On voices
A little over two years ago, I went to St. Mark’s Church for a trans reading through the Poetry Project. I brought someone I was trying and failing to be interested in, a dyke whose face was nice and whose job in set design I found fascinating and who left me cold as my first New York winter. They were the first prospective lover I’d met since moving to Brooklyn the month previous, and for some reason ending things before we slept together seemed inauspicious. Unfortunately, this didn’t make the idea of sex with them any more appealing. When the reading was over, instead of joining them for a drink, I went back to my apartment and wrote instead.
Of poet Kay Gabriel: “Her highlights golden the lowest strands of her shoulder-length hair. Her voice is lively and hilarious and hard.” Of poet Andrea Abi-Karam: Their voice was “monotonous and hypnotic,”; “I think the stapling act has really hit its stride.” I had seen a previous incarnation of my friend Andrea’s performance—for which they read aloud from pieces of paper before using a medical stapler to affix them to their body—multiple times in the Bay the year before, once in San Francisco while on coke a femme friend had flirted out of a bevy of white tech bros in the wood-paneled depths of their Temescal apartment. For the reading at St. Mark’s, Andrea and their performance partner, Lix Z, stapled Mylar instead of computer paper to Andrea’s skin. “The Mylar is loud and distracting and disturbing, much more so than the staple gun,” I wrote in my journal, although this did not prevent another friend in attendance from fainting over their little carnage.
The crowd at St. Marks that night was “trans and dykey and gothy and hot. Cherry-stem neck tattoos. Gold glasses frames. Asymmetrical haircuts.” I chatted with [redacted], “who has a neat yellowy mullet and pretty green eye makeup, a band across their eyes like a ring of Saturn.” But looking again at my journal entry, and at what I’ve written here, it’s the voices, of the readers, of the many trans people in attendance, of the friend who fainted—a podcaster infamous for her dulcet tones—of even my dull date, with their Texan ponderousness, that seem to have made the deepest impression on me.
I still can’t quite believe I’m back in Brooklyn for good. My body has not yet assimilated this information, and the resultant anxiety burns like an electrical charge. On call for disaster that I’m supposed to believe won’t come, I flicker like busted neon.
This always happens. My autoimmunity lays low when I’m overworked, stretched too thin, too busy to think about tomorrow, let alone an hour from now. Relaxation, or the opportunity to think about the future, is what makes me sick again. With no vanguard against which to defend myself—a book manuscript, a shitty relationship, a pandemic-related crisis—the drawbridge drops, and in marches a victory parade of piping-hot medical bills and pricy prescriptions to debate over the phone with harried insurance representatives.
I counterattack with self-care. My little yoga and my little meditations; my reliable eight hours of sleep and unfailing niacinimide. At 32, I’m draconian about my regimen, which is onerous, and tedious, and often boring, and sometimes expensive. Not in a fun way, like a trip to the spa, but in a heartbreaking way, like taking my precariously insured medications exactly as prescribed, even though I would rather stockpile it in case I lose my job (and thus, my insurance) another time.
My specialists would not approve of my cutting corners to forestall against a bad future; my medication is most efficacious at its prescribed dosage, as medications tend to be. But neither have my specialists taken into account the good it does my heart to open my closet door and find hundreds of doses wrapped in silver plastic, standing at attention like good little soldiers, in wait for the next emergency.
The snow is piled high on the sidewalk, but today it’s warm for February. When I meditate, it’s quiet enough that I can hear birds singing in the empty courtyard below my widow.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
♥️
I was at that reading. I forget who with. I remember meeting Douglas Martin and talking to him there. One of those crowds where you look around and relax, and most other people there do the same.