everything else

---

The Blue Monkey is not an especially special bar, it's just one the English-speaking immigrants–"expats"–drink at. And Phil is not an especially special white boy, just an Englishman who will sing "More Than a Woman" and "No Scrubs" with you on the songtao and question your blackness because you've never listened to soca music, which you absolutely have, but technicalities are for people who aren't trying to get laid tonight. You don't even know how you both made it into the bar bathroom without anyone noticing you. Maybe you kissed; maybe you didn't. You're wearing the dress you got from the night market. Your period has arrived earlier the same night, which you communicate, and he doesn't care, your pussy is wetter with the blood, he's coming within seconds of being inside you, fuck a condom, your specialty is unmaking men, unmasking the safe selves they self-identify, he slips out of the stall at your request while you wipe up. The other Black girl in this TESOL cohort went to an ivy league and she's annoying about it. Last week you met an elephant you hope wasn't whipped into compliance in a hidden stable. The white girl you have a crush on goes with you to the mall for Burger King and plan b. The food costs more than the pill. There's not a camera here, thank god, but you know as well as any movie star that being desired is merely palliative–it will never heal you; the shame will be back.

Really, you thought being beautiful would be worth more. What a surprise: it didn't protect the girls you slut-shamed in middle and high school; it has put you in harm's way as an adult. You are no naif. It is not useful to pretend anymore that you can't clock someone's attraction to you, the static spark of their intentions. And even if you avoid a consequential cluster of cells clinging to your uterus, you could still be incubating this British boy's illness. He bought you a beer when you emerged from the bathroom whose polished metal safety mirrors you shakily smiled into while you scrubbed your palms. You didn't nurse the drink. You slammed it.

---

At A Residency, we all end up on the subject of our crutches–because the world is terrible; because we neither start nor end every day with the certainty that we want to be alive; because we are a group of eight artists deliberately spending two weeks away from our support systems, so this was bound to come up at some point.

"I caved and bought a bottle of wine the other night," one of the Residents says. "I drink a lot at home, so I told myself I wouldn't drink a lot here. But there's just so much time, and all the things I do to pass time are internet-dependent." We don't have internet access in our studios; only in the main building where we have group dinners during the week. "So, I said I'll have a glass of wine, which is always my first glass at home, and then I drank three-fourths of the bottle."

"I had to stop smoking weed," another Resident, a new friend, says, "because weed and cigarettes usually go together for me. So like, I smoke the weed to be high, and then the cigarette is the little boost on top of it."

Then, they turn to me: "What's your crutch, Nas?"

"Um..." I say.
"I smoke a lot of weed," I say.

This is only half true. Certainly, I was smoking a lot of weed for most of 2024, and the couple of years before that. (The perils of excess time are innumerable.) But I've cut back significantly on my weed consumption in the last few months, and I'm not giving my real answer because it's uncomfortable. We're pretty accustomed these days to mundane addiction narratives–the shot-stained morning afters in our TV shows; the habitual stoners skunking up the hallways of our apartment buildings; the friend who goes to the bathroom five times and comes back talking faster than you can think every time you go out. But in this moment, talking to artists I've known for a grand total of seven days, I'm doing a variation of a thing I do in my male-dominated tech workplace often: I'm de-sexing myself. It's a sleight-of-hand trick–don't look over here, at the way my eyes light up when you compliment my appearance because I really did put a lot of effort into this outfit that, yes, makes my ass look incredible. Look, instead, at this stupid fucking pun, and isn't language delightful, and doesn't this joke remind you of whatever nature documentary you were watching with your wife and five kids last night, and so on. You would be accurate in guessing that these are conversations as circuitous as the paths that power the computers we all work on. I have gotten very good at concealing myself in the center of a labyrinth. I'm doing it right now.

And I'm doing it because the real answer to their question is: sex. It's sex, it's attention, it's romance, it's the freakum dress I wore to the English department holiday party, it's the friend I knew was into me but I invited them to the club and grinded my hips against them on the dance floor even though I didn't like them like that and I had no plan to go home with anyone that night, it's the way my whole body is a wound wire buzzing just long enough to pull someone new.

When you've been told your body, conduit of your faith in God and some eventual man's eventual baby, is your most valuable asset, one that must be held intact or destroyed, validation feels a lot like power. It's not.

When you've been told your body, conduit of your species and your social group's moral character, is only valuable as a tool of service or a tool of domination, when you are meant to sublimate yourself so others may submit to you, justifiability feels a lot like power. It's not.

---

Right around the end of 2024, my spouse and I started watching Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show. We're not Carmichael super-fans or anything, but we don't live under a rock, either. My partner Sunny had been an avid watcher of The Carmichael Show, and we'd both cried watching Carmichael's stunningly vulnerable Rothaniel. Neither of us is a stranger to being queer and Black and worrying whether your family will still love you when they find out the former. We didn't get through enough of Poor Things to really see Carmichael's part in it (the "Daddy God/sexy baby" thing hit a little weird even though we understood the allegory), but his presence in the film was a welcome bonus at the outset. And from the Reality Show trailer, it seemed like it would be more The Rehearsal than Keeping Up with the Kardashians. It's rare to see a Black gay man as the central character in a reality show that he has creative control over, so we were pretty likely to tune in whether we knew Carmichael's previous work or not.

I rewatched the trailer for the show while writing this, and it really is masterfully crafted right down to the music choice: intercut with shots of Jerrod's family, friends, and performances, we hear "Coffee Cold," the jazzy piano track Handsome Boy Modeling School sampled in their 1999 track "The Truth." I have loved "The Truth" since one of my college boyfriends introduced it to me over a decade ago, and as I've learned with many of my favorite loops, the sample resonates across multiple levels. The composer of "Coffee Cold," Galt MacDermot, also wrote the music for the long-running Broadway musical Hair, which features, among other themes, interracial romance, sexual openness and homosexuality, drug use, and rebellion against conservative families of origin without demonizing any of those things. All of that appears in seconds in the trailer, but is an hours-long backdrop in the actual show. What's more, hip-hop lovers around my age hear those first whiskey neat notes and they don't go to MacDermot, they go to Handsome Boy Modeling School. They go to a song with "truth" in the name, the song about a man who is failing his lover by shrinking behind the mask he's using to conceal his insecurities. His lover can see him clearly, though. And I imagine that for the crooner's silent addressee, that is the most terrifying part of all.

And then the back half of the trailer, which includes a series of quick shots cycling through Jerrod and his various sex partners, is set to the instrumental of Peaches' "Fuck the Pain Away," a song that I'm always excited to hear getting play because I think Peaches is dope as an artist, but which has always made me uncomfortable because the last refrain of the song is, well, "fuck the pain away." Apparently, I'll throw it back for an average man in a bathroom stall, but I draw the line at acknowledging my underlying motivations.

---

Once, in college, a different boyfriend (one with markedly worse taste in music) was in the process of a soft breakup with me. It was a soft breakup because the boundaries of our relationship were similarly fuzzy, but I could feel him pulling away. Mostly we were fuck-buddies, but I was new enough at relationships at the time to think that I could fuck him into liking me more than he liked conventionally attractive white women. It was a Wednesday or something and I was having a rough night, which happens a lot when you're living a double life (mine: nice Christian girl/drunk sexy baby), and I was hoping for–needed, really–a good fuck to distract myself. The town where I went to college is small and Southern and Christian as hell, so there isn't a lot to occupy yourself on a Wednesday night. And here was this perfectly good, reasonably accessible "boyfriend" with his huge dick and his frequently absent roommate. I texted him, and he refused. So I did a thing I don't do anymore: I begged him via text. We went back and forth a couple of times with increasingly longer delays between his responses, my own volleyed back lightning fast.

You should really get some help for that sex addiction, he messaged. And then I finally stopped responding.

I complained about him to all my friends; I said he was an asshole; I wrote a poem about him. I was a performance poet at the time, usually getting on stage once or more a month to project my burgeoning but horribly sex-negative feminist consciousness, so it didn't seem weird to him when I invited him to our campus slam poetry troupe's upcoming open mic. There's plenty I'd counsel my younger self about, especially regarding this particular man, but by then "invite your ex to the poetry show for totally innocuous reasons" had become one of my signature moves, and it was mean-spirited, yes, but also surprisingly audacious given how conciliatory I was in most other areas of my life. Small victories. When I ran into him on campus a few weeks later, he told me it was a good poem. Notably, he didn't rescind his prior recommendation.

---

Once, when I was 18, I cheated on the first boyfriend who loved me with a mentor six years my senior. Once, when I was 22, I fucked my friend's recent ex-boyfriend because he was nice to me on New Year's Eve. Once, when I was 24, I fucked a stranger who taught me how to snort coke through the fluted end of a tampon applicator. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

---

Alone to a single camera in a relatably messy space, Carmichael takes a quick hit from a nearly finished joint, then says: "I gotta get used to talking to this. Cameras make me feel more comfortable. I like this. It seems permanent, and it feels really dumb to lie."

The cutesy version of my writer origin story is that I used to write battle raps on the playground as a third grader. I beat the brakes off every boy who challenged me. I don't recall any of the girls in my class joining these impromptu baby cyphers, but I do remember them saying shit like "You think you're perfect" and being surprised I liked rap music at all. A frequent accusation around this time was also that I wanted to be white and that I talked white, and no one in that age range really thinks to ask things like "are you overcompensating for your dad's recent death?" or "is your mom's current boyfriend a weirdo who puts too much black pepper on stovetop mac and cheese, and are you watching him neglect his own son so intensely the boy's teeth are black and orange?"

Perhaps you're getting a sense for the real writer origin story sitting at the center of the publicly enjoyable one. I loved hip-hop, and I loved stories, and words, and I was working through a lot of shit. When the military kills one of your parents, your family comes into a bit of money–enough to buy a new journal every year at the Scholastic book fair, so I'd fill journals with my poems and raps. When we visited family in the city where I was born, one particular aunt would ask me to tell her my version of the story of Little Red Riding Hood. "You tell it differently every time," she'd say. "I just love that."

---

"I'm trying to self-Truman Show myself," Carmichael says to a black-clad, balaclavaed Bo Burnham in the first episode, "Emmys." "Like, trying to let the cameras be what God is."

"You have a sort of self-destructive thing that can be channeled into stuff that's exciting and alive," Burnham fires back. "But like, I care about you beyond this thing."

Carmichael's face says, ouch, says I'm exhausted, says Well yeah, but that's a profoundly stupid thing for anyone to do. Smash cut to a montage of wardrobe prep and press tour clips, talk show bullshit, Jerrod saying, "Just having her son on television, it's all kind of odd and surreal, because it's playing out. Like, she'll watch this."

Jerrod Carmichael is a Black man in the world and a fiercely intelligent person. He knows as well as I do that your behavior changes under observation–your knowledge of the camera, of the external eye and its expectations and the possibility of punishment, shifts the truth. If I were going to offer a stupid fucking pun, I'd say being watched creates an alternating current.

---

When stand-ups who write well make TV shows, we often get to see early iterations of their bits. I've been watching stand-up comedy since I was around 13, and I used to self-describe as a comedy nerd. (See above: love of words, love of stories.) I've also been a stage performer since I was around 5–first, in ballet; later, on recorder, clarinet, bassoon, and vocal song; as a grad student, in burlesque and pole dance; most enduringly, in words and rhymes. When comedy podcasts really became a thing–some of my favorites included "The Champs" with Neal Brennan and Moshe Kasher, "WTF" with Marc Maron, "You Made It Weird" with Pete Holmes–I felt like I was hearing my experiences with the adrenaline of a good performance represented accurately for the first time. And I remember, back in 2014, hearing Bo Burnham discussing "parasocial relationships"–these one-sided relationships audiences built with performers who were ultimately strangers. Lots of these comics (well, the male comics, which was most of them) would talk about "chucklefuckers," the fans who stayed after a show to fuck someone who'd made them laugh, taking a shot at connecting with someone whose art they enjoyed.

---

More times than I can count, I wanted to stay. I wanted to maintain eye contact. I wanted to memorize the specific softness of each person's palms, the curve of every nostril. Mostly, what I remember are the grids of light I saw from the high floors of their apartments, or the frost flecks accumulating on their dying lawns, or the distant cars kicking up gravel across their dirt roads. At night, dust looks like smoke sounds like fireworks.

---

Over the course of Carmichael's show, the stand-up bits come to function like confessionals. In them, we see Carmichael telling an audience about different kinks and sex acts he enjoys, but we also hear him talk about what it's like falling in love, and what it's like fucking someone he loves for the first time. He talks about his fraught, emotionally distant relationship with his father, he talks about that father's secret family, and he talks about his friend whom he is half-heartedly trying to help launch an acting career. He talks about cheating on his boyfriend. He talks about cheating on his boyfriend with a stranger in the hotel suite he's sharing with another stand-up, a friend he's invited on the road.

---

Once, when I was 15, I confessed to three brothers on the elder body that I had had sex for the first time the previous year. As far as I remember, they weren't perverted in their line of questioning, but I did have to say whether I had engaged in "heavy petting" or not.

Once, when I was 19, I confessed to three brothers on the elder body that I had had a boyfriend and we had been having sex. As far as I remember, they weren't creepy about the details, but they did have to publicly announce that I had been "reproved" as an outcome of a judicial committee.

Once, when I was 20, I confessed to a judicial committee that I had been smoking weed and having sex. I was given a date I would be expelled from the congregation–"disfellowshipped" in Jehovah's Witness parlance, which is to say, summarily shunned. In the month before my ostracization began, I had the last real conversations I'd have with my mom for the next decade. Even after I was nominally reinstated by faking my devotion for a year, I couldn't effectively pretend to be straight anymore. So instead, I secretly decided I'd move to Thailand to teach English. I told my mom it was "random, on a whim," but in reality, I'd planned my escape for the better part of the year I was being shunned. I would make a clean break with my old congregation, and I'd start my adult life in earnest far from anyone who was surveilling me for my own salvation.

I told my parents and my "friends" at the Kingdom Hall that I was leaving two weeks before I was due to fly out. One of the sisters whom I'd admired, one of the cooler Witness women I knew, took me to Dairy Queen to tell me I sounded arrogant. My mom, whom I was mad at and hurt by but still loved, said she had felt it coming. "I've been feeling this demonic presence in the house," she told me, her face painted with disbelief. "I thought maybe it was something I brought home, something I bought at the store, but it was you all along."

We haven't spoken much since then.

---

At the end of "Emmys," Jerrod's estranged mom calls him. They haven't really talked in the couple of years since he came out to the world in a comedy special. He's a little out of his mind on the shrooms he took on the way to the ceremony and the drinks he's been having all night. He offered some of his mushrooms to Bo, whom he'd invited to accompany him after both his crush and a recent Grindr hookup refused the invitation to be his date. We see Bo shaking his head in the shots where Jerrod is imbibing. His face is hidden, but his body says, come on, man, says be here with me, says god, this again.

Jerrod doesn't pick up the phone, so his mom leaves a voicemail. "I love you so much. And you did a perfect job, as usual. I pray that you're getting the rest that you need. And I love you so much. Good job."

On the way home from the awards show, he vomits.

---

There are parts of Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show that are difficult to watch. When he invites his conservative dad on a road trip and asks if his dad wants to meet his boyfriend, his dad is predictably hesitant. It's not that his dad's homophobia is acceptable, but at a certain point, you know what you're going to get from someone. So when his dad concedes, says "I'll meet him," then, "Do you have a picture of him?", it feels mean-spirited for Jerrod to show his father a shirtless mirror selfie his boyfriend took when he got out of the shower that morning. And it doesn't necessarily feel mean because it's forcing Jerrod's dad to deal with his own shit around gay people before he can honestly say he loves his son. It feels mean because Jerrod's boyfriend sent him a picture in which he probably felt cute, maybe something to say, "do you think I'm hot?" and "I was thinking about you earlier." And it's pretty shitty to weaponize that against someone who isn't going to look at that picture and say, "You know what? Your boyfriend Mike seems like a nice guy." He knows his dad is going to use his small-statured, bare-chested white boyfriend as synecdoche for all gay men, and to me, that seems like an unfair weight to put on the partner you're claiming to love. And it seems worse to put the fact that you did in a show on a popular international streaming service. It's a pyrrhic victory to beat a homophobe by throwing your boyfriend under the bus.

This episode, "Road Trip," ends with Jerrod confronting his dad about having a second family. They're good questions to ask, important questions, things any betrayed child would want to know. "Would you say you loved her, or was it just, like, sexual?" Carmichael asks. "Or was it... 'Cause it was a long time. It's what, like, 40 years of a relationship? Was it hard every time? Did you feel like a bad person? Did you feel like you were two different people?"

"Why are you digging into that so deep, son?" his father asks. "Why are you doing this?" Then, "I thought this trip was gonna be about you and I bonding. Let's stop talking about my past and move on forward."

Let me be clear about something: I believe Carmicahel needs more evidence that his father is willing to change and honestly confront himself before either of them is ready to have this conversation. And I don't think his dad has earned this second chance with his son; I don't think Jerrod should just pretend his father didn't hurt him and his mom profoundly over and over again on purpose. But when I'm watching this scene, I don't just hear Jerrod Carmichael confronting his father about why he chose to betray them for a secret second family. I hear him asking his dad: Am I just like you? How can I love someone and still hurt them like this over and over again on purpose?

"Have you got hostility against me?" his dad responds. "I got feelings too. The way that you don't want to be hurt, I don't want to be hurt. Is this gonna be on your special?"

Jerrod says, "Uh, maybe." Says, "Probably." They argue back and forth about who made it public, who made it more public. Then, Jerrod, tears clinging to the corners of his eyes, says, "That's tit for tat. You made it public." The firelight glances off both their faces as they continue, and it's so clear they're fighting from deep within the hurt boys who hurt others, who hurt each other, who kept secrets for decades and embarrassed people so much that now one of them brings cameras to back him up, and money, and what feels like righteous fury.

"If the cameras help me, then they fucking help," Jerrod spits. "But your way is nothing. Your way is silence. Your way is death. I'm not doing that. I'm being a man. I'm stepping up. I'm actually saying the things." He's the fire now, his finger dancing in his father's face.

"These are your children and your grandchildren. These aren't my kids. I didn't fuck nobody. I didn't have no kids outside my marriage. I didn't do that. You did that, and you're ashamed of it."

The rage sputters out after a few more sentences about the justifiable reasons Jerrod is upset. And then there's silence.

His dad has been emotional this whole argument too, although not crying. But this seems to be the moment that breaks him.

"I knew it," he whispers. "I knew it, I knew it, I knew it." He blinks back his own tears. "You done said a mouthful, son. You done expressed yourself. You said what you wanted to say. You're gonna do what you're gonna do." Two beats, more quick blinks, then a soft cracking.

"Can I go home?"

---

I've had a hundred, a million imaginary conversations with my mom in the mirror. "What makes you think a loving god would force you to stop talking to the children he blessed you with?" Mirror Nas asks. "I know you went through a lot, but I want you to know I figured out what real love is, and it's not this." Mirror Nas spits bar after bar about trying to be a good person anyway, about how fucked up it is to call your kid to say their older brother died but never invite them to the funeral, about what kind of mother leaves their minor daughter alone to be interviewed by three men she's not related to about the details of her private sex life. I have very good reasons to be upset with my mom, a solid argument for the way her fundamental abandonment predisposed me to compulsive, risky sexual behavior as a means of self-medication. I wrote a whole book of poetry about it; I've written countless essays about it; I can use nuanced therapy language to discuss the ways my anxious-avoidant attachment style solidified when my primary caretaker observed my pain and ignored it. Mirror Nas always wins.

When I would invite exes to my poetry shows in order to perform poems about how they'd treated me to their faces and the faces of any friends they happened to bring along, it felt phenomenal. The quivering lead-up until my name was called from the sign-up sheet, getting to yell at dudes who were jerks with plausible deniability that I was yelling at them, having people come up to me and praise the art I made about some asshole, often while that asshole was in earshot? It felt magnetic. It felt like power. The stage was the surest home I knew, and audiences could tell, and they loved me for it, and I beamed that love back to them, a call and response where we're all singing my favorite song. "You weren't just spitting up there," another poet told me once. "You were conjuring."

And then the show would end, and I'd help stack up the extra chairs in the coffee shop basement venue, and I'd go home to coil in on myself until someone–my mentor, a boyfriend, a stranger, anyone–invited me to come through.

---

In A Writing Workshop, I write about visiting Aotearoa with my partner Sunny, about watching the gay shame on display in Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, about the ways we watch this actor try to convince everyone around him that he's somehow tricked them into loving him.

"The speaker mentions having a wife in this piece," one of the other Participants says. "I'm curious about how all of this is showing up in the speaker's marriage."

---

The difference between Then and Now is that I go get the Burger King breakfast the day I know I have to write about what I was like as a partner. I joked in an earlier post that my blog is going to make it seem like I have a whole thing about Burger King and that actually I don't, but that's a lie. I have loved Burger King breakfast, specifically the sausage egg and cheese Croissan'wich and french toast sticks with the little hash rounds on the side, since I was a kid. I'd eat Mickey D's breakfast if I were forced by circumstance, like the fact that it was right behind my high school or the fact that the Burger King in my college town had famously unreliable quality and was out of the way. I ate Chick-Fil-A's breakfast because they had an on-campus location at my university, and I hadn't developed the integrity to avoid a place whose profits actively fund conversion "therapy" camps to this day. But the Croissan'wich had my heart, and so did the french toast sticks because I think french toast beats pancakes any day, and then you make that into CRISPY STICKS like bitch let's GO, and my mom, sister, and I used to take a lot of road trips both before and after my dad died, and Burger King was delicious and present and trustworthy through some of the worst times in my childhood. So yes, I do have a thing about BK. I kept a cardboard Burger King crown I got in 1999 in my bedroom for 10 years.

---

At certain points in Carmichael's reality show, I got the distinct sense that the camera wasn't intended to keep Jerrod and the other people in the show honest, or to record the tumultuous process of coming into himself as an out gay man, or even to show how far he's come since he was just a poor, nerdy kid in North Carolina, even though all those things happened too. No, I think there were some days, the days when the camera operators were there to capture him sucking a stranger's foot, or cheating on the boyfriend he loves with a random Grindr hookup, or lying to his boyfriend's face about being faithful while they're talking to a couple therapist, that he set the camera up as a form of self-harm.

I recognize that this essay is parasocial as fuck. I don't know Jerrod Carmichael or Bo Burnham or any of their friends, partners, family, and colleagues. I don't know, can never know, what footage was left on the cutting room floor to get the final version of the show. I don't even know the exact camera setup of every scene, and I couldn't comprehend it like a TV director if I did have that information.

What I do know is the iron core of shame. I know the bloody taste of a morning where you wake up earlier than your sleeping partner, which is every morning, and look at their vulnerable face, this idiot who trusts you enough to be unconscious next to you on purpose. The feeling that someone could love you so much, could buoy you in their arms in a pool where your feet touch the bottom far more easily than theirs, like Jerrod's boyfriend does for him in the last episode of the show, that someone could tell you, as Sunny once told me, that they haven't let themselves sleep deeply next to anyone in years, not until you: that feeling thrusts you into flux. It makes you feel like an asshole, and maybe you end up in a phở restaurant yelling, as I once did at Sunny, "You don't have to be with me! If you don't like how I am, then you don't have to be with me!" But then it started to snow, and we bought strawberries at the grocery store next door, and we rode the bus home to take another swing at sharing sweetness instead.

There was a time not so long ago when I would do dangerous things so I could write about them later, but you know as well as anyone close to me that that's not the real reason I was doing them. I was compulsively avoiding the pain at the center of my being, pulling my focus away from what made me act out and hurt people I loved even when I didn't want to. I have always been drawn to addiction narratives because I'm curious about how other people overcame the part of them that wanted to obliterate them. Still, that recognition of sameness never stopped me from picking up a pen and self-isolating, sitting in a dark room for hours, writing about all the ways I knew I was part poison, a liar, a stupid broken bitch with mommy issues and a persistent need for power to compensate, and never mentioning what I'm going through to anyone professionally qualified to help me.

I know Sunny would have been well within their rights and might even have been advised by commiserating friends to call it off. It had been a good try; we had both put in a lot of effort; we could leave before, as the line in "The Truth" says, "we [were] swallowed up by bitterness." But when someone loves you enough to keep trying, don't tell them you love them back if you aren't going to try to treat them better. That's not love. That's just using an observer to hurt yourself.

It has taken years to acknowledge any of this to myself in a way that doesn't plunge me into oblivion for days, weeks on end. It took my first Black woman therapist, who became our couple therapist, and it took many more fuck-ups on both my and Sunny's parts. But some of that isn't for the world. Some of that is just ours.

---

I know that for me, more than anything else, it took a safe environment to allow me to practice being honest with someone as much as I can. It took knowing that someone was going to charitably interpret moments where I hurt them by accident. First, though, I had to give them somewhere reliable to place that trust. I couldn't keep begging forgiveness for pain I could have prevented.

At A Residency, I talk to my new friend about the fact that I used to smoke cigarettes. She's a smoker herself but is thinking about quitting, so she asks me how I did it.

"Well, Sunny threatened to leave me," I laugh. And then I elaborate. "When I was living abroad, you could get Marlboro Reds for $2 USD a pack, and you could smoke inside, which was amazing. Like, I wasn't gonna pass that up. So I did a shitty thing that I try not to do anymore: I was telling Sunny about a night out, and I mentioned that I'd stepped out for a smoke like it was a throwaway line even though I knew it was important. And they didn't catch it, but now I could say I had told them."

In late summer 2019, shortly before I left the country to complete a fellowship abroad for nearly a year, Sunny's mom was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer. Their mom was a lifelong smoker, so Sunny had grown up knowing that cancer was likely to occur at some point.

I remember the phone call when they got the news. We were lying on their bed, and the day was bright and beautiful. When they got off the phone with their sister, they asked if I could hold them. They soaked my chest with their tears. We were quiet like that for an hour, maybe two, as the day wound toward the night. Eventually, we got up, but I knew while we lay there that I could have held them forever. [note - add a better image here]

For their mom's birthday in July, we had flown to see her in Brooklyn. We–Sunny, their two sisters, and their mom, all danced barefoot on the roof of their apartment building. We watched fireworks explode from other rooftops all around us and we ate perfectly solid macaroni pie. At random moments, unprompted, their mom would yell, "Thank you! Thank you!" like she was hearing the raucous applause of an adoring crowd. When I closed my eyes and breathed with my whole body, I could almost hear the roaring audience myself.

When Sunny was alone with their mom, in a conversation they relayed to me later, their mom said she liked me. She said, "Be nice to her." And even though Sunny can be abrasive in that way New Yorkers are as a condition of dealing with so many goddamn people all the goddamn time, they are nice to me.

So it was a cruel thing for me to do, concealing the fact that I was engaging in the same behavior that was going to take their mom from the Earth. It was cruel for me to play dumb when I mentioned that I'd been smoking at some point a few months after the first admission and Sunny was shocked and hurt. I'm not naive. I wasn't willing to admit it to myself at the time, but if I hadn't known the emotional weight of my confession, I wouldn't have downplayed it in the first place.

"I wanted them to feel like they could trust me," I told the other Resident. "But more than that, I wanted to be someone trustworthy. So I told them I'd quit smoking, and that was the day I stopped." I told my friend that I've caved and had two or three cigarettes since then. But I don't let myself conceal those relapses. Compulsion thrives in the dark, so I tell Sunny if I slip up.

I have made a contract with myself to be as honest as possible because the trust we've built is more valuable to me than validation, and I've hurt enough people to know how hard it is to earn back. The consequence of some of my past behavior is that there are former friends who don't want me in their lives, just as there are people like my mom or folks who participated in shunning me whom I don't want in my life.

But because I have that contract with myself first, I try not to do things I'll feel ashamed to acknowledge later. The truth is, my shame is just the kid with a dead dad and a mom who can't love all of her, the teenager who thinks she needs to pursue pleasure in secret and hates herself for wanting to be held. When I feel their fear, their loneliness, I turn the light on in the room where they're writing. Sometimes, I bring them snacks.

---

At A Residency, the same one as before, the one from which I'm writing this essay, I wake up and realize today is the day I'm going to write about some of the things I really dislike in myself–actions I took because they validated me in the moment, even if they hurt my friends, my lovers, and me. It's a cloudy day, windy, not the 70-something day the forecast promised earlier in the week, but that feels right to me. I get up so I can make it before breakfast ends at 10:30 AM, I dress in appropriate layers so I don't get cold, and I drive the 20 minutes to the Burger King in town. I order a five-piece french toast sticks and a #1 meal with grape jam for the Croissan'wich and cream and sugar for the coffee, which I know will be terrible, but honestly, it's always been terrible. The drive-thru guy, an older white man with a gray beard, calls me "hon" and tells me to have a good day, and makes eye contact when he says "god bless" and smiles like he means it, and I think he does. I'm not a god person anymore, but I mean it when I smile and hold his gaze, when I say, "thank you," when I say, "you too." And I return to the residency center, to the one building where we have internet access, and I set out a placemat, and I pull each item out of the bag, and I prepare a spread. I take my time with the first few bites of the french toast sticks, which are perfectly crispy even if the drive-thru guy didn't put syrup in the bag. Even when they're naked, they're still sweet.

Later today, I'm going to do some cartwheels in the big grass lawn out front because I love feeling my ability to hold my own weight. I'm going to call my partner and tell them I love them. I'm going to close this computer and make sure I get some sun on my face.

---

I cried at a lot of the series, but the after-credits scene of the last episode, "Cynthia," hit me in a specific way. We see home video footage shot five months after the events of the last episode. Carmichael's dad is raking the yard in front of his mom, Cynthia's house. When they get to the porch, his mom throws open the screen door. Three kids, all with variations of his and his dad's faces, are all crooked baby teeth white with excitement, open-mouthed, surprised joy. More family arrives throughout the day. In the closing shot, the camera slowly pushes in on Jerrod's boyfriend, Mike, helping his mom in the kitchen.

I don't know if Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show will come back for a second season, or if HBO is even trying to order one. I hope it doesn't. I'm not sure if Jerrod's relationship survived mass media cuckoldry or the shame spiral that may have resulted from a single glance at discussions of the show in the r/jerrodcarmichael subreddit. I don't know if any of the friends he included in the series are cool with how they're portrayed. I'm not sure how I'd feel if a famous friend did that to me, but I will probably never know.

I do know that going to Aotearoa to meet our twin niblings, my chosen brother's two kids with his spouse, helped heal some shit I never thought I'd get through. Watching them grow teeth and perceive heat, watching them learn selfishness and sharing, watching them experience pain and throw tantrums and staying with them through it, saying, "It's okay to let your feelings out," saying, "I still can't give you more bread until you try to eat the rest of your dinner," saying "I love you," reminded me that I already know how to protect my dear ones when I get out of my own way. Every night of that trip, Sunny and I talked about something new we learned from the little ones. We told each other how happy we were to be witnessing all of it together.

---

At the beginning of "Cynthia," Jerrod screens the then-current cut of the episode for Bo. It ends with a touching scene of him and Mike embracing in a pool, a voice-over of Jerrod saying, "I feel like everything's okay when I'm with him. I can be myself and accept myself. And maybe that's enough."

When the lights go up, Bo has Jerrod feel his shaking hands.

"This is my fucking problem with the show, which is why I'm wearing this fucking mask and why I fundamentally want no part of it," Bo says. "You treat the camera like it's God, like, 'Look, see the truth. Find the truth.' But like, the god on the other end of the screen is the fucking public. This is going to be viewed by the giant, revolting mass of people that is like, argumentative, insane. And that's a scary collective for, like, the judgment of the most precious things in your life."

And of course, that's part of the deliberate irony–that even though Bo Burnham's face is concealed, people like me have been watching videos of him playing comedy songs since we were all teenagers. I don't actually need a credit because I can identify this stranger through his gait, his stature, the cadence of his speech. We are never as undetectable as we try to be, not to anyone paying intentional attention.

When my Residency friend read an early draft of this piece, she got to the lines, "I've gotten very good at concealing myself in the center of a labyrinth. I'm doing it right now." and looked up.

"No, you're not," she said.

No, I'm not.

Me, to Sunny: I'll turn the lights off if your eyes hurt. You'll turn the lights on if I need to see.