I have been playing with timelines. I have already planned out my preferred means of death. I fantasize about it, often.
In my fantasy I am lying in a hospital, although it does not resemble one. Maybe it is a cabin, cheery rows of bunks from childhood, or a luxury suite, a burning of our accumulated wealth, a suite of doctors accompanying us. It is filled to the brim with friends and family and enemies and exes, their skin etched with laughter and wisdom and grief. They are familiar to me. They smell like youth and nostalgia and stale intimacy and forgotten promises. We are clasping hands in a circle, giggling about petty drama and old haunts, marveling at how we've changed, unravelling a lifetime of stories. When the time comes we walk bravely through the door together, never letting go of one other. We are reconciled with how everything will evaporate soon.
The first time I held this image in my head I felt a shedding of fear as familiar as life itself. As a kid I was prone to spiralling and seemed always aware that one day everything I knew would be gone. The easiest path to acceptance: healing your relationship with endings. Once I discovered this for death I repeated the process with attachment security. The way I had always been buzzing with a fear of loss, clawing my nails into every connection. The death of a romance, expired friendships, the space that yawns open when they leave. It was an exhausting way to live, chasing after others. Now when I think of love I try to exhale through the temporal ambiguity of it all. I imagine my romantic future: a series of connections lasting months, decades, lifetimes, whatever. What matters is choice and intentionality. I read up on infinities. A momentary act of loving is not erased by its ending. There are people that I have only grazed that have changed my life forever.
The more I made peace with endings the blurrier my future seemed. It was easier when I had been treading the path of least resistance, the way I at least had clarity. Adulthood has been charted out for us. Adulthood is meant to look like marriage, homes with picket fences, kids with grass stains and scraped knees, a steady 9-5, 401(k)s and taxes, passing in your sleep. Increasingly I find myself rejecting the rigidity of such a framework and doubtful of my ability to adopt it. When I put pressure on myself to find love within this structure my desire morphs into poison. Under its influence I am always capable of harming myself, performing for an invisible audience and spiralling at romantic decay. When I am not nursing a silent obsession I become functional again. When I realized I likely didn't want kids everything began to deconstruct. No reason to merge yourself with another. No need to obsess over how fuckable you are or what your reproductive worth could be. No more fretting about the viability of my ovaries and the ticking of a biological clock. The passing of DNA. The propagation of a species. We are told it is the surest way to fight time. From The Mother of All Questions: “All the ways of tending to the world that are less easily validated than parenting [...] the writing and inventing and the politics and the activism; the reading and the public speaking and the protesting and the teaching and the filmmaking." I throw myself into making. There are other ways to subvert mortality.
My friend tells me we are collectively obsessed with romance because we lack community and seek to replicate it with the family unit. I think of this as I watch friends cycle through dates, make my rounds on MGTOW subreddits, hate scroll on tiktok, raging at skits on tradwives and reductive takes on male-female friendship in what feels like an epidemic borne of loneliness. What space remains for those wanting to exist outside such structures? Queer temporality: the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence [...] an outcome of strange timelines, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices. Queerness has me protective of the sanctity of my friendship of all genders. Queerness has me fantasizing beyond the gender/marriage/family construct to find home. Queerness has me dreaming about cults and religion because there is something compelling about existing as a collective. Somewhere in me is a base desire to live on a commune, linking arms in a field, cozying around the hearth, heads bowed in a chapel, eating and cooking and cleaning and laughing and dying in unity. I revisit my death fantasy, cycle my friends through my head, wonder who will be there. If I will matter enough to someone, anyone, for them to want to end their life with me. I want to mean something to someone. After everything I have said about endings I still want consistency and promise and commitment. That is to say, I don't want to be alone in the end.
So I go on a meditative retreat in search of this sort of community. A cluster of four, we brand ourselves a nuclear family, delegating the roles of mom and dad with ease but arguing over who to cast as the youngest sibling. We decide that two of us will share the spot, simultaneously. We slip in and out of roles the entire week, designating seats in our porsche and inventing subplots of affairs and family intrigue and fantasizing that the airbnb is ours to keep. A picture of suburbia. We take acid and sip on bitter glasses of molly water and drift in the pool out back, watching the tiles breathe. The water is warm to the touch. For a while we hover delicately above the surface, unwilling to mess up our hair. When we finally submerge our heads it feels like a baptism. From object to subject, she quips, mascara streaming from her eyes. An old joke. I tell her that whenever I'm not sober there are two topics that never leave my head: romance and body dysmorphia, the way they intertwine. I tell her that when I am in the pursuit of romance I cannot bring myself to look at my reflection. I tell her I have not even done so much as hold someone's hand in years. I feel it again, that bone-deep fear of time, of growing decrepit, unwanted, dying without someone by my side. No, she reminds me, pulls me in closer. We purged that a lifetime ago, as she dribbles water on my forehead anew. I relax into my body again.
We sit in afterglow of our rebirth as we wrap around each other, bodies flush against each other. I am pressed so close to her ribs that half my face is submerged. It is the sort of intimacy that exists only in careful girlhood. I wish I had infinite hands so I could hold more of yours, she says. The boys peer at us curiously, observing from a distance. We didn't want to intrude, they say, as we pull them in. As we fold into an extended four-way hug I am surprised by how foreign platonic touch feels to me, the way it's reserved for romantic suggestion. Here I am with old friends, yet there has always been polite distance across gender lines. The four of us are safe, we joke, a mishmash of incompatible sexualities stranding us in platonic safety. We hold each other to infinity, faces pressed on shoulders, hands clutched to the point of bruising, watch the sun dip below the water. We joke that we are the new age family. Queer subversion at it again.
I could be euthanized right now, she says. Above us the stars are forming fractals. Look how beautiful the world is. Look how loved we are. If this is the end I'd be happy. Still gripping her hand, I agree.
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