David Bowie, In Memoriam

Bowie is dead.

The words stood oppressively still on the screen, in contrast with my head, which was beginning to spin. What is she saying, I thought. She can’t mean David Bowie. She did mean David Bowie, of course. It was hard to comprehend, because I started to realise that David had never really been alive the way she and I were alive.

He existed—and so he must still exist—in the sadness I feel when Five Years finally climaxes into a soaring chorus, in the image of Logan Lerman in the back of a pickup that invariably accompanies the opening guitar wail in Heroes.

I was technically still fifteen when Bowie first made an impression on me. I had heard Golden Years in the Heath Ledger comedy A Knight’s Tale when I was much younger, but it didn’t make me feel as much as Ashes To Ashes did ten minutes before I turned sixteen. Strung out in heaven’s high, hitting an all-time low. That’s precisely where I felt I was that night, one step into a more grown-up world. Songs have that nasty habit of being able to express your feelings in another person’s words and voice. Bowie’s songs, more so. His raw vocals make a line like ‘sordid details following’ feel like it carries a ton more emotional weight than it would read.

There’s a scene in this Canadian film called C.R.A.Z.Y where the teenage protagonist Zac paints his face like Ziggy Stardust and sings Space Oddity to the mirror. I love that scene, because Space Oddity Bowie wasn’t even remotely close to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars Bowie. Zac had appropriated the look to fit the Bowie he had constructed in his head. I think that’s what everyone did with Bowie. He was a construct more than a man. So of course we loved him.

I cried when it hit me that he was dead. I hadn’t cried over anyone’s death since Steve Irwin. Even I was surprised at how much he had meant to me. I didn’t cry because the world had lost him, because I had lost the part of myself that assured me he was going to live forever. It’s odd, because the music he made would always be there and it shouldn’t have mattered if he was there or not. But it did. The aura around that music would forever be tinted by the fact that he isn’t around anymore.

It’s selfish of me to be so affected, not by his death but by his caesurae to exist. I can’t deny that David had, in fact, existed regardless of what I thought of him. He was an iconoclast, a saviour to so many, and, if all his interviews are anything to go by, a genuinely nice person. He, and his music, had meant so much to many, many people. If so many people could have lost a piece of themselves all at once, it could only be through Bowie. That’s really what David was; a figure, larger than life, created out of the most powerful feelings in millions of people.

I will miss him, because he was a part of me. But I will also miss him because we have all lost him, his voice, his guitar playing, his acting, his incredible personality, and his ability to create magic with his stories about space, Major Tom, and the end of the world.

If you thought you’d blow our minds, Bowie, you sure did. Thanks for coming and meeting us.

Violence

You don’t beat me up
You aren’t chucking me out of the house
So maybe I should be grateful that you respect me as a person, just not as me.

But there’s violence in your words.

In how you say you love me, but you don’t approve of me
Because after twenty-years of sheltering me in a world where differences are celebrated, you want to teach me that I’m not going to get approval from everyone
Especially not you.

And there’s violence in the silences you keep

In the way you know when a post-it moves from my table to my bathroom mirror yet somehow fail to notice the rainbow I stuck on my cupboard door.

In how I can tell you that I was in love with a girl who wasn’t my girlfriend, but not that I have a crush on my friend.

In how I’m expected to understand where your anxiety and your tears come from without you attempting to comprehend that I like boys.

In how I’m expected to defend myself from relatives asking if this means I’ll never get married and have children like I always said I would
As if the decisions a seven-year-old makes about his adulthood are legal and binding
As if I promised then to be heterosexual and I’m going back on that now.

Mama’s just scared.
Is your head twisted enough to believe that it’s any scarier for her than it is for me?
Eight years knowing, six being afraid to tell you
Imagining your reaction being nothing like it is, but apprehensive that it just might be.
Fear was right.
Courage was wrong.
Just the opposite of what you’d taught me all my life.

You took a left off last laugh lane; you’re not coming back again

Faith
by Ashe Vernon

“I believe in boys with sad eyes and soft smiles.
I believe in girls who roar back at the thunder
and still kiss like the first time they fell in love.
I believe in the people who’s skin never felt like home to them,
so they carved home out of the dust beneath their shoes
and kept on going.
I believe in all the ones who are told they don’t belong.
I don’t think I belong either.
I don’t know what it means to “belong”
but I know the ones shouting have nothing to offer,
that fitting in is the fad diet we’re all starving ourselves to.
I believe in us.
The ones who have never felt good enough.
I believe in the girl next door, who likes to be called “her”
but who woke up, today, with a gender that felt like
hand spun wool and spilled milk,
and who still doesn’t know how to tell her mother.
I believe in the ones dating the wrong people
so their parents won’t have to know
who it is they want to love.
I believe in a fear like that.
I believe in the kindness of strangers
and I believe that turning a blind eye
isn’t what makes you bad.
It only makes you scared like the rest of us.
I believe people learn to be brave.
I believe in the hands picking flowers as much
as I believe in the hands that plant them.
Because sometimes our hearts are too big for our bodies
and they like to go bumping against each other–
sometimes,
love doesn’t mean what you think it does.
You and I don’t love the same, but we are,
all of us, out here loving.
I believe in the collection of fingerprints you pick up
from everything in the world you have ever touched.
If I believe in anything,
I believe that that
is enough.”

“Because sometimes our hearts are too big for our bodies.”

I don’t know what to feel. I try to cry, but I can’t. It feels like the appropriate response would be to cry. I screw my face up (I’m an ugly crier. I’ve watched myself in the mirror several times), but the tears don’t come. I don’t feel like crying. I go through a list of emotions—troubled, yearning, heartbroken, heavy, light, hanging on. Nothing fits. But I am hanging on. I’ve been hanging on since the night I lay down and discovered that I was realer than the characters in my head.

The universe tries to make childhood’s end less of a shock by having the mat pulled from under us. It hopes we won’t notice. But we notice, and we’re falling. Betrayed.

I talked, for hours, to a boy today. He’s going to be a paeleontologist and a weapons designer. His favourite dinosaur is Spinosaurus. His second favourite is Megalosaurus. He loves playing Minecraft.

He doesn’t stand still. He tells his stories in skips and sways—not of his sentences but of his legs and arms. He isn’t like me. I wanted to be a paelontologist, but my favourite dinosaur was Triceratops. I swayed when I talked, but I hated talking to the older boys. I never ended up becoming paeleontologist. At some point, I realised I didn’t want to. But I want to want to.

Conversations about childhood I have with grown ups centre around the general lack of responsibilities and excess of time. I nod and smile, but it’s far from the truth. There were responsibilities of magnitude, and there was never enough time to fulfill them. The waxing crescent moon was the eye of a monster and we had to get off the island before it opened completely. We didn’t consider then that it would just close again and that what we were really trying to escape was the revolution of the moon, whose each cycle brought us closer to the real monster.

We were beautiful, because we didn’t know it. Time was the apple. We were Adam, Eve and the serpent. All we ever wanted, then, was to grow up, because we saw the adult world through the veil of childhood. Maybe the veil can be kept on—children can be saved from growing up by their Peter Pan, their Catcher in the Rye. Or maybe all children, like me, have no choice.

You must always be a child at heart, the grown-ups say when everyone’s looking. But inside midnight bedrooms, they probably know that to grow up is to grow up completely. But we aren’t children, and we aren’t adults. We can’t be adults. We can’t remember what we lost, but we can’t forget that we lost something, and we can never deal with that.

“I was most happy when pen and paper were taken from me and I was forbidden from doing anything. I had no anxiety about doing nothing by my own fault, my conscience was clear, and I was happy. This was when I was in prison.”

— Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings

I need to remember this, if I’m to get through another year of college. Artistic perfection can go fuck itself. Give me that pen and paper.

First

The only thing I really remember is that it was sunny, not unusual for a summer late morning. I was young enough for my mother to have bathed and dressed me, and she was now drying my hair in the balcony. The scratchy sound of and sensation of the towel on my scalp was making me sleepy, but the ferocity with which my head was being thrust back and forth was making me nauseous, and I tried to focus on the street four floors below. What caught my eye wasn’t that the boy had no shirt on, but that his golden-brown skin seemed to make up for it. I pictured my own pale body in the mirror. I looked naked, like something was missing. This boy would have been overdressed in a t-shirt. His worn denim shorts hung precariously on his hips, reaching his kneecaps, and below that he was bare again, calves glistening in the sharp light, his bare feet kicking up tiny stones from the pavement. He looked about ten, but everyone looks older than they are when you’re a child. His lanky arms and the muscles in his athletic torso stretching with every stride were careless. I remember feeling queasy, as if my stomach was being pulled into my chest. I remember having to squirm where I stood because there was something pushing out against the front of my undies, making me uncomfortable in a way I since came to be obsessed with. I wonder if that’s how he felt; the lining of his denim shorts brushing against his skin.

Bow ties and black dresses

She’s standing with her cheek pressed against his. It’s the kind of photograph they would print out on glossy paper, frame and hang up in their separate bedrooms. The kind they’d find at the bottom of a musty shoebox twenty, thirty years from now, and it would make their hearts drop for a moment. Her hair looks different. A fringe covers half her forehead, and a few strands sweep over her eyes which look hazel in the light. If I squint, she almost looks like someone else. I feel a stab of guilt when I think, she should have been mine. She is so beautiful, so intelligent and so powerful, and she should have been mine so we could be the couple that made peers jealous and little boys like a twelve-year-old me have an ideal to aspire to.

His hair is blown back in an intentionally untidy way. His hair is always like that. His eyes look hazel too in the photograph. They look like eyes do before laughter, and the curves at the ends of his wide smile look like they’re about to break into laughter too. His lips are pink. The same pink they were when we were drunk on the bus, when I put my arm around his shoulders and forced myself to stop thinking about kissing him. He would taste like her now. The way my mouth tasted after all the times I had kissed her. He’s wearing a red bowtie.

What bothers me is that I’m just a part of her story, and barely a part of his. I’ve always wanted to be the biggest part of everyone’s story because I knew that I was worth more than a little inkjet printout on someone’s mirror. The last I saw, I’m an empty space on the glass that was going to be filled by a little inkjet printout of somebody else. Not him. He’s going to be on the wall, inside a frame with her, because I could never take a god damn decent photograph with her.

Writing about sex

I’m seventeen and I’m supposed to be studying. I’m sitting at my desk. I have open books in front of me, but I’m not filling them with equations and proofs. There are stories no one can read in them, spreading out from the centre of the notebook like ink from the nib of a pen held too long against the paper, because the ends of the book are too exposed.

About boys I go to school with. Younger boys with red cheeks and laughter in their eyes, and what I would do with them behind locked doors in storerooms and toilet stalls.

Boys on the football team, brown calves not yet hidden beneath coarse black hair, sweat trickling down their necks down their stinking jerseys. I wish I was good at sports so I could be on the team with them, showering with them, watching them soap their bodies and shut their eyes as the water runs over them.

Shorts and knee-socks, the smell of sweat and dust and deodorant, the touch of rough hands clammy and cold in the dark corridors on sunny November afternoons.

I would fuck half my school if I could. I can picture it. Hundreds of bodies writhing in pleasure, the burning sun and the burning sand all over us. Bodies of every size and colour, but mostly brown—the brown of too much football in too many free periods.

I’m so hard, it feels like I could rip out of my jeans. I pull down my zip and a few strokes later, it’s like I’m there with them. Fucking them and being fucked by them. Skin on skin, the sound and smell and touch almost real. I wipe the globules of semen from my hand on to the denim.

I’m afraid. Twenty-year-old me is afraid. I’m afraid sex is the only thing I can write about. All of my other sentences read like a child’s prose, and when I read them I want to tear them up or tear myself up. It’s like I’m seventeen, sitting at my study table, fucking my right hand instead of studying.

Sex Without Love

Double-bolting the front door and opening a new Internet Explorer window, at age ten, sex and love are never supposed to intersect. People who are in love can never have sex with each other. There is too much sweat and moaning.

Love is for the woman who will become your wife. You will have two children and live in a house with a picket fence and a pool in the backyard. In summer, you will sit on the verandah and eat watermelons. In winter, you will have stockings over the fireplace.

Sex is for the young men on the computer screen—their tan lines and perfect asses. They are beautiful when they do it, one’s ankles on the other’s shoulders as he lies on his back. The outlines of ribcages; skinny, hairless legs; red, bent knees don’t belong to lovers, but to playmates.

Even after scrawling your best friend’s name, in red, across the bathroom tiles and rubbing yourself against it until you’re covered in paint, you can’t love the boys you want to have sex with. You spend the last part of that bath scrubbing every bit of paint off the wall, shivering under a cold shower.

The day you cringe a little less at the thought of your parents doing it is when sex with love starts to make sense.

Home sick from school, when you’ve watched too much porn for it to turn you on anymore, the image of that freckled Anglo-Indian boy holding hands with you excites you in a way you’ve never felt before. You feel like, maybe, you could spend time with him between handjobs. Maybe you could kiss him without pressing your crotch against his.

At eighteen, a girl you’ve known for a while asks you out. You say yes. By nineteen, you can have sex with her and love her at the same time. Touching her body is more than a stimulus. At twenty, you break up because you love each other more than you want to fuck each other.

You write erotic stories like the ones you used to when you should have been studying for your board exams. About skinny boys in school uniform. This time, you love them. You don’t need to be committed to them to know that what you feel for them is more than a conversation on Grindr.

Boxes

It’s probably a biological function for the preservation of order in one’s life that we almost always try and fit people into little boxes. The funny one, the quiet one, the crazy one. The writer, the automobile enthusiast, the photographer. The gay one, the slut, the stupid one. We typecast everyone else into these wooden characters, and give ourselves the leeway to make bad decisions while still believing that we are good people—better than everyone we haven’t forgiven for their decisions; we’re not like them.

My friend says she has a bad habit of pretending to be outside of humanity when she talks about it. I think we’re all guilty of this at some level. For me, it’s when I’m driving. The SUV driver who cuts me off is a “douchebag”, but when I cut you off, it’s because I’m really, really late for class so I apologise, but you have to understand, I don’t usually drive like this. In those moments, everything my high-school English teacher taught us about plurality of vision—why I chose to study English in the first place—is all flushed down a large metaphorical toilet. The childhood lesson that actions are, more often than not, a product of circumstance is all very well in a warm bed at 12 AM, but it’s always forgotten in the heat of a subconscious desire to prove that you’re better than everyone else. Perhaps it would have been better if had I taken up competitive sport as a hobby. A fake box like defensive midfielder is much more accurate than one like bad driver.

(Not the kind of boxes I’m talking about, but I suddenly want to binge on the first two seasons of Weeds, when Peter Seeger was still alive and life was rather different than it is today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlSpc87Jfr0)

Some things are perfect

When an old friend talks to you without any of the teenage awkwardness that drove you two apart, everything that happened in between loving him and seeing him now, falls apart. All the walls you built to protect yourself crumble, and though you’ll never be as close to him again, you’ll only remember what happened from when you he first kissed you to when he made you listen to The Number of the Beast and said, “This is music”. And even though his little cousins—the ones who moved in when he moved out—are now taller than the both of us, they’re still the scrawny kid with asthma and his brother, the kid with the terrible voice, because you won’t really see the young men they’ve become, just as you won’t really see the adult he’s become. Some things must stay in the past.