Use Me

Your heart quickening and thudding, arms flung up around your neck...

Somewhere between all the glitz and glamor and camera flashes were many many eyes sparkling as they looked up into mine, embraces between old friends and new, erotic decisions, brave words of vulnerability, belly laughs and glasses of champagne, smokey liner obscuring my eyes. I turned 25 again and will be for the next 10 years. The party was magnificent. Go back to my Gemini Gala with me, join me in my body: your heart quickening and thudding, arms flung up around your neck, acrylic nails brushing past to grab your attention, the waiter bringing you another mezcal negroni, warm hands around slim waists for pictures, heavy diamond stud dragging down your ear, everyone’s attention following you everywhere. You and your shadow are exalted by the perfect half moon and impending change forms a shade around your body, or the glow that all living things emit around themselves, an aura which fades only after death. If you weren’t so focused on neurotically checking whether everyone was having fun you’d have noticed you’re more of a symbol than a being to many of your party’s attendants, a scapegoat of sorts, requisite archetype comprising all of their unspoken need to be ruled by their desires, to resist traditional structures and rules, to openly love and be loved for their anarchic ideas, their taboo interests, and all their secret shamelessness. They need you as much as you needed them there, they’ve been waiting for the opportunity to see you at your best, to see how you can seduce them, to see how well they can resist.

For a time we were the only ones dancing. Very soon the space reserved was not enough, and by design, bodies were forced into close proximity, colognes and perfumes mixed, everyone mingled. Hanging like a Babylonian garden over all of the decadence and the catching-up were also the absences; those no longer within my inner circle, those who said they would come and never appeared, those other selves whose shells we typically walked within.

I’m still coming down from the afterglow of being in such a good mood, surrounded by all of the love, the projections, the gifted drugs, the amused comfort with me admitting how intoxicated I was, and of course the constant flashing of the cameras. Like the Godfather in that classic opening sequence, anyone who asked a favor or confession of me would receive compliance from the truest, deepest outer body of mine. Some were flustered and hesitant to act on this tradition of mine. Others wanted only my ears: they confessed past infidelities, forbidden desires, illicit envies, narrowly avoided disasters.

Performance or power? Everyone knows there are privileges the world affords the brave and the bold and the beautiful; When you get high enough you can dodge raindrops, Future sang in Use Me, in which he confessed that he gave the world the ammunition needed to shoot him down, to force him into the mold of a toxic unfeeling hedonistic character, but at the same time detailing that he wanted it this way, he got this high on purpose, and slurring his words, he crooned to a nameless lover (probably replaced twice over now) that he’s ready to love her, for real this time, eager to parade her around, fend off her previous lovers, in other words prove himself. I didn’t play any Future this time around but I had enough eyeliner smudged under my brows that my gaze was almost as imperceptible as his, and I had all my chains on, and though everyone wanted to buy me a drink I felt such pleasure denying them, insisting they order whatever they wanted, because I am the gift and I am giving myself with every word, every dollar I earn, every night I spend dragging them all outside again and again, laughing in the same gasped breath in which they yawn.

And all around us the revolution erupting. I won’t say it has begun anew because it never really ended, for years it’s already been waging everywhere, from cratered battlefields in Africa and Asia as well as within the hearts of those brave enough to open their eyes and look at the world, in the Americas, in Europe, on every island in between. History is a cycle of cycles and I am following the path my spiritual great-grandmother Anaïs took, devoting myself to socializing, educating, and art-making despite a war raging around me. I’ve learned from her journals and her struggles. I have no shame in being an artist and not a soldier, my father suffered enough of that role for the both of us, and I know well the importance of art and rhetoric in times of chaos and conflict. I’m not just a symbol but also a creator of myths, a translator of events to elegies, a mirror-maker.

If you see only enemies out there you aren’t looking hard enough at yourself.

We will want to remember this one day. Those that come after us will wonder and yearn to learn. They will want to know if we were aware of everything ruining and crumbling around us while we danced at night. They will marvel at our resilient ignorance, our stubborn loyalty to our jobs, our outdated ideals and expectations, our dedication to our poisonous order. I gave my film camera to everyone at my party because I wanted to be seen, yes, and because I wanted my beautiful friends to feel as resplendent as I saw them as, but also, I wanted to be able to write on the back of the film prints a message to my future selves: In our own way we found a way to resist despair. We looked in each others’ eyes and saw life despite all the death. And so in celebration we danced.