Queering. Debunking. Migrating.

Two months ago, I moved five blocks up a hill. Migration. As
movement, relocation, transference, change, exchange. When a
year takes and offers as much as 2023 did, I feel both the
cushion and sharp edges of time. The tissue and bone of
minutes, miles, and intimacy. Migration.

With connection and solitude woven together, tethered as
throughlines, I pivot from old binaries. I blend platonic and non-
platonic. I challenge our culture’s core tenet of lack (to live
without intensity- say romance and material excess- is to stand
feebly without the screws of comfort and sex and passion) and
blur the boundaries between where we place ourselves as
individuals, where we feel we belong, when we feel complete.

Migration. Similar to platonic love, is not home or the familiar
undergoing subtraction. Migration. Is a queering of who we are
and what we practice. In my new home, I relearn who and what
I share space with. As I develop a queer intimacy with this place,
the unknowns migrate to known.

Last month, the day we climbed out of a nine day stretch of sub-
zero weather, I sat eating lunch in the sunniest room
downstairs. Facing the street, radiator at my feet under the tall
table, I stared out at the bigLake. At the top left corner of my
front porch, perches a pomegranate-size bird nest. Spotted at
the closing with my realtor in early December, I didn’t imagine
I’d see anything visit all winter. Migration. Cross bills- one male
one female- heads popping up and down like bread in a toaster-
spent thirty minutes watching me watch them.

I have relationships, nests of connection that are the most
affirming, safe, and unlimited, with people and places that
release the pressure valves of everyday intensity. Migration,
unlearning deeply held cultural convictions about which
relationships matter most, is a way to meld more compassion
into singular moments.

I muse on how by allowing love of self, place, and other to
migrate, I file down the barbs of life’s rules- and threats. I
desire not just one body, I “desire the splendor of light moving
through all bodies and allow love to transcend the physical.”
(Ficino).

Migration. To become intimate in new ways. To renew ways of
knowing connection and pleasure and liberation. From one
season to the next, new addresses and friendships and realities.