On this day in 2010
Audio-hallucinations, frivolous significances, change.
One morning as a freshman in college, I woke up to what sounded like an androgynous voice saying, “On October 19th, when you are 27.” Intrigued and still half-dreaming, I said, “Why, what happens then?” and I felt a surge of euphoric warmth course through my body. Needless to say, I was curious about what might happen on that day.
Cut to my 27th year, I’m living in Chicago and I’ve relocated from my cousins’ house, where I’m staying, to the 24-hour Starbucks on Clark and Belmont which, at that time, served as a defiantly bohemian haunt, the most unStarbucks Starbucks in late-aughts America.
Right around October 19th, but not the day of, a gorgeous guy approaches my table, or did I say hi to him? I don’t remember. I was newly single and socially hungry, and I’ve never been shy about approaching people under any circumstances. We start talking and at some point I mention that I’m finishing up an essay on a deadline, and I thought I’d do that here at the coffeehouse because, I said, I’d be less distracted. (My cousins’ house was not a place built for laser-focus.)
He replied, “But you are a distraction,” which remains the best line I’ve ever gotten, and, unabashed sucker for lines that I am, things moved fairly quickly after that. October 19th was our first date and our first kiss. It was impossible not to wonder if I had found The One right at that moment, based on that experience years prior.
I hadn’t. Our fling lasted precisely one week, and the next time we ran into each other he was disproportionately nervous. My cousins, three Bolivian-born sisters, are beautiful women, and he hit on at least one of them during the time that we were together, so in spite of our giddy affection, it’s not like he only had eyes for me. But we had planned to do a couples’ Halloween costume as Penny and Captain Hammer from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog:
Committing to a couples’ Halloween costume with someone you just met is maybe not the best idea, but we were enamored with each other from the start: he had a thing for redheads and my hair was long back then, and he was someone who inspired my extremely hetero male neighbor to muse to me, “Handsome guy,” after they’d met. The story behind our “breakup” is less of a story than a predictable cautionary tale about making a lot of assumptions (mutually) based on sexual attraction, and learning the hard way that there are smarter ways to go about romance.
I can’t imagine even attempting to strike up a conversation with him now, so I can’t say there was a deeper meaning to whatever it was we had, certainly not the kind one would expect as a build-up from an esoteric prediction. Still, now that the air, at last, has gotten autumn-crisp in Georgia, it’s feeling reminiscent of that strange Fall week. I remember it more clearly than more monumental periods, and maybe that lends credence to the inexplicable audio-hallucination that marked this day in the then-future.
Or maybe I’m just hypothesizing because meaning is never inherent, we make it or we don’t. Out of everything if we want to go crazy, out of nothing if we want to go even crazier (or is it the other way around?).
The last time I was properly exhilarated about Halloween was 2022, and in that ecstatic entry, I related my history of Halloween transformations without mentioning my thwarted Couples’ Costume. Captain Hammer and I were no longer an item by Halloween, and while I wasn’t heartbroken as I listened to ghost stories in an Irish bar, wearing my Penny sweater and one striped arm-warmer and a tank top and jeggings (2010!), it still wasn’t entirely comfortable to embody a character I may never have taken on if I didn’t have a partner-effect I’d been going for. I can’t remember if anyone I met that night knew who I’d come dressed as. (You had to be a pretty specific type of nerd to get it.)
Near the end of my lesbian werewolf novel-in-progress, Sugar Moon, a massacre takes place on Halloween, and before the violence I freaked myself out by successfully writing, there’s a parade of costumes. I was thrilled to describe, in lavish detail, a costume Delirium from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, and this morning I found myself wondering what to do with that: change it? Goddamnit, Delirium is a singular character, why…But of course I could ask the same, now, of Penny and Captain Hammer. Since both Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon have been revealed to have used their history of public “feminism” to justify abominable behavior, there’s a lot of mental and emotional reorientation going on for specific types of nerds right now.
That leads me nowhere in particular. There’s an argument to be made for characters taking on a life outside their creators, just as we can all claim songs as our own themes and experience-narrations apart from a lyricist’s life. What does that have to do with a voice from the ether-or-perhaps-temporary-insanity marking a day on the calendar that was both lastingly significant and not so much? I’m forgetting how to do this essay thing, make a connection between the personal and the greater. My depth perception has been off for a while and I can’t tell the big from the small. I blame my students, whose off-the-cuff thoughts that they barely remember writing have me transcribing their sentences into my Notes app, quoting them in conversation and thinking about their observations for weeks.
When that’s your every day, nearly every detail seems arguably connected to another. I can’t draw the sensible lines anymore, meet the demands of the form where I start small and thoughtfully zoom out. My lens is officially all over the place, going from distant to close-up without rhyme or reason. Maybe all change looks blurry from inside, and at some point I’ll learn to draw shapes again.
Until then, I won’t rely on inexplicable voices to tell me which days will stand out in the coming years.