History Of Violence

The summer that we met, my boyfriend and I spent an awful amount of time splayed out like whales on picnic blankets.

In the park across from his house; in the sprawling fields that lay, suspiciously, in the middle of D.C.; on the roof of my house, I could go on. In those moments, nothing mattered. Except, maybe, the rain that was supposed to arrive later in the afternoon, or the sound of his chest beating against his t-shirt, or the song that I would play next and whether he would like it (as if the future of our relationship hinged on a two-hour playlist); or, perhaps most acutely, the creeping sense of anxiety I felt when he stared at me. When he saw me.

Those days I spent in a frenzy: constructing a future that could only be capacitated by someone with an insatiable appetite for the utopian.

Nothing mattered, and yet, so did everything. Our love, in its emergence, was total guesswork: a series of misfortunes and mistakes that forced us to confront the parts of ourselves we wished desperately to reject, even as they drew us closer to each other.  That summer, then, was a kind of utopian failure.

—

The first mistake occurred, coincidentally, during one of those first days that we spent clung together on the picnic blankets. My head was on his chest as I read from a battered collection of Rimbaud poems. Somewhere along the way, his hands found my hair. And then: his fingers were running through my dark brown curls. We found a pattern this way, a kind of strange rhythm: his hand pulsing through my hair at the speed of each line.

I finished a poem, closed the book, and looked up at him. He smiled at me and without hesitation: I wasn’t expecting your hair to be so soft, like mine. What does that mean? I sat up. You know, I thought it would be coarser? Harder? You mean like black hair? Does it excite you that my hair is “like yours?” His mouth forms into a frown. You know that’s not what I meant.

And I did, of course, but the moment felt like a betrayal: I was suddenly a casualty. I felt, for the first time, that he did not — could not — see me, at least not in the way that I could.

 I was betrayed — not by him — but by the distance that whiteness afforded him. And I was devastated: by the reality that, beyond all the love he could feel for me, the shadow of history would sit squarely between us forever.

What’s more: history’s shadow could rob me of myself entirely; and more acutely, it could rob us of each other. I know, babe. I know.

I put my head back on his chest. He puts his hands back into my hair. I count the number of times my heart beats per second.

—

In 1920, W.E.B DuBois published “The Comet” — a bizarre piece of speculative fiction. The story goes: a comet strikes New York City, and everyone disappears upon immediate impact. That is: everyone except a man – black – and a woman – white. At the end of the world, interracial consummation feels – for once – a total possibility. What strange marvel that their love, in whatever mangled and corrupted form it emerges, could spark the end of the original American romance: the intimate bonds between conquest and touch; between intimacy and biological warfare.

But of course, in predictable fashion: the woman’s family arrives from the ashes and their love is buried away.

Tucked under the rug of history, a tent pitched between nowhere and nowhere.

—

DuBois wrote “The Comet” amidst his own history of atrocity; the Influenza pandemic was ravaging the Western world, the First World War had ended just shy of two years prior, and the Red Summer of 1919 — a collated, dystopic string of white supremacist violence — still held indelibly in the American collective consciousness. “The Comet'' thus poses the question: Is it possible to love against history?

—

Those mornings when I wake up before him, I sit up against the wall and stare at him. I see his body and I see love. I see his body and I see an entire history of violence next to me; I see the fields pillaged and burned and biological warfare and the mangled dream of conquest. I am still, to an extent, tortured by the sense that my love for him could never be extracted from the violent histories that brought us together.

—

D.C. Pride 2019: in waiting for my friends who are notably and obsessively late for everything, I decide to pitch a seat in the middle of Dupont Circle. In front of me, seas of red and blue; armbands; the fray of a thousand cropped t-shirts; whistles, pom-poms, glitter; a queer utopia constructed out of total absence and the need – the deep need – to exaggerate a sociality under constant erasure. In front of me: an older white man stands staring wildly. He walks towards me, places his hand on my shoulder, and turns his head to the side. You are so beautiful. They don’t make boys like you anymore – lean, light, exotic. You’re a walking carnival. What are you doing later? He doesn’t speak? You playing tough or what? Fucking stupid. He walks away, hands tucked into his shorts.

That night, I spent two hours in the shower: rubbing and rubbing and rubbing until I was raw. 

—

For so long, white men have constructed a ruse of me, whom they adore. To love my fetishized mirror image is, for them, a gesture of intense personal growth and transformation. I’m doing it, they proclaim like little children, I am loving my enemy. What bullshit, that they truly believed that in desiring me, they could escape the grips of the normative. What bullshit, all that I have given up of myself to be wanted. What total, utter bullshit.

  Once, on a third or fourth date, a boy pulled me into an empty alleyway and pinned his hands to my shoulders. I think I love you. You do so much for me. I learn so much from you. About you.

There are things which are not about what they are about. This is one of them.

—

All of those years I spent in an unbearable darkness, looking at the version of myself – which they loved, who was not me. I watched him disintegrate, reform, and tick tick tick like a bomb, detonating at the speed of dystopia.

Those years, I wanted to be wanted more than I wanted to be history.

—

The distance between me and the white men who desire me – for one reason or another – engenders perpetual conflicts, dilemmas, disputes of intimacy. Our differences — our racial differences — flourish and reproduce themselves in our closeness. Every touch we share is traced with an impossible lack, every kiss a strange, fucked-up memory of violent antagonisms. How does one escape the histories that live inside of us, squared neatly into our skin?

Those days when we’re laying down together, or cooking dinner, or laughing in the car, our closeness is a secret rhythm – code we share alone. Those days, the world around us disintegrates, empires tumbling over one by one. Other days, I feel like a total stranger to him.

 In the days where nothing feels exceptional, we have learned to live in absolute juxtaposition: total closeness and unbearable separation exist at once, all of the time.

—

In the beginning of our relationship, I spent hours repeating and explaining a phrase: before we met, I was bad. I guess what I was trying to articulate was less that our relationship made me good or better or happier, but — in a shameful sense — that I was no longer consumed by a deep sacramental loneliness. And what did that make him? A surrogate object? Something in the place of the white boys before him who came and went by the end of a deep breath?

Shame. When I told him that I was bad, I was trying to say: I am enthralled by my own personal shame. I was hard to get and now, because of him, I am hard to get rid of. A new shame in and of itself. How do you admit that you need someone who has the power to destroy you?

—

Dispatch, 8/5/20

I want a biography of James Baldwin & Norman Mailer and how the black boy looked at the white boy & could only see a clump of grey, but I want to make my intentions really clear that the biography itself is a metaphor; that I am the black boy looking at the white boy & marveling in the blankness of my affection.

—

Other notes on history: it resides uncomfortably in prose. Some things – like Gods – are so beyond us.

—

A dilemma of intimacy is a dilemma of impossibility. It does not make the relationship more difficult. It is never about difficulty. Difficulty can be overcome – stomped on, seduced, rectified, made sense of. Impossibility is destructive. A total wreck.

—

 There was the day after the first incident, when he approached me to apologize. I stopped him before he got to sorry. I couldn’t bear what that word foreclosed — a betrayal, a wrongdoing, a mistake. But more than that, I couldn’t accept what I already knew; that sorry could not topple the empires in front or behind us. Sorry could not repair the generations of destruction, loss, and dispossession that led up to that moment. Sorry could not bridge that huge, insurmountable gap between us. Sorry could amount only to a kind of pitiful courtesy, and what good could that do me? There would be tons of other incidents, tons of odd missteps and accidental jabs, a pile of horrible things learned and unlearned by our personal histories. What would that first sorry amount to, then, if not a reminder of our recursive insuffencies? If not to say we are so bad for each other, and who is ever willing to admit something like that?

  I’ve moved on, I don’t wanna talk about it, it’s fine, I say. A crude slap of negation. What I meant was: an apology is a waste of air. The damage was done centuries before we arrived at the picnic blanket. Your words are mere detritus.

—

  Impossibility — which, when boiled down, can be reduced to the childish dismay in not getting what you want — is terrifying because it complicates one’s comfort with the things, the people, the places, and the circumstances in their life that can be.

 As a kid, I remember waking up from my dreams with an immediate and lasting anger. How dare you, I admonished the sun for waking me up and taking me out of the world that, above all else, belonged to me. Perhaps what is devastating about waking up from a dream — a great dream that is — is not the dream’s disruption (the TV fizzes, the fall is cut short of the landing, the boy is gone before you got a chance to kiss him) but the realization that follows sometime after that you are alive in a world that demands your disaster, your suffering, and your mortality, and there is nothing, nothing you can do about it.

—

  To try to love a boy against the grain of its impossibility is to be exiled from your own life; to see yourself from the outside, a spectator and witness to your own disaster; to watch as you — or the you that they have invented for you  — push a comically large boulder up a mountain; to see the men that you have tried to love at the summit, torsos collapsed in deep and insidious laughter. Isn’t it strange that  endear sounds like endure if you don’t listen hard enough?

—

  Strangely enough, intimacy persists: a private language without grace. I tuck my hands into his shoulder, and we unfold: a backwards map of life together.

—

  Sometimes our prose resides uncomfortably in our history.

—

  Christmas Day 2020: We’re sitting in my attic as he goes through a photo album of me. He’s seen it hundreds of times, and still insists for me to find it every day he comes over because you look so fucking cute in every single fucking photo.

   Unprompted, he asks me: Does it bother you? Being in a relationship with me? Why, because you’re white? Not really no. I love you, and shouldn’t that be enough? I know I know I just don’t want you to feel like I’m dating you because of it. I love you and you being black is not consequential or inconsequential, it just is. So, don’t make me feel like that.

Even in the wake of assurance, the distance multiplies.

 —

Intimacy is complicated, yes. But it feels all the more complicated when the person you love, you fear, does not — cannot — really see you. This is altogether not enough to abandon the idea that they do, in fact, love you. But how do you make sense of a love that can only accrue at a distance?

Maggie Nelson: And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?

—

How does one love their shadow?

—

Dispatch: 1/21/21

Don’t you get it?

Not even disaster keeps the world from spinning. 

Let’s keep dancing

                                until they get us.

—

Love cannot save us from total impossibility. But it can bring us out of it. It can force us to see beyond it, to get over it, to let that boulder drag itself slowly down the mountain. To love in the face of disaster is to prepare for total devastation. It is precisely because love cannot save us that we seep in its invention.

Love is not enough. It is us, and us alone, which is always promised.

In the horizon of desire made impossible by history, I sit squarely in the clouds: a bright thief of light.

—

The black boy stares at the white boy and – and – and -and – and -and -and

—

Roland Barthes: I myself cannot construct my love story to the end. I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others.

—

Nothing can prepare you for impossibility. Nothing can make you anticipate, predict, or accept that what you want is also, at the same time, what fucks you up, what disarms you, what makes you see everything sideways. Nothing can teach you how to translate love’s strange, mystical language and contort it into something that works for you. Nothing — absolutely nothing —  in the total history of violence, can point you upwards towards the mountain and stop that boulder from crashing down behind you.

Dilemmas will remain dilemmas.Your love will remain disastrous. It is you, alone, who can halt the stars racing down the sky.

—

      Here is the thing about impossibility: it has no place in the world.

—

“The Comet” (2021):

In a dream, I wake up next to a boy in a crowded bed. On the nightstand beside us, a stack of books crowds the surface: a library copy of a Foucault reader, the selected works of Rimbaud, a reprint of a McKay novella, I could go on. On top of the books, a cup of water is polluted with cigarette ash. American Spirit. Beside the books, a square white nightstand. It’s Guernica outside the window, and a bomb is slowly becoming a crater, and a city is slowly becoming a shipwreck, and a beach is slowly becoming a funeral home for beached whales.

 Quietly, I fold myself back under the blankets and stare at him as he twists and turns out of the sheets. The sheets above him an ocean. A wave.

I watch him as he twists and contorts through his violent dull sleep, a one man act on a crowded stage. I watch him and I look for the details — to remember him, to know that it’s him: the freckles that denote his nose, the long strips of hair shocked with bleach, the perpetually pouted mouth, his red cheek pressed into a pillow. I swear I have never seen him before, and yet, I know this stranger so intimately. Before I can stop myself, I say: Tomorrow is never enough. The alarm clock blares and flies off the nightstand.

Hmm? And he’s awake and spluttering and breathing heavily. He sits up, finally, and places his back against the cold wall. The world is going to end, you know? I had a dream about it. The world is going to end and we’ll be dead by tomorrow. I can’t listen, so I put my head on his shoulder and I whisper — I’ll be here baby, until the end of the 21st century, when hills give way to a thousand boulders. When history is not enough for the both of us. I’ll be right here. My meteorite, my meteorite.