"So you're born on the cusp / or it's a run of bad luck / yeah it's bigger than us / it's bigger than love / it's underhanded / and you never feel it... so you never look back / yeah you never look back."
The American Analog Set's Born on the Cusp, a breathy song about love lost to bad stars, has stuck with me for years. I always want to put it on mixtapes for people to remind them of me, but then quickly remember that the song is actually about walking away from a cusp-born sweetheart who is just too confused and fucked to get their shit together and pick a self--or a someone--to stick with. It's sad, but I could listen forever.
As a tween and a teenager my confusion about being born on the cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius was much sharper than the ambivalence expressed by AAS' drizzly aesthetic. My feelings about astrology were marked by perpetual crisis best characterized by the question: "am I or aren't I?", and much of my life being a "scorpittarius" -- born on the cusp of revolution -- was a turbulent experience. It was scary to feel like I wasn't placed in any order; like I could swing both ways but never come to rest in either.
I would tell people that I was technically a Sagittarius, but that it was close enough to be a coin toss as to what I really was. This flexibility provided a mutable security for me for a while, but as soon as I hit puberty I longed to be secure in the knowledge of myself as being only, purely, and truly a Scorpio.
The sexual politics of middle school were definitely where my obsession with the "status" of my sign began. Now that I know more about astrology feeling secure as a Scorpio sounds like an oxymoron, but as a naive kiddo the Scorpio ethos oozed cool. I resented my four-hours-shy birthtime (yes, I looked it up) almost as much as the dowdy sportswear and precautions against gossiping too loudly that were leveled weekly at Saggitarians who read Teen Vogue in the early 00's.
I wanted to be sexy!
By 12 I recognized (like many of my peers) that sex appeal is power. I pined for the watery mystery and turgid hotness of the Scorpio thing. I wanted that vibe, really badly. So I just told everybody I was one. After all, a couple of magazines did say that I squeaked in on the last day. It was weird to realize that I could lie about something so (seemingly)significant to my identity and get away with it. Trying to suss out the cusp thing was probably one of my earliest attempts at both drag and self-deception.
While I did care about astrology in middle school, I was more interested in it for fashion than philosophy; my either/or anxiety surrounding astrology-as-ontology really ramped up in high school. I became best friends with a really intense Scorpio I from Upstate New York and the Lower East Side, and a lot of our relationship was based on what she and I saw as our shared Scorpio pathos and displacement. Of course half the time I was freaking out about being an impostor, but for a while I managed to channel this anxiety by learning as much as I could about Scorpio and scorpions in order to effectively cross over to the water side of my hybrid existence. Did you know that scorpions fuck for 24 hours, glow under UV radiation, and taste and smell with six nerve bundles that grow out of their stomachs? Or that Scorpio actually has three manifestations--scorpion, serpent, and eagle--that represent the sign's often ignored narrative of transcendence?
More than anything Scorpio seemed to be an almost Nietzschean sign: dark as fuck but hell-bent on self-improvement no matter (and here's the unfortunate Scorpio cross to bear) how self-destructive the means might be. As someone who was pretty much obsessed with the idea of the übermensch in high school, it's not surprising that this sign was my golden ideal. So I worked really hard (no matter the means) at perfecting what I saw as the perfect Scorpio persona: critical, dramatic, scathing, Machiavellian, and uncompromising. Fortunately I didn't know anything about Ayn Rand yet.
For the most part my hardball Scorpio self was sustainable, except that I noticed myself becoming less and less happy the more I tried to avoid what I characterized as, well, happiness; without totally realizing it, I had linked feeling satisfied firmly with a Sagittarius point of view. So, for a couple years at least, I stuck with the hard road of the Scorpio process. I made and lost a lot of friends.
Looking back, I think my troubled experience with cuspiness acted as a placeholder for deeper anxieties and questions I had about how the outer world shaped and marked me as a human being. My concern about which sign I was mirrored questions I was starting to ask concerning deeper facets of my identity. As I grew I started to wonder: had something really bad happened to me in childhood or not? If so, what the f was it? Did I have depression or anxiety? Could I have both? Was I gay or straight; what even the fuck was up with bisexuality? At the time of my preoccupation, the answers to these questions (that I liked) all seemed to be given explanation with a Scorpio personality. As a Scorpio I could be unhappy, but ok. It seemed like a Sagittarius identity came with the necessary caveat of total(ly embarrassing) self-confidence.
Being a cusp sign is something that only began to sit well with me once I learned more about how brains--and mine in particular--grow and develop. In college I learned that trauma can cause brains to literally split into two--albeit very differently sized--areas of function: one where trauma is stored on ice, and one where normal brain function still occurs. It's like staying in a hotel that you realize, after one too many wrong turns late at night, has a huge secret meatlocker full of creepy stuff that might not be as frozen--or trapped--as you think. In other words, when something really bad happens to you it's pretty normal to feel like you're constantly trying to solve a huge and high-stakes mystery about what's actually inside you. For me, trying to understand my sign often pointed to this process.
However, I don't want to reduce the essence of my feelings and attitudes towards astrology to surviving trauma. Getting over the Scorpio thing definitely did engage and involve something beyond how coming to know and accept that experience changed me. Returning to my fire roots was as much a choice as alienating myself from them. As I grew up, I came to see tremendous value in the flames that used to just turn my murky waters into steam. Instead of ruthlessly discomforting myself in a patriarchal and masochistic attempt at personal growth, these days I put a lot more stock in sticking my nose in the wind and running with the things that excite me. I like striving to meet the goal of being embarrassingly self-confident. I like knowing that being all brash and Jovian and loud has helped tremendously my ability to advocate for myself. I did this work on my own, but it's cool to be able to accept and identify with a sign that advocates for the outward, enthusiastic, unselfconscious and unfettered devotion to the things we love.
Plus, it's nice to just be half-something and not have to change or worry about it. I'm part beast, and it feels good to have heat under my hooves again.
Showing posts with label autobiographical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label autobiographical. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
2005,6 (written 2012)
i remember writing an entry in my journal when i was 15 about how i felt like i was growing up in spurts that were so dizzying. i felt like i was competing in a bicycle race weeks after learning how to ride one. i think that it was recently after the 'cool kids' in high school started talking to me like i had a pulse, like i might be as alive as they seemed, and i had started my band with violet and we were getting noticed and photographed on the street all the time, which was weird because there was no music on our myspace yet. we didn't even have any songs back then, but we would hang out in union square all day covered in shiny beads and scarves, singing at the top of our lungs (mostly janis joplin and that one song from rent), arms wound around each other's waists. people thought we were sisters or dating, and i think back then we were both. we felt so invincible, but i was incredibly fragile. i remember writing in my journal, "four months ago i didn't even know what a hipster was" and this was back in '05 when that word wasn't an insult yet and it was really all we wanted, a craving like the taste of salt on our hungry tongues.
i used to sit on the corner of east houston and eldridge in a red and white striped dress, no shoes on, back shoved up against the glass windows of the 24-hour pool hall. this was "the spot." one of many, but the best one because it was just outside of "territory," the rectangle we all used to walk that stretched from avenue B to the Bowery, but close to silver spurs too, where violet and i split grilled cheeses with bacon (extra crispy) and always had to go to the bathroom at exactly the same time. their milkshakes were thick as cement.
territory was the neighborhood where our high school is and where my and violet's ex boyfriends both lived. we used to walk the streets giddily there, half-hoping we'd see them so we could run away holding hands and laughing. one night we stalked up avenue A at midnight and covered all of his band's stickers with ones of our own. we always joked that each other were the prizes won out of those early attempts at love. i remember when ben and violet used to come down the stairs of his apartment and it was so obvious that they'd just been fucking, and half the time she was crying, but she never ever wanted to let go of his hand. one night he threw a printer at the wall beside her. i remember hearing stories about sex and vaseline, violet's dislocated jaw and seizures. i remember the story about how they finally did it on the floor of her bedroom in a pile of stuffed animals after months of Ben not being able to get it up.
they were my model for what it was like to be an adult. i think that ben was 16, and violet a year older.
i remember when they finally broke up for the last time. there had been twenty-seven ruptures before this one, a number that you can't make up. i forced my way into violet's apartment and held her while she sobbed in jerky breaths. we were both afraid she was going to die, but she didn't. after that night her bed became another spot for us. a place where we sat end exchanged dreams through our open hearts.
one night violet asked me if i thought i was a good person or not. i wasn't sure, but we were determined to figure it out. "i know" she said, smiling. pulling out a piece of paper, she began writing a list of names on it. we were sitting on her bed and i was backlit by a standing lamp that always shone in my eyes. my shadow fell across the page. "write down the name of every relationship you've had that's ended. friends too. cross out the ones where they hurt you. if you have more crossed than uncrossed, you're good. you know what makes you bad." i found a piece of paper of my own and started writing. this girl was complicated and sharp in a way i'd never seen before.
Eventually we concluded that we were both good people. Out of my eight, I'd hurt three; out of violet's 15, she'd hurt six. it was may of 2006 and we were alone in her bedroom. the walls were painted pale green and her shelves were still lined with horse figurines and children's books. i was supposed to have been home hours ago, but i didn't really care. i'd never known a person who approached her world so systematically, and with so much force. it meant so much to me to be good in the eyes of the world, and in this spring, that's what violet was.
i laid back on her comforter. violet's ceiling was speckled with little black marks from when she and a boy (years ago) had thrown firecrackers at it in the dark--the kind that come in a box full of sawdust and explode when they hit the ground with tiny pops. "i love you," i whispered, and she jumped on top of me. we often sat like this, with her innocently straddling my hips. she'd kissed me once that year, in her sleep, but we hadn't talked about it since. the sky outside her window was black, and i could see our silhouettes reflected in the glass, dark and angular inside a yellow halo. violet replied carefully, so as not to include the "too" that would cancel out our words, a running joke. the pieces of paper slid to the ground.
"i love you."
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