Turning 40

I turn 40 today. I don’t feel “forty years old”. I don’t know what that is supposed to feel like. But whatever it is, I can’t quite feel it yet.

Maybe it will come to me in waves, like a dance, like memory. Maybe I will remember what it was to imagine my future self, and that will be something delicate, plausible in its nuance but lacking in verisimilitude across time and space. Or maybe I will gesture myself to life, emergent in a new decade, nostalgic, and yet, pulsing with what it is to be here, now.

When I was a child, I would witness the Sandhill cranes crossing over my parent’s house every morning, returning every evening, with their raspy bugle. In this field white egrets would perch on the back of a horse or a fencepost. I would watch the great blue herons, silent and mysterious. And the osprey and red tail hawks, caracara and scissor tail flycatchers, twisting in the night. I always remember the horizon.

This is what I miss the most from home.

Now, all I see is the brick of the apartment building across the street. The people standing on the corner, smoking drinking arguing loving. The people scattering and filing across the sidewalk to work to bars to church to family.

But I am a child of horizons and wind.

(Home. Sandhill Cranes. Fog. Mesquite trees. The fence we built but never mended.)

I remember when I was 20, an undergrad at Trinity University (the one in Texas), playing soccer as if that was all there was to life, believing that, loving that. And yet, also closeted, unsure of the rushing desires and asphyxiating homophobia of the early 2000s. In those years I did not yet know I was Indigenous. I was still maybe Mexican-American. I was something not quite legible, brown but not taxonomically identifiable. I was queer, but closeted. Indigenous, but not yet aware of that aspect, that me.

I think about being twenty two and just coming out, having a boyfriend for the first time, one who convinced me to get my eyebrows done (thank god I don’t do that anymore), and who gave me a Tiffany necklace that he had given to his previous boyfriend, who returned it when they broke up, and which I in turn, gave back when we split.

(2005. This was from a conference in Alabama that I went to as an undergrad).

I remember this pink v-neck shirt that I would wear to the bars in San Antonio and Austin. It was a time of pastels and tight fitting things, gym days and short hair.

A decade later I was finishing my PhD, hair long, eyebrows set free. I used this photograph as my “professional” headshot for several years. Drew, my partner at the time, had taken it at the apartment we shared in South Austin. I had to send out images of myself for the Stony Brook website, and this was the best I could do. It’s not a bad photo—though I kind of blend into the background, and I didn’t yet know not to wear white for these types of things. But I like the way my eyes seem to look out, not exactly at the camera, but just over shoulder, just beyond.

(2013. Photograph by Drew Wilson: in Austin attempting “professional”)

There is also this one, which my mom requested after my PhD hooding ceremony. I think she had seen someone do this on Facebook, and she insisted that we take it. It was May in Austin, and it was hot. I was sweating through my shirt, under the polyester regalia. But we did it. Somehow this is both very me and unrecognizable.

(2013. Jumping for joy in front of the Texas Capitol [where I had also protested things that year, lol], but for Mom’s sake we did this, and I’m glad)

Or there is this sweet and blurry photograph that my dear friend Stephen Jacobs took. In 2005 he had evacuated New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and stayed in Austin for a few years. Steve was a retired architecture professor at Tulane who was doing a PhD in Latin American studies just because he wanted to. We became close friends after he broke his ankle and needed help going to the store and such. He loved opera and had the deepest darkest velvety voice, and he would sing constantly. He passed away the year after I moved to New York, the year after he took this photograph.

(2013. Photograph by Stephen Paul Jacobs at Austin Java on Barton Springs)

I remember being in the city and thinking about our relationship, Steve and mine, and asking myself what type of quirky old man I would become. I was 30, a newly minted PhD, having landed a tenure track job, about to end a long-term relationship, unsure of what was to be this new life, this new adventure. But it was so far away. New York was never a place I wanted to end up. But there I was. I remember driving all the way from Austin to Long Island, and listening to The Great Gadsby on Audible, crossing the Manhattan bridge at night, and imagining that this place was alive with possibility. And sadness. And pain.

When I moved here I was so lonely. I didn’t know anyone. The advice I was given was that I could adapt to the job or to the place, but it was hard to do both at the same time. So I lived out by Stony Brook for a lonely but thrilling year. I was a first year assistant professor, trying out things that in my graduate life were mostly theoretical. Teaching a graduate seminar. Being the one asking the questions, orchestrating the pauses, liberating the room from doubt. (LOL) Clearing the air with a mention of Foucault or Deleuze or some poststructuralist type. I think we should admit that sometimes poststructuralism is a shield from saying what we really mean. If something is both what it is and its opposite, or if the idea of critique is to find the opposite meaning in something, then what is the point of arguing against that which is not what it is.

I would say something like: “Yes, and power, as we know…is also about the body.” This is and was true. But I feel the sentence differently now. I have a different understanding of “the body”. Mine. Mine-in-relation. Mine-as-ever-on-the-verge-of-becoming-undone.

I moved to Brooklyn the next year, 2014, scraping together the deposit and the first month’s rent. It was more money than I had ever had. And then it was gone. The first years as an assistant professor were mostly paycheck to paycheck. Sure, I had my first real job. I had autonomy. I had possibilities. But New York was also crushing, I have to admit. (I am still not really a city person.) I would take the Q to Union Square and walk up to 15th or 18th, and across to 7th Ave, maybe all the way to Chelsea, maybe for a drink, maybe for something more. I would wander, hoping something would happen. Something city-like, something that would let me know that this place was in me. I didn’t realize then that that desire is the city. It’s the thing that keeps you here, always wanting it to want you back.

Now that I’ve been here for almost a decade, I realize: it’s not things, but people. New York is about making kinship with people, about listening. It isn’t about doing things, or being places, but being with.

I grew up with horses and wide open spaces, grass, bluebonnets, thorns, mesquite trees, yucca. I was a little cowboy, really.

(ca. 1995. Little cowboy Indian, aka “Joe Matt”)

I remember riding in a rodeo on my pony Thunder. I was probably the only little child participating, but I won the pee-wee high point. No, I don’t know what that means. But I remember riding around in a circle, and then trying to get Thunder to walk backwards, which he didn’t do very well. I remember the lights were on, and I was out there alone on this pony, while people were watching me, hoping I would get it right.

I remember being this queen, too.

(ca. 1990. At a New Year’s Eve party hosted by my dear Aunt Teena and Uncle Bill).

I love this me. I love how free, how unencumbered I am here. There I am holding a playing card, ripped in half, for a party game, adorned in tinsel, shining. This person is dancing. He laughs at himself, at the future me who will look back at this moment and wonder if I was ever as free as I was then. He will say, yes. He will remind me that I have always been this child, this spirited, undaunted child grinning with abandon, eyes dark and luminous.

I want to remember this me on my 40th birthday. This child who would think I am too serious, too caught up with things over which I have no control. This child who remembers how to be the life of a party. This child who dreams, twinkling at midnight.