19 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
19 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
#### The Weight of Wanting
|
||
## Oct 14, 2025
|
||
---
|
||
At the gym, I am not a man or a woman or a queer body. I am a collection of movements. A set of repetitions. A calculus of effort and symmetry. The mirrors line the walls like an endless chorus of judges, and I study myself through them: the slope of a shoulder, the softness of a face that never quite leans masculine enough, the hint of fat that clings with memory. I used to be fat. Not in the nostalgic, “glow up” sense, but in the way that teaches you to apologize for existing in space. Now I am less fat. But my body remembers. The roundness lingers in my face, the old shame in my posture. It’s a strange inheritance, to lose weight, but not escape its ghost.
|
||
|
||
The gym is supposed to be a temple of transformation. For me, it’s also a confessional booth. Every rep feels like repentance, a small absolution for the sin of softness, of effeminacy, of wanting too much to be seen. The iron never lies, but it doesn’t forgive either. When the weight rises above my chest, I imagine I’m lifting something more abstract: the part of me that still flinches when someone calls me “fag.” The part that wants to be desired but not categorized. The part that keeps trying to reconcile masculinity and queerness in a world that demands they be kept apart.
|
||
|
||
In Santa Cruz, queerness is ambient, it hangs in the air like the mist from the ocean. Everyone is soft, ethereal, performing care. But softness doesn’t feel like safety to me. My bisexuality collapses under the gaze here. I become “the gay boy,” a decorative character in someone else’s narrative of radical inclusion. To belong, I have to lean in: to exaggerate the curve, the tone, the cadence. It’s not malicious, just exhausting. I leave each queer gathering feeling like I’ve betrayed some quieter version of myself. Every woman I've loved becomes a footnote, a phase, evidence of my confusion rather than my wholeness.
|
||
|
||
In San Jose, the pendulum swings the other way. I blend in too easily. Stussy hoodie, silver chain, jeans that sag just right. I am one of many: boys who talk about bulking and ratios, who go to raves "for the music," who hide softness under creatine and slang. Here, my queerness recedes into the background. Tolerated, not examined. There’s a freedom in that invisibility, but also a loss. I am seen as “normal,” which means I am not seen at all.
|
||
|
||
Between these two cities, my body becomes a site of negotiation. Every pound lifted, every calorie tracked, is an act of translation between two worlds that can’t seem to hold me whole. The gym becomes the only place where both versions coexist: the gayboy chasing twinkness, the abb chasing defintion. In that liminal space, aggression feels holy. A ritual through which I can access something wordless. Power, maybe. Or control. Or just the relief of motion.
|
||
|
||
But liberation has its own cruelty. There is a kind of spiritual violence in self-improvement: the belief that salvation lies on the other side of progress. That if I sculpt myself long enough, I’ll arrive somewhere better. More real. More lovable. More deserving of belonging. It’s the same old theology of the before and after photo: proof that the body is a problem to be solved, not a language to be spoken.
|
||
|
||
Sometimes, when I’m racking plates alone late at night, I catch my reflection in the darkened glass. The gym is empty, and the air hums with fluorescent fatigue. I see myself, neither saint nor sinner, neither gay nor straight. Just a body, suspended in the act of becoming.
|
||
|
||
And for a moment, that’s enough. Not freedom exactly, but something adjacent: the quiet grace of being seen by no one, and still showing up.
|