Girl

When I was 13 and at the peak of my social justice warrior phase, I believed that being a girl hurt, everyone thought yellow people looked the same, and cat-calling was absolutely horrible. There were a lot of other things I thought, but I probably don’t believe them anymore.

Websites all over the internet say that it’s typical for teenagers to question their sexuality. I’m on the tail-end of teenagedom, but I still do that multiple times a week. I think that means I find life interesting. The number’s up from two weeks ago, because I just got into The Internet. My roommate found them going through her brother’s Spotify. I play Ego Death beginning to end, beginning to end, three or four times a day. It makes an hour feel like nothing. Syd Tha Kyd has a slow kind of look about her. She says “girl” like the wind at the tip of a roller coaster. Her voice sounds worse live. She doesn’t show skin, but her clothes still look like they’re threatening to fall off. If it takes Syd Tha Kyd to turn me queer, I must be the straightest girl I know.

Once, on a trip from the Quad to the Yard, I decided to take an off-route. Since Syd Tha Kyd was telling me to loosen up, I walked slow. I had on a cardigan with an obnoxious amount of faux fur. I got it for $30 at Primark in October because back then it seemed classy. A girl smoking a cig told me she loved my sweater, and I said I loved the pink shoelaces on her Dr. Martens. She asked me what I was doing later, and I told her I was going to study. She told me I didn’t have to be in a box, that I was beautiful enough to make it decently on the streets. I told her that I must be one of those smiling ballerinas in music boxes because sometimes I loved it, the box. She told me her name was Syd. I felt like it was fate. She asked where I lived, and I pointed to Matthews’s tall slick bricks. You’re a Harvard kid, she said, don’t you think it’s your human duty to get people like me off the street?

I said Harvard kids were just in the Bubble. She said she once sold fake heroine to a Harvard kid and the kid came back for more, that you could be smart but just dumb. When we walked to the gate, she asked if I had to go. I said yeah.

The last thing she told me was that ideas never worked, and I shouldn’t let anyone, including Harvard, tell me what I cared or did not care about. Which seemed too perfect, because even if I didn’t agree with her, for a brief moment, I wanted to. Sometimes life’s more about living than what you think about it. Thinking can make you feel good, but it can’t save you.

Before Syd Tha Kyd joined The Internet and started singing about girls, she was part of Odd Future, a group known for its misogynistic and homophobic lyrics. She left in 2010, but it was mostly because she felt lonely, not because of irreconcilable ideological differences. People don’t have to have ideologies to be political. They don’t need to be political to be poetic either.

When we read "Absalom, Absalom!" in class, my TF asked if anyone could ever live their ideology, and I said no, because Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK both cheated on their wives. I guess I sounded judgmental, because he told me it was human nature, and even if a part of me knew he was correct, I still said that human nature wasn’t necessarily a legitimate excuse.

In December, I ushered the Christmas show at Sanders and someone told me I looked like that girl from the detective show, God I really did, if only she could remember the name, and had anyone ever told me that before? I shook my head even if though knew she was talking about Lucy Liu in "Elementary," and I don’t look like her. It didn’t matter, because maybe in the blue light of the theater I wasn’t smiling or frowning and you’d never see my un-Lucy Liu-like dimples. I should have been angry but I wasn’t. When I walked out of TD bank someone called me sexxxxy and I laughed because at that moment, life seemed too easy.

Once I told a friend that kissing someone feels like a surrender, and he told me sometimes kissing is just kissing.

When I read "Absalom, Absalom!", I underlined every time Faulkner used the word “fornicate” and thought it meant something. I wondered if he’d do the same.

At some point while I was hanging out with Syd, someone came up to her with a dollar and told her to buy an Arizona Green Tea, raspberry-flavored, from CVS. He couldn’t go in because he’d shoplifted there and got banned from the store. We spent five minutes looking for the $1 can version. On our walk away from CVS we passed by a couple of Harvard kids, and when she asked for a spare slice of pizza or a beer, they looked through us like we were straight air. I’d never been the object people were afraid to look at before. Somehow, it felt freeing. I didn’t know taking yourself from the world’s gaze would feel like that. I wondered if this was how boys feel.

After that, I went back into the bubble and felt a little more safe. No, I hadn’t felt unsafe. I just felt fresh.

Christina M. Qiu ’19 lives in Matthews Hall. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.