haircuts are always a point of conflict between my mother and me. to put it lightly, it's not a shocking revelation that a queer person has some mixed feelings on hacking away their appearance to fit into gender norms. my mom, servant of these norms, tells me that if i love her then i need to do this, slipping a comment under this faux request that it’s getting long like a girl’s. it hurts me especially this time around, when i tell her i am doing this for her, and she lightens up and accepts my concession. sometimes i feel i should be more capable of hate towards people when all i can do is just love with difficulty.
there's a park in my hometown that is very pathetic and barely warrants being called a park, granting it the distinction of Mini-Park. it is a sad slot of land, developed in 2016, on the corner of two busy streets where hundreds of drivers disregard it daily, perhaps even unaware of its presence. the city touts it as an emblem of low water-consuming greenery, an "oasis of drought-resistant plants, equipped with structures with promised but not delivered anti-graffiti measures. a Former Friend was the one who told me about this park. now probably somewhere far away on the east coast, they held so much love for their hometown that totally eclipsed my lack of care for where i'd grown my whole life, and they absolutely adored this "tiny park" as they called it. we had visited the park together in 2019, but i, afflicted with the poison from either driving past it often myself or needing to forget everything from this Former Friend, can't hold a memory to this allotted bit of nature.
the park itself is woefully inaccessible as private parking lots and suburban residences occupy the surrounding blocks, so i ended up parking ten minutes away after i got my haircut and walked down the non-existent sidewalk to get to the park. i can't fathom really how one is to even enjoy the park; i do hate grass for the water and carbon emissions necessary to maintain it and i may not be an outdoorsperson but along with the sparse walkability to the destination, there's just not much here: some shrubs and trees, a mosaic of a monarch butterfly, a few stones and benches. i walk up to read a plaque as i ignored the sixth call from my mother after her tenth text asking where i am and assuring me that she loves me. it lists out the city council members who had a part in this development, and as does the sign planted amongst the greens say, names the park "Spirit of '76 Mini-Park", invoking those "classic" American nationalist sentiments of freedom and individualism. i remember in 2019 being told that i was “easy to love” and years later, those words would be retracted. looking round the park again, i can't help but regard it as a bastard project of city-planning that seldom sees visits from anyone in this city and shouldn't matter to anyone, and yet the shrubs are so lush. i know this contradiction of suburbia still sees care. i know i had seen love here. it doesn't make sense to me. maybe it's because i made a mistake: you after all were made not to grow but to endure.
my sister texts me after three missed calls to text her back to let her know i'm okay. i text her back immediately and start to walk back to my car.
