PicoBlog

Whilst scrolling through online content, sometimes certain colors, sounds, or imagery just stop me in my gay-little-tracks. This week, it was a video of a cookie. Not just any cookie. A cookie meant to look like a blanket.

In a plucky instagram reel, some hands place a piece of pink play-do looking cookie dough into its place as the final square of a cookie quilt. Piecemeal together raw, once put in the oven (poof, goes the Instagram reel), it all weaves together when baked.

It’s sweet. It’s inspiring. I want to try and fail at making them myself. But more than making me forget who I am (not crafty, not a baker, not into quilts), it left me wondering about what pieces make up the rest of us, all us non-cookies. All us people.

We’re all a patchwork of scraps.

Thinking about quilt cookie me is similar to when I sit down with crayons to draw myself: I am a series of rainbow shapes and squiggles for curls. In my minds eye I have ringlets and pink circles for cheeks instead of the frizzy scraggly light brown and mostly grey mop that I’m rocking these days along with a side of rosacea.

So, what would I be if a patchwork of dough? What are the ingredients that make me and what iteration of those ingredients make the final baked goodie?

Would I be round or square? Would the way my body has grown and hardened and softened and hardened and softened like butter going through a temperature lifecycle of fridge to counter show up in the shape of me?

How would my scars from surgeries where they sliced me right open and scooped me right out and that one funny one on the bottom of my foot from jumping off my great-aunt’s dock in Wisconsin right onto that upward facing clam and that other one from picking my skin with tweezers too many times? What about them? Could I find a brush small enough to mark all the freckles and spots, the ones that come and go with seasons and the other ones that stay forever and the ones that rise to the surface with the sun like brown brown cooking oil in a water glass?

What is the color of cookie dough made of needles and insulin and rubbing alcohol? Where is the metallic dough? Where is the dough that is the clear glistening of a lifeline, a drug in a vial clinking around in my heart clear as a bell?

As I get older and come to grips with the everything of me, all my obsessions and all my jealousies and all the ways I was taught to think I can be small (and all the ways I am fighting to be big), will I find the right shade? Will the new texture of my energy without alcohol and while learning boundaries crumble in a way that pleases the tongue? Will I melt the fuck in your mouth?

What crumbs will be left on the edge of the table and on the cookie sheet and in your lap and in your sweet little mustache? What of me then? What does it mean to be savored in small bites, to be eaten whole all in one soft gulp? What does it mean to be the one left on the plate, never enjoyed besides with each passing eye?

I hope I am the kind of chaos that rolls out smooth with the rolling pin. The kind that turns pock marked and gold in the oven, rising and falling with heat and with time. I hope I surprise you with a kick of something, likely flakey salt formed when I laughed so hard I sweat from my temples.

Blanket cookie there you are, all of me. Dumb little cookie in a video on my dirty iPhone screen. Making me wonder about all the hands that shaped me, all the cookie cutters that tried to pry their way through me, only to be invited to change freehand, with steady care and imagination.

Roll me out thin, all the way, and drape me over you. Look up into me like a parachute on an inhale, that big pre-k way, sit on my edges and let me be the sky, for just a little.

Sky cookie, sky cookie. Drape me, drape me. Stand me up on my edges and make my baked dough into your home. Let me stand as my own home, too.

If I am my own walls, my own floor, my own windows, my own roof, how sturdy to I stand now, a 31-year-old cookie?

I shape shift in the sun, but I hold strong in the wind.

And don’t even start to think about what happens when you dip me in that little glass of milk.

What a week! I learned I was elected to the University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy Alumni Board. I’m hoping to being queerness and everything I’ve learned in abortion access organizing to a space that, from here, is looking pretty drab. It will look like three years of meetings and work to create a space for students to thrive. To be in the program and to find their careers afterwords. Hoping I can make some folks feel a little less alone. I’ve been thinking tons about how the way I think about problem solving, community, and the kind of future we can build was lent its foundation from the critical analysis thrust on me by professors and colleagues at the Ford School. The very lens that roots me firmly in my calls for justice and in my commitment to finding a way forward where we can be our whole selves and not have our histories and memories and futures violently stolen from us.

And then… yesterday, I had the total privilege of walking into Barnes & Noble, taking the escalator to the second floor, and finding this cover on the newsstand:

I flipped and flipped and flipped and got a little wet-eyed to find my words, in print, on page 68. So fucking close to my dream of being published on page 69.

The piece is about pleasure. And about how my experience with sexual pleasure changed as my life changed with new partners, with new identities, and with new diagnoses. Sex is different with chronic illnesses and medical devices on my body. It’s different when I need to know what’s going on with my blood sugar. And when I wrote this piece when it was first published online last year, I had no idea that it would find new life in print.

This marks a really lovely close of one circle, one cycle, one year of really investigating what it means to me to be a writer. November to november of essays and reporting and blogging and podcasting and of trying to write a book. I’ve turned words over in my hands and my mouth and my guts like a washing machine, looking for new ways to hold them all in this one vessel I’m given.

It can hold more, now. It can move differently, now. It can turn the words to a rainbow blur that looks like shapes of dreams and laughter and like pages and pages of love notes.

What will next November’s load look like? I cannot wait to find out.

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