im a camilla girl bc i also know what its like to harbor such a deep crush on your man but then he blows up and you have to live, a shell of a woman, with his skull fragments constantly in your pocket, only to have his soul transplanted into your body, missing the man you’ve know your entire life and letting him borrow your body on the weekdays on an alien planet
“We go from store to store, trying to things on and inspecting them. I give my opinions on dresses and shoes, blouses and lipstick colors. Sometimes I say things that make the other women look at me, agape, as though my mouth has been possessed by that flighty queen from Queer Eye even while the rest of my body still looks like any other big dumb boy’s. I say that I like a skirt but I wish it were bias-cut instead of A-line, or that I am not fond of the fashion for surplice tops, or that the post-WWII idiom in shoes this season is amusing but rarely looks good on actual feet, or that I like the look of a bolero jacket. I know the names of colors, heliotrope and coral and Nile blue, and I can say without hesitation whether a lipstick might look better matte with a bit of powder.
These other women look at me with wonder, their boyfriends and husbands having made a fetish out of refusing to learn such words under any circumstances, as though merely pronouncing the word "periwinkle” or “princess seam” could easily turn a strong man gay as a box of birds. They say to her, “That’s your husband?” in voices that loiter between admiring and disgusted, as though they know that there’s no force on earth that could make their men or boys take such interest in their clothing and they think they might really prefer that to the spectacle of me, filling an armchair, legs crossed ankle over knee, looking just right until I say “tea length.”
The point is that she wants other girls to see what it looks like to have a boy so cracy in love with you, as I am, that he will spend an afternoon talking about capri pants to have a boy so delighted by you that he never calls you by your name, but addresses you always as “beautiful girl,” or “my love” or occasionally and with great fondness, “boss.” To have a boy who will happily fetch your next-size-down and carry your bags and charm the salesclerks at the register without flirting overmuch and just generally try to make himself as useful as possible, all for the dizzy and undying pleasure of making you happy. And even though I am not a boy, I look like one, and so I can be complicit with her in this kind of wonderful afternoon, part indulgence of her great beauty and style, part guerilla feminist activism.
Later, when we walk through the mall or down the sidewalk, me laden with packages that are clearly hers, I watch the eyes of the people we pass: the women who look at me with a certain longing, wishing they had their own boys to carry the bags. The men who look at her with an unmistakable hunger, wishing that they had the honor of schlepping for a girl like her, and then look at me with a certain edge of disbelief, not quite clear about why I get to squire this marvelous example of femininity around when they are clearly wealthier, more handsome, better hung. I have learned to meet all of these gazes with a calm kind of sweetness. There’s no point in defensiveness or sheepishness or challenge. I’m the one holding her bags.“
"Being a Shopping Switch” Butch is a Noun essays by S. Bear Bergman (2006)
Be open to the possibility that people are speaking nicely about you behind your back. People are conspiring about ways to help you. People advocating for you. People are genuinely rooting for you behind your back.
holding my own face in my own hands and screaming “there is no connection without an open heart! you must be brave! you must be honest! you must be true!” in the mirror
so I started rereading GtN (as one does) and was struck by this passage where from the very beginning of the book, Gideon positions herself as more important to Harrow than the Locked Tomb:
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cut to the pool scene and Gideon learns that not only does Harrow love the corpse of the Locked Tomb, but that the corpse of the Locked Tomb was, in all her silent sleep, able to convince Harrow to live in a way Gideon’s (loud, active, constant) existance in her life was never able to
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and I think that is really, like, when Gideon truly starts her sort of… backslide wrt her perception of her relationship with Harrow – like, at this point in the story in the pool, she’s already well along in her corruption arc into the “Perfect Cavalier”. BUT like, we know from being inside Harrow’s head that Harrow would break herself and her duty in order to hold onto Gideon. she would & she did!!!! which is!!! something that Gideon KNOWS at the beginning of GtN but then forgets/is convinced out of, entierly unintentionally, but to the point where by the time she comes back in HtN she has a totally reversed perception of how Harrow feels. leading to, of course, this:
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anyway.
no you’re sooo right about this and I think we’re all so in love with the pool scene because of the lesbian catharsis it brings that we miss the fact that it is not entirely a good scene for them! especially for gideon! in some ways it’s the moment when they actually begin to recognize one another past their own self-inflicted shame, and in that way they do begin to see one another as equals. but on the other side of the coin, i think it marks a transition in their relationship in terms of how gideon thinks of her purpose. i never realized how discomfiting the bit is where harrow confesses being in love w the body–staring not at gideon but through her, confessing her love for a corpse. I think in that moment something clicked for gideon–the thing she later references in her conversation with ianthe. harrow told her about the body and gideon went “oh, she can’t love me, not like that.” and I think cavalierhood was the immediate and best way for gideon to remain essential in harrow’s life! the most important thing to her is ALWAYS being important to harrow, having her full attention. oh, you decided to live because of that corpse? well how about I save your life by dying for you? try forgetting about me now.
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