Last night’s Buck Moon was no joke: in all my years of staring up at the night sky, I’ve never seen more haunting moon shadows — the cloud formations looked like the silhouette of a Gothic castle. Once the moon showed its grand self, forget it, I’ve never seen it loom so truly large, or so deeply orange. I had just sent out my lesbian werewolf novel’s most recent incarnation to a new round of readers, which felt newly right.
Prior to that cinematic show from the cosmos, oh my did the rain come down as we drove. At one point, we couldn’t see in front of us: it was like a blizzard, but with rain, which, even New Orleans doesn’t play like that! Many people pulled over on the side of the road, and almost everyone drove with their hazard lights on, which was a very strange sight to see: hazard lights blinking in all directions on moving cars.
What a way to go to IKEA.
It’s in Atlanta, two and a half hours away, and we had a laughable amount of shit we need, and still do, but what’s absolutely insane, possibly the most truly surreal aspect of the entire experience, is that the Atlanta IKEA is a relaxing place to be! That, I was not prepared for. Atlanta, as a city, is all kindsa somethin’ else, and I’m still getting to know it.
But I’m also embarking on a new phase of existence where I give a fuck about my home enviorns, because the fact is, I never have. I cannot even count the number of houses/apartments I’ve lived in, I literally can’t. For me, the place most people call “home” is wherever you’re staying for more than 3 days before you go on to the next place. I often call hotel rooms “home” without thinking, as in “Should I run back home and grab that?”
Growing up, I couldn’t count on anything physical. Clothes and toys and books belonged as much to my cousins as to me, which is not a philosophy I ever consented to, and it held into adulthood. When I lived with them in 2010, I lost a lot of things I deliberately taught myself not to miss. If I ever complained to my mother or her family about a dear lost item, the reaction would be either rage or the kind of nonchalance that is tyranny: I am casual about this, so you should be too, even though the issue is one involving you and not me.
Anyway, objects. Best to just not get attached. I started to develop the suspicion that the reason why other people lived in such beautifully decorated homes is because they were superior beings to whatever I thought, for too many years, I must be. Then I got together with Ian and discovered that it’s really fucking satisfying to put a lot of thought into what kinds of dishes you own. I discovered a lot of other things, too. Eleven years later, those discoveries are still unfolding. Some of them are instantly liberating, others involve a lot of pain and resistance on my part before the liberation comes.
Hey, look what day it is in America, I didn’t even do that on purpose, I swear.
When I was fourteen and living in New Orleans, I had a dream that a stunningly gorgeous boy who didn’t exist (I was often having dreams about stunningly gorgeous boys who didn’t exist) told me, “You would be so pretty if you were a firecracker.” I woke up puzzled and asked my then-friend, who prioritized dreams and their possible messages, what it meant.
She said, “Maybe he meant that you would be pretty if you acted like a firecracker.”
It was Saturday, so I went to Fifi Mahony’s, the wig and makeup glamor-planet that remains New Orleans’s best source for both, and bought thick silver glitter body paint that I pasted on my eyelids. That, I decided, was what a firecracker would wear.
In high school when I lived in the Midwest, I was close-devoted-friends with the suburb’s only goth couple, and what a figure they cut, those two, in their boots and black nail polish and dyed hair and duel fishnet, sometimes their vampire fangs. We drove out to an expanse of field and lay in the grass, sharing a sleeping bag, watching the fireworks. The shells fell around us which should have been scary but somehow was just invigorating and immersive.
In grad school, the lo-res Children’s Lit program that lit up two summers in a row, I remember looking around at my friends and thinking, “This 4th of July is one of the best days of my life,” and I only have patchy memories as to why, but I can call up that feeling easily, instantly, powerfully, which plays a role, I’m sure, in why I can’t answer the call to be cynical about this day.
Wait, let’s not forget: the first 4th of July after Trump was elected, they blocked off the streets to cars in Oakland so that we could go in the open air up a big hill to the fireworks, and the spirit in the air of the diverse joined-creature that we were was defiant: This place is ours, no matter what you say, no matter what you do, no matter what you destroy. We cannot be destroyed. We are fortifying a spirit that cannot and will not be destroyed.
That night helped too.