“Amulets depicting a particular demon were practical means of protection against the creature itself and were also used to protect against and cure illness and other misfortunes.” –note scribbled somewhere in the Met

For a few months a few years ago i spent most of my weekends catering reception dinners for large-ish weddings at a hotel in Williamsburg. Always a bride, never a bridesmaid, i had never really observed standard marriage rituals. Most of my friends are unmarried, and both of my brothers married very young with complete success. i thought marriage was a kind of spontaneous response to meeting someone you simply could not be without–with the caveat that this feeling turns into much more breakable emotions under extreme duress and major life changes. Marriage was a game of chance, and i side here with Joan Didion’s explanation of gambling in the White Album: “Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness.” In extreme contrast to this approach, catering put me in relation to these people whose lives seemed to have been geared, carefully, toward this moment that would no doubt be a filmic pause on forever. Everyone ate and drank and told tales about how it had always been so. Many of the couples had met in middle or high school. At the end of each shift, i’d head straight up to the rooftop bar and, as i drank with my coworkers, ask myself again: “Who are these people? Who taught them how to do this?”

My second marriage had not so much come apart as it had, like a superhero’s plainclothes costume–shredded and pedestrian in the wake of demonic, mutant transformations–exploded its seams. When i’d g-chatted my first ex-husband for legal details about that divorce, he’d typed without pausing: “Oh God, you’re not getting married again are you?” i’d spent the previous decade immersing myself in queer, Feminist, and Marxist theory trying to unthink heteronormative patterns of desire and consumption. Six months after moving to Brooklyn i was pregnant, about to be married to a man, and it was looking as if my positive pregnancy result had spontaneously aborted my academic career. i’d spent so many years working against this sort of either/or dualistic black and white good and bad bullshit, but in the wake of my move i just somehow–i’d lost so much of the emotional scaffolding one earns from spending her whole life in the same small town–let everything go out of focus.

Many teachers and professors had altered the course of my life with training, tools, and even advice. i was never baptized and my grandparents’ attempts to counter that lost enchantment never stuck. School was my favorite Althusserian ISA, and when i was younger my teachers would describe to my mother, much to her genuine confusion, a child she found unrecognizable at home. Until i actually started sleeping with my professors, this was a divide to which most of my lovers also probably bore witness. So perhaps, for instance, you can imagine the power i relinquished to the person who introduced me to theory and cultural studies. Neither of us ever stood a chance. One afternoon, in the middle of a fairly standard discussion of some work of 20th century Japanese literature or other, he stalked up to the chalkboard and drew a triangle, and then proceeded to give a very basic description of Rene Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. i put up no defense as the idea of mimetic desire overtook my analytical toolbox. The amount of academic work this tiny alteration alone produced should have been the kind of armor i needed to avoid these kinds of sensitivities to grand narratives and normative desires.

i’d lost more than academia when i drove away from the South. When i was an undergrad, i fell for someone who spent most of his time thinking about and making music. i was already fairly academic about my own rock n roll obsessions and spent most of my time listening to music and reading books, so we worked it out. He was taking piano lessons at the time, and in the music department at school there were random pianos available for students. Some afternoons we’d walk across campus and climb up the concrete steps to the practice rooms. He’d gently nudge the doors with a booted foot until finding an empty room. i’d sit lightly next to him on the bench and either read or just put my book down and rest my head on his lap. He hadn’t really figured out how to play well yet, but i’d attached to the idea of this kid who had started out as a drummer in Panhandle punk bands needing to understand how all of the parts worked. Long and slim but with drummer arms and a beat in his head that would drown out whatever conversation he was supposed to be responding to, people thought he was slow, but i knew better. i was having trouble getting used to how he always had so many people around, so I gladly tagged along on these plunky breaks, listening to him tip and tap count while i pretended to read. Afterwards we’d wander over to the music library, the only place he could get his hands on NME, which was still in weekly newsprint form. One day, he tugged me over to the stacks and said, “Hey, check this out. Can you believe someone wrote a book about this?” He was holding Dick Hebdige’s Subculture and the Meaning of Style. i finally had a bible.

Over the years, Subculture and the Meaning of Style indeed became the cornerstone of my academic work. Eventually i found queer theory and its production of sustained, complicated, relevant analyses and archivals of subcultures. Queer theory promised a land where people were smart, brave, and shameless. I’d found a “discipline” committed to elongating the utopian possibilities its subjects provoke, and it was there or nowhere, i guess. Or at least, it was there and then nowhere. The problem was, i hadn’t yet figured out how impossibly queer my own desires and interests and hopes and dreams were. i just thought i was a colossal fuck-up, so i quit all of it. “Grow up!” everyone kept yelling at me, but i’d spent the last five years working on a dissertation arguing for the right not to grow up. i was at a standstill.

These days i wake up and wonder why, when there are new hands graceful and thin and other hands boxy and callused that reach for me, faces close with real live smells and textures and the actual sensuality of presence–of my child and of my lover–why when there are new things happening every second does this velvety nostalgia turn, the second i let it in, into such a bright star? Why is the art of losing so impossibly difficult to master? Here is Audre Lorde, from “Poetry is Not a Luxury”: “Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves–along with the renewed courage to try them out.” Okay Audre, i take that to mean that i can shelve that Marie Kondo book all of New York seems to be obsessed with for a while and hold onto my past for a little bit longer. It might yet come back to life.