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Let me tell you a story.

Over the past decade, I have read vanishingly little fiction. The fifth and thus far final volume in A Song of Ice and Fire in 2012 (good god) was finished in 2012. A couple Ursula K. Le Guin stories perhaps. Mostly it has been historical volumes: well written but dense, dry. I get stuck in the middle of them, feeling bad about having yet more books with no blueprint to completion. I start a new book to feel the wind in my hair and the sense of accomplishment.

In early November, I visited the library branch to give graphic novels a try. So many queer stories of all age levels, forged with distinct lived experience, have been released in the past five years. I started reading a book every few days. Then one a day. Now I read one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with a third sometimes in the evening. I am now immersed in fiction- often involving queer people I can picture real or imagined similarity with. Whatever my difficult feelings about reading "lesser" stories with lots of pictures, I am having a dialogue with a type of art.

A lot of stories involving junior high or high school aged children. Kiss Number 8 (2019) takes place in a very small Catholic high school in the suburbs in 2004, thus being obnoxiously relevant to my adolescence. I was not out in high school, and I did not always treat people who were out well. There's an act of replay and repair; the past is a painting but perhaps its place in the gallery can be changed.

In the past month and change, my therapist said that the way I talk about myself, my needs, is very distinct. I typically try to explain how I feel through an academic approach- forces and influences and very fine distinctions. I outline things that could plausibly be true, but they are not meaningful to why I act how I do.

So I read fiction, cry towards the end, think about what romance must feel like.I grapple with how dead inside anhedonia makes me feel a lot of the time, but also understand that I still feel things and believe things. It is in reading fiction, which often includes characters who have a more 'typical' emotional response, that I learn both what I cannot relate to (yet?) and what I find something in, even if it looks very different.

In the past couple of years I use the image of the ground raw heart that defies expectation in continuing to beat. I have long had a lyrical sensibility, more in common with my poetry than my functional prose. When I told a friend about how someone made me feel ("I felt the blood rush in and the heart go loud") they were taken aback. Not because they didn't understand the sentiment, but you don't talk like that.

Perhaps I do. Hey, this thing ticking away in here. It still has something to say.

Artemis