a rumination on here

The sky is so beautiful. My wisdom tooth is coming in. I'm walking on streets I can't claim as my own. The sky is blue and the clouds are white with tinges of pink and orange. Is this sky the same in Greece? I'm on the phone with my mom speaking in Greek and walking fast, can these people tell where I'm from? I'm from there but I'm here now, what does that mean for me? In class I fiddle with the little spikes coming out of my upper gums, the left side is coming in a lot faster than the right. Am I a late bloomer? I put on a necklace I brought but I look 15 years old and I take it off. The big 2 0 doesn't seem that big. It's crazy that I'm here right now. Speeding past people on the street and they're saying things I don't understand and I can't order in Spanish but I'm forced to try and it works out but the employee speaks English to me. 

These streets hold so much history. New York streets hold a lot of history too but damn this shit goes back way farther. Under these paved streets is land that used to be a dirt path. The dirt path used to be the site of native fauna. So many people walked these streets before I even step foot on them. What does that make me? An intruder? A guest? An American? Yes to all of them. It feels conflicting to be living in a foreign city that suffers under the flood of tourism. I can lay some claim to Greece but I have no connection to Spain and that feels troubling. At least I'm not from California. I've never visited a non-European country, what will happen when I do? The undeniable embarrassment of being a foreigner.

I'm here but what does it mean to be here? I think back to a piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres: "Untitled” (1989/1990). Two stacks of paper side by side, one stack has sheets that have "Somewhere better than this place" printed on them and the other stack "Nowhere better than this place." I was presented with these two options at the Museo Reina Sofía and I couldn't choose. I took both (the weak man's choice). I know what it means for me but what does it mean for you?

In the same museum on the 4th floor there was a screening of a recording of this protest art piece titled "Carrying" (1992) by Pepe Espaliú in which the HIV-positive Espaliú was carried around the streets of San Sebastián by pairs of "friends, artists and activists." "The chosen route through the streets of Madrid weighed with symbology to condemn institutions' indifference to those suffering with the virus." I don't usually sit and watch the videos at museums but I sat down for this. 34 years ago Espaliú was carried through streets that I may or may not have walked on. What else happened here? The ghosts of Madrid are present in each step I take. Is it because the sidewalks are stone instead of slabs of concrete? I don't feel like this in New York, but that's because it's too familiar. How can I feel the weight of history when I have to go to high school?

I want to add in here something that I wrote in a Letterboxd review that I keep thinking back to:

"on the drive back to the village it was night time and i was looking out the window seeing the scenery in a new light. i love when movies do that, when i finish watching one and afterwards im moving through the world differently, looking at the world around me through the lens of the movie. ugh movies are awesome. i wish i knew all my familys lore. just found a pipe that used to belong to the grandfather that i was named after that i never met, cool as fuck, he used to put his mouth right there and now hes dead but im here and im named after him. woah. ancestry is crazy"

I found a bag that used to be my dad's hunting bag and it was full of shotgun bullets. Washed it and brought it with me to Madrid. He's dead now but I carry his face. We all carry faces and bodies and personalities of the people that came before us. Our parents were raised a way that must have been akin to how their parents raised them and so on and somehow we turned out like this. woah. ancestry is crazy.

I'm so focused on the dichotomy of here and then. I am reminded of José Esteban Muñoz's book "Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity." The first few sentences from the introduction are as follows:

"QUEERNESS IS NOT yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house."

I live in the here and now and I think about the past, but what about the future? What's going to happen on these streets in the future? I don't like to imagine the future because it scares me, I don't have to tell you why—but it doesn't have to! Why is it so hard to imagine utopia? I should reread Cruising Utopia.

 A bit of a switch up from my usual postings, I wanted to get some creative thoughts out from my head and into words on a screen. I'll do a regular blog update post at some point maybe? I'm in Madrid now if you couldn't tell.