I haven’t been doing so much personal writing lately. I’ve been wrestling with this piece that I’ve been itching to release, not so much so it can exist in public as much as to rid my system of it. It’s something I’ve been working on for over a year, maybe as long as i’ve been in New York, maybe even longer. “Maybe” because it’s a part of a jagged process of relocating, grief, separation, loss. The writing begins before the page, you know? [Can you hear my bimbo voice? My valley girl inflection meant to lighten the weight of pain?] It feels like an important bookend on an experience, as if its completion and liberation is tied to my own. I keep finding myself not knowing how to do it, how I want to do it, though doing what feels right in writing isn’t always what makes for the most neat lived experience. This seems to be the struggle at hand: how can I live with my writing if it engages my real life? (Doesn’t it always?) How will the people I care about (which is to say virtually everyone)? And naturally, how to deal with all the humiliation and self consciousness that comes with writing from, or perhaps alongside life? (Within it? On top of it?)
Beyond this standstill with a past, it’s springtime. It’s been beautiful in New York for extended moments. We’ve been getting flashes of the coming summer, which means the parks are buzzing with a fog of weed and paper bag libations. An old man plays the most unmusical keyboard you’ve ever heard accompanied by a low-tech drum machine. You and a neighboring reader look up, acknowledge this jarring contribution to the cacophony, and press on with your heads bowed. This is just how it is. New York reckons with a kind of collective checkout that is a deeper infrastructural reality in a place where summering is a regular happening for some. This wasn’t the case in Seattle where summer is typically a cherished severity, a brief standout moment in the longer slog of grey months, and class less apparently dictates the rhythm of the city. In these glimpses into the future, New York becomes kind of feral and the moment you break out a dress that shows your body, the hunger of the city becomes more real, alongside the stink of trash in the heat. Sometimes we are all trash in the heat.
It is, of course, also taurus season and as a natal taurus sun, I celebrate all the venusian repose that such a period entails. The grand fucking off of it all. For me, the moment has also been characterized by a fitting amorousness, a surprise romance that I didn’t see coming, for the way it has existed out of bounds, relationally and otherwise. Let’s just say it’s messy. After a period that has been dry of compelling romantic opportunity, relatively ascetic living (exercise, healthy eating, abstinence from smoking and sex), and a focus on work intended to break my habit of prioritizing the romantic, it’s a crack in the structure of things. It’s somewhat scary for a number of reasons, not least of which being that I’m recently untethered from the grips of something else. “You’ve punctured my solitude,” Maggie Nelson writes to her now partner Harry in The Argonauts. “It had been a useful solitude.” I reread Nelson’s memoir and other works of hers obsessively after moving to New York, largely as an accompaniment to my longing, but that is perhaps to be left for the aforementioned stubborn grief piece. But yes, you’ve punctured my solitude, the one time I felt really on top of it. It almost seems a gesture of self-sabotage, but why then, does it feel so right? Can’t I allow myself this without the sharp cast of judgement? A girlfriend says I’m lovedrunk… glug glug glug.
The past year has importantly been inflected with friendship as a primary relational structure and the way it can be punctuated with romance. Lately I’ve been reflecting on the amorphous nature of time and my longstanding relationships, those that have gone for ten, fifteen years, entire lifetimes, arcs, and identities. Those that have held me through transition or reappeared after some time and honor all of who I am today. Some may have you believe it’s a tall order, and it maybe it is, but that’s none of my business. I have historically feared separation by time, but experience through age has shown me its virtue. The way you can pick up with someone after years, the way distance intentionally imposed or otherwise can heal or transform. That said, I also struggle with time’s preciousness, reminded in moments that nothing is promised. I hate reckoning with the what ifs and hold a certain vitriol for those who take life for granted. It’s all so precious and in a world ever on the edge of disaster, of doomsday clocks, and a systemically integrated violent carelessness for human life, I have an impatience for mindless disregard. I wonder about the line between a kind of patient acceptance and what I call “disaster brain.”
My oscillation with this feels punctuated in part due to reading Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) alongside Jamie Hood’s tremendously affecting newsletter regards, marcel, which is a bit about Proust and a lot about other topics that pique Ms. Hood’s luxuriantly contemplative attention. I pray my impatience with this essay does her justice, but I can’t more emphatically recommend reading her in whatever way you can find. Her book How to Be A Good Girl shook me with a recognition and kinship in a way few texts have. She’s a writer whose work has deeply moved me and has brought me into a deeper feeling of presence. I’m grateful that we have become friends. The list of those who could inspire me to read Proust is very short. In a recent dispatch “V. On Possession” she weaves Proust, Annie Ernaux, and a particularly ripe Joan Harris née Holloway storyline in Mad Men together, contemplating desire in brilliant symphony, albeit in a different way than considered here. I won’t expound on it much—you should just read it—but I’ve been returning to her in conversation with Proust naming, “love—like writing, like death—stretches, shortens, exhausts, and collapses time.”
In addition to friendship that has spanned great swaths of life, I’ve also found myself considering relationships that are relatively young, but feel kind of ancient. This happens especially in my relationships with other queer and trans people, which frequently find me confounded by the ways boundaries are blurred along relational structure and desire. A handful of people who I feel close to now first occurred to me as crushes or at least romantic question marks. These relationships sparked with the thrill of falling in love, even if lacking in the realm of immediate sexual desire. I wonder often if this is a flaw of my system, if I’m just a seeping body of feeling, desperate to a claim to love in some way, ascribing dramatic meaning to every little thing. What does it mean to have the rush of deep belonging with someone you barely know or who you have not truly seen until you do? What changes to reveal these things? I’m not sure, but sometimes drugs help. One day I’ll tell you about falling in love with you just before my birthday and the ways I was kept up seeking out every bit of you, for the ways you made me real and said all the things I wanted to (we’re friends now, which I think is what it might have been about all along).
After telling my mother about one of these points of elevated interest, the subject of which was a woman, she said with all confidence “Oh, I just don’t think you’ve had a close girlfriend in a long time. Girlfriends can be very close.” Beyond the fact that my mother has very little knowledge of the actual goings on of my social life, this hit me as wildly off base. Probably in part because she was reinforcing the hetero framework that I’ve reinforced so often myself. Could she, my primary model of normative womanhood truly understand the depth of feeling that I’m naming queer intimacy? The gall. Still, I had the resounding echo of her assertion playing in my head on repeat. It revealed something about my relationships that I think I may have left out for some time. The more I think about it, the more I think she is both right and wrong. If this line of thinking reads messy, it’s because it is, and I don’t really care to tidy it.
[There is something here about an abandonment of queer being, of my attempts to assimilate my womanhood into heterosexual structure for my own personal affirmation. The way cis men have historically offered something compelling that feels so deeply separated from my social life, my ethics, my knowing. Chalk it up to a psychoerotic fixation on being loved in this specific way to fulfill something long ago lost, noble feminine suffering, the works. There is something so savory about emotional distance and one’s journey to fill in the gaps—psychic motherhood as the most elevated act of service there is. The separation of church and state confounds that which is holy, so that I cannot place my sense of the erotic in what I know of love. That is to say, what I’ve made my typical sexual mode has obscured other relationships so much so that I have struggled to fathom their forms entirely. If the sexual fixation is relegated to masculinity, strong feelings for anything that falls outside of its most strict construct confuse. Perhaps the feelings with nowhere to go have something to do with drought, deprivation, a lifetime of on-and-off not-belonging and the rush of the reminder, the truer embrace. I’m babbling, but I think the ones that know, will know, you know?]
Truthfully, I think that I’m somehow unable to differentiate between the categories of friendship and romance is actually a symptom of a fallacy within dominant culture that suggests these are so wildly disparate. Obviously boundaries along the lines of relational form are warranted for any number of reasons, but it seems an extension of the straight values of marriage as an isolating reality that delineates things so deeply and keeps us apart to maintain the economic and social flow of gender disparity and other infrastructural aspects of white supremacist heteropatriarchy. Anyway, I’ve gotten much too deep and definitive about it all. Let the mass seep freely.
This playlist, inspired by the short window of time that the peony is in season, is about deluge. Leaning into reckless feeling, loving without fear, beyond rationality and circumstance. Orchestrating figurative love letters for a new flame that doesn’t yet have the clarity of language. Beginning as a tight ball and bursting with it, becoming ragged and unkempt, like the flower does as it opens. Loving the edges and irrationalities. both/and. Romancing your friends. “The peace you get and the hope you feel when you outside staring at the moonlight” (Junglepussy). The grand delusion and believing again. The expansiveness of unfettered intimacy. Joni Mitchell singing “didn’t it feel good?” Because we would already be saying “I love you” if we weren’t fucking. Wishing you an overflowing cup always— V
tracklist:
someone to call my lover - janet jackson
disillusioned - daniel caesar
body - summer walker
give it to me - swv
kandy - fever ray
shiver - fever ray
sorbet - kelela
no mop - roddy ricch
B.A.B.E. - sault
nectar - justmoni
help me- joni mitchell
get happy/happy days are here again (feat. judy garland) - barbara streisand
call me irresponsible - nancy wilson
love… can be so wonderful - the temprees
sweet - lana del rey
you take me high (feat. tendai) - t.williams
lydia - chastity belt
heart storm (feat. NAO) - serpentwithfeet
let the light in (feat. father john misty) - lana del rey
i know you, i live you - chaka kahn
contigo aprendí - simone
ocean floor (feat. wiki) - junglepussy
i’m pressed - serprentwithfeet
your sweet love - lee hazlewood
when i think of you - janet jackson
french lessons - mykki blanco & kelsey lu
send one your love - stevie wonder
panties an bra - city girls
CPR - summer walker
baby - summer walker
i’ve known the garden - res
you came to me - beach house
if i ever fall in love (original acapella) - shai
finale - julia holter