief.  Come with me, for a little while.

I do not have words for the broken nature of my heart.  I have only feelings, so strong they function like beliefs, intense and overwhelming and often indescribable.  Not alone because I don’t have the means, but because I wonder if they exist– a language all of guttural growls and vivid emotions.  Bright and detailed uncertainties that I am helpless to really or accurately articulate.  

They come in waves.

Sometimes humming a wordless tune to pass the time that inexplicably results in tears.  Sometimes having to pause a TV show to stop and take a heavy breath.  An anecdote, a rainy day, a documentary about the ocean, or a long, unbroken stare into a starry sky.  Sometimes bolting upright to grasp for dreams that have fled into the dead of night.

I wonder if there is a scientific formula for what moves us– truly moves us– as human beings.  Is there a chemical equation to explain why certain video games can reduce a full grown man to heaving sobs, alone in his own living room?  God forbid with others present.

Maybe they haven’t found it, yet.

If they have, will someone please share the link?

I don’t know if I believe in “kin.”  Other or fiction of otherwise.  I don’t know if I believe in reincarnation, exactly.  If I believe a soul has a natural one-to-one from one life to the next.  I don’t know if I believe in gods or demons.

What I do believe in, is endlessness.  There was always something, and that’s what there will always be: something.  Even if that something is emptiness, for a while.  Even if that something is a whole lot of nothing by most standards.

There is so much out there to know.  So much left to try and understand, we’ve barely even started.  To me, that’s the most beautiful thing about existing, at all.  And one of the most terrifying, too.

I don’t know what my dreams mean.  I don’t know the reasons for my intense and particular longing melancholy.  I don’t know if my detailed memories of things I’ve never done and places I’ve never been are a trick of the mind, a coping mechanism, a vestige of someone that I used to be.  But I know that they are persistent.  I know they have been with me ever since I was just a child.  I know there are other people like me out there.

They feel things that aren’t theirs, know things they’ve not done, miss what they’ve never had.  With sincerity.

At least a few of them.

The lonesomeness of any individual, in a great ocean of distant stars, is not a solitary lonesomeness.  It is always one shared by some, that much I also believe.

I am a grown ass man.  I have a house, I’ve got a job.  I have a cat and a spouse and a lawn that I’m only minorly obsessed with.  I pay my bills, I go grocery shopping.  I cook, I clean house, I go to concerts and visit friends, and go to bed in loving arms.

This weirdness does not define me.  It does not control my every thought.  It does not come from the searching of some sad teenager who feels at a loss, crying alone in his darkened room.

Although that was me, once.  For a brief few years.

And before that I was a happy kid building castles on the beach, asking my mum when friends she’d never met were coming back.

I believe that whatever my experiences “really” are, whatever they really mean, they are my experiences– and that means something.  And if you are curious, if you are a voyeur of the strange, if you are here to find some kinship, or to make fun of a full grown man for the way you believe he plays pretend, then I will tell them to you, if you stay for just a little longer.