Afterlife, like a bathhouse

Like a Saturday.

My dad’s first boyfriend after my parents broke up died of AIDS. A brilliant friend of mine speculated last week over a Mineragua at Good Housekeeping that maybe we wouldn’t be experiencing such unfathomable disharmonies with the far-right today if we had that whole generation of fathers. We lost thousands of artists, thinkers. I imagine the bathhouses, so liberated it’s almost like they knew they were living on borrowed time.

When I was five, I started spending Saturdays with my dad. He’d say, “Okay, if you could do anything in the entire world, what would it be?” He was so adventurous, but I’d always say Color Me Mine. I’d gingerly select my colors & brushes, then adorn an object (a cup, a bowl) with fairies & girls with leaves in their hair. Occasionally, my dad would make something so ugly that we’d laugh. Most of the time, he didn’t paint. It was beyond my awareness that there were likely a number of times my dad was handing over his last twenty bucks.

The afternoon sun folds into dusk. The tropical storm & the earthquake. The kidnapping of Niger’s president. The week looms delicately & dangerously, yet so far away at certain angles, like the strings on a mobile. I wonder if that is what the afterlife is like.

I imagine my dad in Heaven,
angels rubbing sunblock on his golden shoulders
Like those videos of men in Naples on Instagram
It’s like Jacob’s ladder! Except, he is the ladder
& I am just the fable
In the sky, everything is hyperreal;
Each handshake like a kiss on the hand
or a small piece of cinnamon bread
Skin is just pure oxygen
they sweep stardust from their doorsteps
At the same second, I lie & breathe
& let mermaid tears drip
& squint
& I can almost
see them.

There is a Yiddish word, mechayeh. “Bliss.” Surely the boys don’t need money wherever they are, or passports. I wonder how we reconcile the delight with the wreckage. Ancestors, you must have time to help us? You must be trying. Maybe, as you wade in a stucco pool in a place that feels like 1960s Brazil, you come to us with ideas for healing. Maybe you are annoyed that we’ve stopped writing down our dreams.

“We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.” José Muñoz