Newspapers / Q-notes (Charlotte, N.C.) / March 3, 2012, edition 1 / Page 18
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Transilluminations continued from page 12 only. The ones that follow "her" are male to the animal in front of it and female to the one behind. The sea hare at the end of the line bringing up the rear is male only. What a triumph against sexual binaries! It is unclear if spiders or slugs have desire, but certainly their stories are prompts for a decadent evening. Cherubic and armed, Cupid is the har binger of the empurpled dimensions of love, desire. Desire is a constellation of wants and needs, hopes and dreams reaching out toward someone or something. Frenzied wasps dancing their mouthparts into the sweet sap of overripe figs breaking-open in the Southern sun. It is all tabulation that when turned on another person often involves projection. When I started dating my husband, it was all desire. The way he would sit with his thumbs in his pockets, as if a pose, looking directly at me. His gesture was jocular, but I was swept away nonetheless. With a shift of his lower jaw or a pushing out of his shoul ders, I dissolved. He was cocky—this young Oedipus— but, from our first encounter, I offered him my attention as his roost. On our third date, accidentally, his finger touched mine, our knees, under the table, hap pened to brush against each other. I became absorbed in the significance of these subtle mishaps. I started to create meaning out of these brief zones of contact — each touch raises a question in need of an answer. As simply as that, I was falling in love. The ache of desire can give way to love. If desire is projection, then love is about recog nizing the emotional contours and experiences of the one you desire. Loving someone is the closest we can get to knowing what it is like to be another person. Love breaks through our serially surging selfishness. Later in our relationship, I was sitting in the "Surgical Waiting Room" of the hospital. He was having surgery. A necessary cut; part of his transition. For him, cutting his body was a way of healing not hurting. Removing deep structures that fill his body with competing hormones, his testosterone will no longer need to fight for a place to stay, a home. It is his cut, his alone, and yet I feel him, feel the thick purple scars on his abdomen. For him, the surgery is a desire for change; for me, his cuts are about love, loving his scars as marks of his own desire. As it is for the patrons of Venus Castina, so, too, is it for my husband: changing sex is a desire to love. Now that Valentine's Day is gone for another year, put aside those chocolate roses and stuffed winged bears holding heart tipped arrows and sit down with your friends or your lover and talk about yourdesires. Dim the lights, listen to Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde," especially Isolde's last aria, and enjoy a deca dent tipple and a scrumptious nibble. Consider the importance of following your desires, for repressing them does you no good. Following your desire is a brave way of recognizing that something is happening to you, something remarkable. Perhaps it will break open your world or perhaps it will simply open your heart. Things will change. But, change is what must happen to desire for love to a find a home.:: — f/rsf appeared/n Independent Weekly on February 1,2012. 1 Ms^.Tmrs \/No A \sk’t jusf Wily cp^mAsiA tt 9o»«E'WiH6-Tft£y a car- ' iptm- AH' W^uy AN "iPEA"-. / vuFeSTyte f irluipe, j r rkmciTcATED /ieiSS 18 qnotes March 3-l6.2012
Q-notes (Charlotte, N.C.)
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March 3, 2012, edition 1
18
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