Reconfiguring Romance
bringing pleasure into the new year, plus: what I learned about love in the PACU
Happy new year, slugs. If you are still trying to wake up your brain two weeks into 2025, me too. If your holidays were rough this year, meee toooo. If you feel a foreboding sense that we are entering a dark era, me too!!!!
I didn’t party on New Year’s Eve, and it was nice to not be hungover the first day of the year. My husband had to have his uterus removed two days after Christmas (see below), so we went over to our friends’ house for nachos and collaging, one of my favorite group activities.
Collage requires no skill, very little planning, and everyone likely has some stack of glorified trash lying around they can bring for the materials pile. Plus, it feels like divining; trash magic. It’s one of those things that’s easier when you turn your thinking-planning-executing brain off and tap into feeling, color, shape.
The combination of randomness bounded by available materials, the hunting and gathering and the repetition of page-turning, all in a circle around a table together — it is a perfect incantation for entering a flow state.
It starts with destruction; ripping, tearing, and piling. I look for colors and textures first, try to gather a wide variety of sizes and a somewhat cohesive color palette. Once I have enough images, I cut them into interesting shapes, and begin the process of therapeutic ‘reconfiguring’, as queer collage artist Daniel Fountain describes it.
The limitation of the page, while initially frustrating, is actually the best part — the four corners force me to edit. I can’t always make the pieces mean what I thought they would mean. The image emerges through a process of experimental rearranging; the meaning weaves itself.
We were a group of neurodivergents who chafe at the thought of distinct goals, because we know such fore-planning often just leads to disappointment, so we decided to collage what we want to bring with us into the new year.
Play, pleasure, found family; the worse the world gets, the more I need these things. And when I say pleasure, I don’t mean it in the self-care, spa-day, get-yourself-a little-treat sense, but in the being-with, getting-to-know, touching-holding-smelling-tasting sense.
“Romantic love, the last illusion, keeps us alive until the revolutions come,” wrote Larry Mitchell in his classic book of queer fables. Not romantic in the rom-com sense, but romantic in the making-beauty-together-in-the-dark sense.
As Bettina Judd writes:
“In the delirium of a felt life is the made thing and making a thing worth feeling for.”
So, here’s my first made thing of the year, an essay about neurodivergent romance and transition, which I’m going to tuck behind the paywall because I bled out on the page a little, if you know what I mean. If you would like to commit to reading more of me this year, here’s 25% off for 2025.
Your Little Monsters, Our Strange Affection
For Christmas you got me a stainless steel pan and a pack of colorful rubber gloves. “Are you trying to tell me to get back in the kitchen?” I joke. But you know that triangle between stove, fridge, and sink is one of my favorite portals into flow, and you know I need something between my skin and the dirty dish goo, even if I am too stubborn to admit it.
I am so used to sucking it up, holding it in; I can take it, I can take it. But you never flinch when I spit up my neuroses. Sometimes, I don’t know what I need until I see how good it feels, and then I wonder how I lived without it all this time. Which is to say: I love those rubber gloves.
On a phone call a few weeks before surgery, your aunt asks if you have a will. “Just in case, you know,” she says, as if it’s common to die on the table during a laparoscopic hysterectomy. It’s not, but regardless — a life without you starts to flash before my eyes.
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