When he comes back to school, after visiting his family for the weekend, he tells me he has a present for me. I follow him in the hot rain to his room and find out it’s A Field Guide to Stars and Planets, in hardcover and gold leafed.

“It was $8, at a used bookstore,” he says. His hair is flat and damp and his eyes grin like mine must be. It’s a sweet token.

At lunch, my friend Gabe catches sight of the book, and I tell him who gave it to me.

“That’s really nice!” he says, in his usual, leveled voice. “You are definitely the kind of person that attracts gifts.”

“What do you mean?”

He opens the book. “Well, I think you have a real appreciation for things. When you love an item you really show it, it’s sweet. People like to see that so they get you things.”

I think about that statement for the rest of the day. I do have a lot of appreciation for things, which comes from my mother’s love of antiques and history. I hold my precious belongings like talismans, getting emotional over their details, but I’ve always assumed that my single-mindedness would be a burden, or an annoyance to other people. The thought of someone wanting to see that part of me makes me feel warm, like a new star has chosen me as its birthing place, all shiny and new.

Later, flipping through the pages on my bed, I lose myself in the non-emotion of the writing, in the decentering act of learning where to look and find each star. It actually calms me down to know how huge and indifferent space is because it keeps me from slipping, as I so often do, into living my life as an amalgamation of the desires of others. I sometimes feel so spaced out and fragmented that I can’t breathe. To be put in my proper place, simply by the positions of the stars—it reminds me that I have my own gravitational pull, and can affect others. I don’t need to be purely reactionary.

For a while, I had a crush on a boy who knew I wasn’t cis, but who didn’t respect my identity. When he would comment on my “hot body,” I knew what kind of body he was seeing. And I played into it, wearing tight clothes and makeup, as if I didn’t hunger for straight lines, two dimensions. It both exacerbated my dysphoria and tricked me into thinking I was being selfish (if my body was so beautiful, I had no reason to be so dissatisfied). Dysphoria is not a universal trans experience, but from my experience as a queer trans boy, it can be very hard to define things like love and desire when I can’t decipher whether I want someone’s lips on mine or if I want to see them in a mirror. When I thought that the goofy, confident boy I wanted to be would scare him off, I repressed that boy and instead immersed myself into what being him would be like. I stalked his Facebook, looking at his summer photo albums, indulging myself in his bare-chested grins, remembering how I love the feeling of diving into a lake yet also dreading the cling of my swimsuits, the great reveal of taking off the towel.

To me, queerness and loneliness often intersect. Pretty much all representation of love that I see in media and society is heterosexual, so, for me, to be queer and trans is to constantly fear that loneliness will never end, and to fear that I won’t find love. I’m still trying to understand my own queer rage and fear, and I’ve found that Deerhunter’s music is the only thing that centers me when I feel, as I so often do, like a queer version of Bruce Willis’ character in The Sixth Sense: incandescent and invisible, without language to explain myself. Deerhunter’s songs revel in the moment right before passion turns to obsession, letting every loop and lyric steep in itself. As someone who falls in love hard and constantly, I understand the feeling. Their music sounds like the strange, unreasonable act of caring deeply.

I’m thinking about the time I saw Deerhunter: Crouching on the sidewalk waiting to talk to their singer Bradford Cox, and then speaking to him about gender. And the drive home, during which I forget most of what he said besides that he told me to not be afraid of loneliness. I like it, take heart in it, repeat it like a prayer. It gets me home that night, tucks me into my bed, nudges me awake in the morning.

Now I’m in my bedroom, listening to “He Would Have Laughed.” It’s looping like a recurring dream, singing me into a trance: I won’t rest till I can’t breathe / I can’t breathe with you looking at me.

I think: I let people dictate who I am. I shouldn’t do that. I can do it for a while. I stay alone. I miss other people. I find my friends again. To impress them I become what they want me to be, even if they don’t want me to be anything at all. I let people dictate who I am. I shouldn’t do that. I can do it for a while. It keeps looping. It keeps looping. It keeps looping. It keeps looping. It keeps looping.

Stop it. This isn’t about what people think; there will always be someone with a sour tongue. This is about me being happy. I have my own gravitational pull.

****

I am in a room with the same boy who gave me the stargazing book. I look at his eyelashes, his sweater draped over the bed, his open laptop. I remember earlier in the month when, while acting foolishly at a party, I leaned toward him, grazing his ear with my lips. “You are so beautiful,” I said. “I wish I was you.” I envied his straight lines and comfort with his body. I wanted to be the kind of boy that he’d love, so for a while I tried to sculpt that boy, step into his skin, become him. I observed the boys he had been in relationships with and the boys he had crushes on—in what ways were these boys and I similar, and how were we different? I was being very empirical in my studies, and I was more distraught and frazzled than I’d ever been before. I was constantly trying to measure up.

But today, I’ve been feeling better, more myself. I kind of discovered, as I fell behind on school work and on taking care of my body, that I was being silly: I could no longer live entirely through someone else’s likes/dislikes and still hope to be my own person at the end of the day. I deleted most of my social media apps (they were making me into a collage, and I wanted to be an original work), and did all my writing and illustration work in my room. There, I can indulge myself, find my person before taking that person into the greater world.

Sitting next to the boy, I feel more comfortable, and less worried about what he thinks. I know him better, and I am glad I am me, not because he has anything off putting about him, but because I know I wouldn’t be any happier if I were him. I am thinking, Hey, this here makes sense! He has so many of his own flaws, but that doesn’t mean he’s undeserving of good things: the sunlight that warms his windbreaker, a voice to weave around him, a warm space to fall asleep in. All are welcome, and he is so worthy. I’m beginning to believe that, in spite of all my confused parts, I might also be so worthy. ♦