Sitting near my (current) favourite tree, some kind of hardwood with flaking bark and tangled roots — currently blanketed in Swiss springtime flowers — I ruminate about my obsessions.
I usually jump forward, into some apocalyptic version of the near-present. Or, most nights I return over and over to my watery grave, the Ikaru Maru. Lately, as seemingly all those who grow to middle age, I’ve been pondering the past (if only with a pathological frequency). Ostensibly difficult and complicated times, evidenced by the extant archaeology of the scar lines “hate” burned into my left forearm. Nevertheless, they seem to shine and gleam. The drugs and self-doubt, the furtive glances at transness (still more than a decade before fully coming out), and the OCD fuelled nightmare episodes, all seem somehow simple and special. Maybe it’s the dancing. My now broken body with its deadened nerve endings pine for the locomotion of yore — sweaty bodies that pulse and vibrate, smelling of Molly. Somewhere, in a box in my mind, I hear “Well you came in with the breeze/On Sunday morning.” My heart quickens and I feel another body pulse against me at one of Toronto’s long-dead alternative dance clubs, now the generic foyer of a condo.
Maybe it was just the evidence of queer subjectivity that was laden in those days: an avalanche of bondage gear tumbling out of a friend’s closet as he introduced me to the remains of yesterday’s club culture or the first furtive feelings of gay attraction. Gay clubs were already running on the fumes of the last generation’s scene, but at least there was one. Now those hallowed drag-queen halls are, again, condos. But that my mind keeps slipping back to that moment, over and over, points to something other, I think.
The OCD-addled mind is often temporally/spatially elsewhere. It is seemingly always worrying about something that is either not now, or not here. In my case, I am chronically and pathologically somewhere else, or in a state of super-position — spinning here and there in the same moment. Being in 2004–2009 might be a normal slipup for someone approaching their late 30s, but the time that my mind seems to be spending there lately feels a little neurotic. Even so, it feels normal for me to be out of time, it’s just this time my worrying machine is fixated not so much on dysphoria/dysmorphia fuelled by obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but the warm glow of a past self that probably never really existed. Maybe my mind is retreating to a moment when the future seemed more possible.
Sometimes I wish I could spend more time in the space and time I physically inhabit. If that had been the case, maybe I would remember the dappled light that crisscrossed the meadow surrounding my tree. How the air smelt humid and fragrantly of Swiss mountain flowers.
