Bead, Bed, and Alley

The first moments of adolescent affection in my hometown were a game of silence and touch, of the vertiginous point between language and bodies, but never either entirely. A body might come together with mine, but there was no word for it—at least no word that we knew, boy and sex and love all sounding wrong. My adult relationships aren’t always recognizable to other people, either, although they’re familiar to me. I used to gather my sister’s Barbies and bring them to my Ninja Turtles, placing them all on top of the Ninja Turtle Sewer Playset and acting out complex, sexualized dramas. The Barbies were often upset, and the Turtles a bit naive in their good intentions. I didn’t know what the tensions were, between these women who towered over these guys, only that things were tense and that I had to hide the play. It was many years later, walking to the beach-bound bus in New York, the girls all taller than the guys, that this game came back to me like Oh, of course.

The distinction is between narrative and something else, between the way a town looks in a photograph and the way a town looks when you play flashlight tag in it and you are nervous. Sometimes it takes so much momentum to escape your context that you seem to never stop straining at escape after that. Sometimes you meet people you love but that still won’t be enough because you won’t know who you are, when you are someone who isn’t alone.

As with the golden curtain he made for Roni Horn, the strands of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s touch just slightly. It is a curtain of plastic beads, some blue and fewer clear or white, hanging in vertical lines that collide. The rows of blue are wider than the rows of clear, which appear white from a distance. Like many of the artist’s candy spills, like here, that its width should fill a space in such a way that the audience is required to pass through it, and that the beads should be acquired cheaply, and locally. I have not seen this curtain in person, but imagine the feel of the beads against my body, the movement of the beads (waves), and the plastic clatter of their collisions. Like just softly, all of me is touched, and I hear it.