Crossing Days
Tucson, Arizona
On election night, 2016, I go to a friend’s place to watch the results roll in. Pizza has been ordered. A pot replete with artichokes simmers on the stovetop all night. After Pennsylvania goes red, everyone in the room thinks what the hell, and we each eat a handful of shrooms. I believe our stated rationale is that inducing a sense of the surreal might make the next few hours more bearable, a purely temporary undoing, like hitting a slip-and-slide in the dark. Let’s eat our drugs and our snacks, turn off the TV, drift untethered in history for a time.
Much later that night, Kelsey and I go downtown to stand under a crane. Trellised in Christmas lights, the crane rises up above a 24-hour, cooperatively owned café called Shot in the Dark where the walls speak in paint splatter and the booths herniate foam. Stickers on the cashier read “Keep Tucson Shitty!” and “Fuck Phoenix.” Kelsey and I both moved to Tucson with the vague hope that affordable rent and creative writing workshops could turn us into artists (we are, in our small but significant way, the people gentrifying this place and making it more like Phoenix). Shot in the Dark is our designated place for late-night writing. Young and queer Tucsonans treat the café like a second (or only) home. There is no air of feigned productivity here, no awkward patter of first-dates-over-coffee. It is that rare kind of “safe space” that does not advertise itself as such, and on this night more than most, the indoor smoking area spills over with overworked staff and weepy clientele, everyone setting fire to their feelings.
Outside on the curb, Kelsey and I try to keep our sights trained on the crane trellised with lights. We feel inexplicably devoted to it, this sometimes green, sometimes blue sign which tells us to get to work. Each night, we bike from our separate apartments towards the beckoning lights of the crane. Each early morning, we share a post-writing cigarette on the curb and discuss spiriting up the crane’s metal lattice—what it’d be like to look down on our bodies from above our own bodies.
This morning, I return to my apartment and disengage from all my screens. I lie in bed trying to remember what it felt like: walking to my polling location the previous day. How sure I was then that a crossing could be made and that it would be the right one; how easily I stepped, not even looking, into the crosswalk.
Torugart Pass, China / Kyrgyzstan
There are as many kinds of border-crossing as there are borders. Crossings can be long or short, backwards or forwards, zigzagging or straight. At base, a crossing needs to suggest and then break one or many thresholds. It doesn’t have to be Hannibal crossing the Alps or Columbus crossing the Atlantic to count. (Needless to say, most of the crossings we learn about in school are made by men bent on war or plunder or both.) To get out of a room, an altercation, a frame of mind, I cross the floor, the street, or the bounds plotted by social decorum. To get out of a country, I cross a border, and then often another for good measure.
For many of us, crossing is an everyday behavior. I can’t really remember the first time I crossed a border. (Question: if you don’t know it’s there, can you really even cross it?) I was probably very young, riding in the back of the family car as we drove from Tennessee to Georgia in search of baby bok choy. I doubt I had any inkling of the exact moment our bodies passed from the Volunteer State, where we lived, to the Peach State, where all the Asian grocers did their business. That border, stitched in place by the 35th parallel, is well and truly invisible—you need to believe in it to know that it’s there.
Borders that follow mountain chains or rivers make more sense to me. Here at least is a physical distinction along which our differences may align. Getting across such borders can take some effort though. Years ago, I was in China trying not to be in China, and so I planned an impromptu excursion across the Tianshan range to Kyrgyzstan. The Kashgar-Osh bus was full, so I arranged a shared taxi with two Danes also bound for Central Asia. Our driver would take us only as far as the border. He pegged the Danes—both blond, both tall, both irrepressibly smiley—as traveling Russians and me as their Chinese tour guide. “Be careful they don’t cheat you on the other side,” he told me in Mandarin. “People will understand them over there.”
One of the Danes started vomiting the moment we cleared Chinese customs, a victim of the altitude. Because the soldiers at the border felt sorry for him—and who wouldn’t, this pale giant spewing nothing but gastric juice across an international highway?—our trio got bumped up in the crossing queue. Soon, we were crammed together in the cab of a semi-truck, and then we were clearing Kyrgyz customs, which was really quite perfunctory, a polite proffering of our blue and crimson passports followed by a sidebar in the bathroom where one agent wearing a grizzled ushanka asked me for a bribe (I was too slow to catch on, and so the frustrated officer went looking for a quicker mark). After negotiating our fare with the semi-truck driver, whom none of us could understand, we were off again, cruising through that immaculate, mountainous terrain. I would spend a week reading Rimbaud and Rilke in the world’s largest walnut forest before leaving via Bishkek for Istanbul. The Danes would settle their stomachs and then head via Moscow for home. I can only assume that the driver is still out there, working his usual route, crossing and re-crossing that same imaginary, but also real, line.
Yungaburra, Australia
When I was nineteen, I spent a winter in the field learning to run transects. This process involved walking in a straight line across randomly selected sections of the Australian continent. Every few steps, I would drop a 1 x 1-meter quadrat on the ground and make note of everything contained by that white plastic square. What percentage vegetation? What percentage bare earth? Was the soil here dry or moist, rocky or clay-like? Were there any species I could identify? Was this piece of land, this pixel of ecology, mostly sun or mostly shade?
My instructors told me that the point of running a transect, of treating the distances we cross as data, was to understand the average conditions along that line and to use this knowledge to formulate critical questions about the environment. Each transect was supposed to be a usable cross section of the Earth. Run enough of them, and you’d have a general idea of a biome’s composition and variance. In retrospect, I’m fairly certain our instructors just wanted to teach a bunch of study abroad students something simple but time-consuming enough to keep us out of each other’s bunks. I didn’t learn much that winter about the Australian environment, but I did gain a potent metaphor for how people in motion like to understand their lives. We keep running our separate transects across the land, seeing where all our thoughts and emotions lie on the ground: Are we happy in this forest or sad by this sea? Are we eighty percent actualized here? Fifty percent detached? Is it overcast in our tundra? Is it flood time on the plain? How do we enumerate the serenities of daylight in the desert, the quiet fatalism of brush before the burn?
Tucson, Arizona
Before I moved here, I didn’t think too much about the city’s location near a contentious border, but living here means thinking about that border whether I want to or not. It means running each dusk past a federal courthouse where deportations are being “streamlined.” It means border patrol agents showing up to job fairs at the university where I teach. It means taking seriously the idea of this place as a passageway for people seeking new lives, and the suspicion that everything I encounter here has something to do with that attempt, that crossing. Going up into the local mountains, which scientists like to call “sky islands,” is said to be like “walking from Mexico to Canada in less than 10 miles.” The hike is long, but the views from the top are splendid.
Gloria Anzaldúa writes that “the borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.” A scientist running transects here will find “the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer… those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the normal.” For Anzaldúa, the borderlands are both an external landscape and a fluctuating internal terrain. To live in the borderlands is to inhabit not just a space-in-transition but a migratory frame of mind. This is a psychogeography too often defined by its bloodied edges, by Narcos snuff-porn and wild west nostalgia. For Anzaldúa, the borderlands host—indeed, they exude—a creative force that gets lost in a country’s buffered interior. Living here at the junctures of nation, race, language, and sexuality imparts lessons about pain and alienation, but also about healing, mysticism, and grace.
The day after the election, everyone I know and love in the city looks shell-shocked or livid or both. It seems we have entered a new era. The op-eds say we’ve gone from political theater to reality TV, from facts to their alternative, from overzealous identity politics to age old white supremacy. This crossing didn’t happen overnight, and our new president is merely its ugliest face, but it feels so total at first, like whatever is happening right now will brook no chance of return.
At Shot in the Dark, I can’t write in anything but fragments. I spend a week jotting down notes on each day, inspired by Anzaldua’s reminder that “every increment of consciousness, every step forward is a travesia, a crossing.” The entries quickly turn into litanies, each page a transect I chart across time:
That time I ask a friend if she wants to go with me to a group discussion and potluck. “Liberal circle jerk,” she texts back. “But there’s food,” I respond.
That time one of my oldest friends, a Trump voter, texts me from Florida to say I told you so. When I start to take this a little personally, he tells me to calm down, writing that Trump’s election won’t be the “end of the world,” which is technically true, but still I feel cross with him.
That time at Safeway when the gorgeous cashier with the earring forgets my cashback because he’s crying to a song by the Smiths.
That time we are all, in different ways, erratic: over text, at dinner, in class handing back papers.
That time the red-headed woman at the bar keeps saying “I believe in crystals, I believe in metaphysics, I believe in reincarnation, I believe.”
That time people on my phone are recommending we reread Harry Potter, or sign all the petitions, or do our best to escape our echoes, which are chambered like ventricles and atria in the heart.
That time I attend a gathering at the Global Justice Center and dream together with the crowd that an asymptote might arise, a line impossible for even the most dire of political equations to breach, a line buttressed by what I want to call decency or common sense or just plain math.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
The first time I dropped acid also felt like this crossing I couldn’t come back from. I don’t mean I left one reality for another. In fact, the world as I experienced it became if anything more present, more animate, more “real.” I found it possible on acid to go on walks and buy donuts and stand in the bleachers of my college’s Romanesque coliseum agog with wonder, and all these experiences of passage were imbued with an almost unbearable sensuality, not a sexy-sensuality, but an oh-my-god-I’m-feeling-way-too-much sensuality, the kind you can get from sex but which doesn’t require the presence of anyone or anything aside from psychoactive chemicals and all these pretty lights going off in the dark. I remember a friend quoting Whitman to me because, of course. I remember another who kept bursting into different rooms to shout that love was the answer. At the peak of the trip, the walls of my dorm room opened up their stomata and took secret, vegetable breaths. I felt in those slow and shapely moments like I could grasp the transience hidden in every real thing, like that transience was somehow solid, this necklace of time I could drape across my chest.
Saigon, Vietnam
In a pivotal scene from Marguerite Duras’s novel The Lover, a white girl stands on the deck of a ferry in colonial Asia. She is wearing a fedora cap and a dress the color of an old pillow, its whiteness tinted yellow by her sweat. A Chinese man is watching her, the only white girl bold enough to take this form of transit. He walks up to offer her a cigarette. The girl declines the cigarette but not the man’s other, tacit offer.
“I think it was during this journey that the image became detached, removed from all the rest,” the girl, now a woman, will reflect. “The photograph could only have been taken if someone could have known in advance how important it was to be in my life, that event, that crossing of the river.” To the reader, the crossing probably feels significant because it catalyzes a scandalous erotic encounter, but to the girl, it feels like more than that. She will return to the ferry, to the very moment of crossing, repeatedly in her memory. It becomes the well-oiled hinge between before and after, youth and adulthood, innocence and abjection. Something vital about the girl gets consolidated on that ferry, an awareness of her sexual power, her lissome limbs and avian rhythms, that is more lasting for the girl than the memory of the Chinese man she meets and takes as her lover, a man whose most enduring feature is the way his voice is said to tremble.
“When I went away, when I left him, I didn't go near another man for two years,” Duras writes. “But that mysterious fidelity must have been to myself.”
Tucson, Arizona
How does one show fidelity to a self who is always changing, always crossing over into some new state of being?
That time the cowboy hatted man says to his girlfriend on the street as I walk by with a man I am maybe seeing: “Oh look, white and yellow.”
That time I spit in three different vials so a social scientist studying elections can assess voter stress levels. My compensation: $50 and the regurgitation of a feeling.
That time I knock on Kelsey’s door to catch a smoke and she is crying in the middle of the day, so I stand with her and cry too and then we step outside for our smoke.
That time at Shot in the Dark when I start writing again, and it’s something in the shape of this essay.
That time my friend and her black lab spend the night. She breathes on my neck and I can’t sleep, but it feels so good, the breathing, the hold I have on things, the waking up in the morning still groggy but not alone.
That time we are colors, riding towards Gates Pass in his pickup truck, the sky banded yellow and white, Yves Klein and quartz.
That time, on the phone with my Trump-voter friend, when I start quoting from all the books I am reading and he tells me to slow down, that’s enough.
That time I am smug.
Death Valley, California
What I’m trying to say is that I wish I had a more decisive approach to time, that I could determine, à la Duras, when and where I crossed some line and everything changed for me. After our first time dropping acid together, many of my friends spoke with unnerving clarity about how the drug had rewired them inside. One friend told the group he now recognized the fool’s errand of ambition that had dominated his young life, how his entire existence up till then had been consumed by a desire to succeed, which he now could discard like a moth-eaten sweater. Others spoke of meeting an almost divine figure in the middle of their trips, a figure whom they didn’t call God but whose manifestation had broken their stolid faith in a world purified of the supernatural.
I stayed silent during these conversations, feeling like I had little to contribute. My time on acid had been impactful, but not in a way I could describe to them or myself. Whatever that experience was or wasn’t, it soon got folded back into the regularity of our college lives. We finished writing our theses and donned our graduation regalia. Even if ambition was a disorder some of us thought we’d cured, we kept moving down the same predictable paths of law and academia, consulting and tech.
After the election, I am reminded again of just how quickly a singular experience can get swallowed up by the rigamarole of the daily. Although we have been cautioned not to allow this presidency, this time, to ever feel normal—for normality is the gateway drug to complacency—it seems impractical to live in a state of perpetual alarm. A crossing has been made and now here we are, alarmed but also complacent. I start to feel less scatter-brained when I speak. I buy more books to decorate my apartment and my mind. When the year is almost over, Kelsey and I swallow the last of our mushrooms at an abandoned RV park in the California desert. We spend the night lying prostrate on a concrete slab, staring into a skyscape full of pulsating stars and contrails pointing west to LAX. Nothing makes sense, not the firmament, not language, not the time ticking away inside us. I feel shattered for absolutely no reason (it is one of those “bad trips”). I feel like my body is a figment of my imagination, and so why not dispose of it? Get off this slab and walk barefoot into the desert. Note the cactus, the scorpion, the folded edges of the land. Note the chromic sheen of the moon, the weightlessness of the air. Complete the crossing and don’t come back.
Istanbul, Turkey
A few summers ago, I crossed the Bosporus with a dear friend from high school. The benches on the ferry were mottled with bird shit, the sky beyond the railing burnt to a blue cinder. I don’t remember how much acid we were on that day, but it was enough that I felt like I could read the emotions of all the conversations going on all around me, in Turkish and Arabic and French. This voice in my head kept telling me that my friend was the closest person to me in the world but also no one at all, just another compassionate stranger on this crossing, a presence no more dear to me than the black clad women at the prow, the tourists taking pictures, the boat, the seabirds, the water molecules which intervene between continents.
“The outline of my body is a frontier which ordinary spatial relations do not cross,” writes Merleau-Ponty. For me, psychedelics facilitate a set of non-ordinary spatial relations that force me to cross over my body’s ill-defined frontiers, offering up this illusion of boundarylessness, of all things and all people as precipitates in the same eternal solution. Many of the writers I love have commented on a similar obliteration of barriers which occurs in the very moment of crossing. There is Duras writing of the girl forever fixed on the Saigon ferry, but there is also Anzaldúa writing from the borderlands that “all blood is intricately woven together, and that we are spawned out of similar souls.” There is John Berger, who wrote after crossing the Bosporus of feeling “suspended in time above the shining water, between home and work, between effort and effort, between two continents,” and then there is Whitman, our poet laureate of ecstatic connectivity, who writes in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” of standing at the rails of another boat, on another strait, thinking of all the crossers who have come before and all those yet to cross: “The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them.”
Psychedelics help me be the kind of person who can take Whitman at his word, who can imagine that we are all connected by something as simple but complex as the crossing of this strait, this desert, this plain. But that doesn’t mean I can fool myself into thinking all crossings are interchangeable, that they will all be met with equal success or cast in poetry’s universalizing glow. It’s important, in other words, to keep thinking about the ways our crossings are both different and the same. Trace the connections but attend to where they stop.
Tucson, Arizona
Springtime creeps into the city. The man I’m maybe seeing suggests we take a drive to the nearest ocean. We cross without incident at Nogales. At the edge of the Gulf, I tell him I’ve decided to move to China in the fall. He doesn’t ask me why, just listens to me crack weak jokes about how in China, at least, authoritarianism doesn’t have to pretend. Both of us know I want to leave not for any clearly defined reason, but because this is what I like to do: find a place and then feel myself leave it.
What I should actually say to him is that I grew up picturing my life as the product of someone else’s crossing, not as that crossing’s long attenuation. My parents left a homeland so that I wouldn’t have to. They crossed an ocean so I could plant my feet on that ocean’s other side, an American through and through. But my life has turned out differently than I once imagined it would. Every place has come to feel like a crossroads, every day an opportunity for crossing. In the end, is it something I do only in my head—crossing over just to say that I’ve changed? Or can these crossings be translated out of my imagination and placed into some material form, a corridor I might walk or run or stumble gamely through? Anzaldua writes: “Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”
In the meantime, Kelsey wants to go out dancing, so I put on very short shorts, a denim blazer, and a pair of leather sandals my ankles keep slipping out of. We each tongue a tab of acid and go from one club to the next, arms linked, our undercut hairdos facing each other scalp to scalp.
On the street, a white man calls out, “Look, Chinese takeout!” I turn around to face him. The sidewalk looks bright to my dilated eyes, a stroke of orange I share with the man and his spiky hair, his clotted cream complexion. He puts his hand on my shoulder and asks me if I’m offended.
“Yes,” I tell him, I am.
He wants to know why, am I not Chinese? Before I can answer, the man gets angry. He feels very inconvenienced by all this. He starts pushing his face closer to mine, until I cave backwards against the wall. This man slurs at me, repeatedly: What are you? What are you? What are you?
My mouth opens but men like this always answer their own questions: “You look like a queer fuck to me,” he says, mumbling and then louder. Kelsey and I make a break for it. We cross the street, running, as the man stays on his side, yelling after us that the “queer fuck bar” is back the way we came. Without thinking, we run toward our crane, which months after the election is still electric, a bridge of light splitting the void. It is so beautiful, our crane. We do not think then of consequences or causes, of how that crane is there not just to please us but to build a brand-name hotel, and that after we leave this city, as we know we will, the crane will go down and the hotel will go up, casting its shadow on the street, shuttering the café far below where we met to write down all our stories, scraping the paint off the walls and polishing up all the countertops, scattering whatever it was people made together in this place.
But no, right now, we live in a sequence of unimpeachable moments. We live in that time when no asymptote comes but still we cross the dance floor at the queer fuck club; that time on the rooftop when Solange plays for an hour-long minute; that time we look up and the crane is still there, still lit up; that time a woman in a floor-length dress of the haziest gauze stops us on Congress Street to compliment our seal-smooth legs; that time by the tracks when the train cars which say “China Shipping Company” are passing, these boxes I want to climb back into; Tucson to LA, LA to Shanghai; the dream of a further crossing.
What are you? the man asks, but what I am is gone.