White fountains at the end of the mind
At the moment I am living inside Eat Butterflies With Me, Patricia Lockwood’s review of Nabokov’s new uncollected writings. Everything else is elsewhere.
Like I don’t remember if I bathed today but I think I did. I ate some peanut butter from the jar. I need to buzz my head or touch up my roots, but I’m not going to do either. Who cares what I look like? I’ve been in sweatpants since I got here, California, two weeks ago. There’s a velcro boot over a sockless foot that probably contains a fractured bone, so I couldn’t go anywhere easily, even if I could drive, which I can’t, since I don’t have a car. And where would I go, with this pandemic on? Who would I see? I was born and raised in this town, but I don’t know anyone here except for my sisters, my mom, and her husband. Orange leaves, tabletop buttes, strip malls, train tracks.
Like you, since March I have been craving people. I have daydreamed about fucking strangers, and have longed to slither through a crowded bar, and have watched movies set in New York City with actors bravely striding up Fifth Avenue, brushing shoulders and fingering turnstiles, caressing faces and kissing lips, addressing other people through naked air—no plastic, no plexiglass—with my teeth on edge. Every film released prior to March 2020 feels like an orgy of maskless public congregation, from Elf to Eyes Wide Shut (especially Eyes Wide Shut, even with the masks). Post-pandemic, they should all be ranked one step higher in the MPAA rating system, except for Carpenter’s The Thing, which is one of the few to have been made more relevant by COVID-19.
Like you, I feel greedy (envision the sealed eyes, the moist snouts of a rooting litter) for such abandon, yet horrified to see it enacted, even in fantasy. Before is a lost world that I can only approach in reverse: With every step back from it, my perspective changes; I have only begun to apprehend the size of it now that I am very far away. In California again, for the fourth month of this endless year, I’ve finally started to feel true loneliness, differing from my prior disconnect like coming to after a night of tequila shots differs from holy resurrection.
Because for the first time, here with a hostile natal family and more responsibility than I can easily take on, I feel truly alone. Since March I have yearned for dear ones, to be sure, but I have also never been starved for human touch, or questioned whether there would be other queers for me if I needed them. Such yearning that I’ve done has happened from the privileged security of a small group of Brooklyn queers, and the knowledge that my gay family in the Bay are in close, regular touch, if nothing else.
But things have changed here, or come to a head, or something. Surrounded by straight people, swimming in transphobia, and milked of emotional wherewithal, I’m sort of wallowing the afterbirth of a breaking point. Without going into detail, my already jagged relationship with my natal family has almost disintegrated, but I still can’t leave here, and I will have to keep returning, maybe for the rest of my life. Despite not having lost my gay family, my girlfriend, my community, I feel now as powerless and alone as I did when I was a teenager, alone from even myself. Which is to say, I feel depressed.
If depression is absence, where do you go? White fountains at the end of the mind.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
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