don’t know who I’m kidding, imagining you care

and I could stand here waiting, a fool for another day

For 4+ years I’ve been writing mostly for performance or for social media, and I’ve gotten very used to being able to describe my work beforehand, so I’m gonna do that. This is a piece I wrote based on a meme I was trying to make that had turned into an introduction to something I’d planned to read at the virtual Sorority Series show on 1/21. But then it kind of became its own thing that wanted to be read. It is by no means a finished piece, but it’s a pretty good example of what I’ll be writing here. Thanks for reading/subscribing! x

In a little over a month, I’ll be turning a big age that shall remain unnamed. This, combined with the forced self-reflection of semi-isolation that we’ve all experienced during the pandemic, has led me to a particularly nasty outbreak of nostalgia. 

When you’re too young to have many regrets, nostalgia is fun. I remember being like 12 and laughing with my friends about how “when we were little” we used to stack multiple pairs of socks on one leg then scrunch them down. When I was in high school, I was a raver for one summer before being caught staying out all night and hopelessly grounded.

(So, if you don’t know, some people had rave names. I will reveal my ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE rave name here, eventually.)

At one party, I met a girl who had named herself Twink, she said, after one of Rainbow Brite's sprites. I tried to fact check that on google some years later, but the results for “twink” are a little difficult to wade through, as you might imagine. It’s true, though, Twink was Rainbow’s buddy, a furry little white guy with a red nose. 

Anyway, my friends and I were obsessed with cartoons and music from the 80s, from a time before most of us could really truly remember, but technically we were there, and that’s all that mattered. It was around that time that we started dressing super 80s-inspired as well. My best friend’s big sister would curl her lip at our outfits and sneer “I was ACTUALLY there, you know. It wasn’t that great then either.” I thought that was kind of mean, and for her information, we were curating the best parts of 80s fashion with a contemporary flair! I wanted to ask why she was so bitter, but I was scared of her. 

Imagine my surprise at the horror I felt a few years ago when those stretchy plastic tattoo chokers from the late 90s came back. (Me, a grown woman in dog hair encrusted leggings to an adorable, sharply-dressed teenager: “Well, actually, in my day, cool people didn’t wear those. Those were sooo dELiA*s catalogue!”) 

Once you’re old enough to have accumulated all the regrets and unfinished business you could ever need to write the memoir you’re going to regret not starting sooner and probably never finish, nostalgia isn’t that fun anymore. Nostalgia feels to me like someone is taking a still-smoking, extinguished match and trying to relight it against my spine. My insides boil over, white hot with something long-cooled.

I was at Sprouts the other day when I suddenly took notice of the generic gentle guitar man song that was playing. I found myself mouthing the words to an old song I knew I didn’t even really like when it was popular, but it moved me. I began openly weeping in front of a wall of Icelandic skyr to Duncan Sheik’s 1996 one hit wonder “Barely Breathing,” and I still don’t really know why. 

Here I’ll confess that I did something very bad and went to Marshall’s last month to pick up a couple of Christmas gifts. Crying at TJ Maxx is kind of my thing, but I had never cried at a Marshall’s, so that part felt safe, despite the pandemic risks. They were playing exclusively Christmas music, of course, which generally does not make me feel terribly emotional except for “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” a song that fills me with an immeasurable sense of wonder and gratitude to be gay, because it reminds me of this one year at Palm Spings Pride in early November, when I was partying with a big group in one of those rooms at The Ace with a patio. Some incredible genius had the idea to unseasonably play the Mariah Carey Christmas classic, and it turned into a full-on sing along conga line with drag queens, like a scene from the queer christmas movie we all deserve. It was utterly spiritual. 

But back to Marshall’s, a store announcement interrupted the Christmas music, and there must have been some kind of glitch because the song that came on immediately after was “Hang With Me” by Robyn. I involuntarily started dance-crying in the privacy of the most deserted aisle, the one where they put the blank notebooks that say BELIEVE or WHISKED AWAY in that terrible font across the front. I wanted to be whisked away to the gay club with my friends, dancing and singing so close. 

One of the biggest things that’s been bothering me about reaching a significant age during this time, besides the fact that I can’t afford my Botox aka forehead kombucha, is the feeling that I’d been straddling a threshold I didn’t want to be crossing in the first place, and now there’s been this seismic blast and I have no idea on which side I’m going to land. I want to be the person I was right before all this, but I’m also aware that that person was becoming more terrified by the day of how already far away she was feeling from the version of herself who was dancing with her friends in the gay club in 2010, when the Robyn song came out. Or even just two years ago.

When, if, this thing ends, I want to be all of the best selves I ever was over the years, in addition to the person I’m becoming. I want to feel young and free, but with the wisdom of my big age and everything I’ve learned nourishing me, sitting satisfying in my belly instead of feeling like a comedically unnecessary anvil tied around my already free-falling feet. Is it possible that this crazy glitch in time can help create that kind of reality? I really fucking hope so.