april 1 2024
My lover asks me if I want to watch The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) for Easter and I say yes. This is true love. It’s Sunday and almost everything is closed. The streets have that quiet hum to them. In the evening, my best friend comes over with her boyfriend and I don a frilly, burgundy-coloured dress and cook Easter dinner for all of us.
“I’m on my Nara Smith,” I say, sleeves fluttering as I bring a pot of water to boil.
“Who’s that?”
“She’s a queen,” Maria chimes.
The boys don’t get it but we laugh. Thirty minutes later, there is rice, chicken, brussel sprouts. Pomegranate fruit leather and baklava for dessert. Mini chocolate eggs. LaCroix. Cranberry juice. We eat together and it is good and life is beautiful.
I’m always full of heuristics when I’m in a good mood. When I’m in a bad mood too, I guess, but I’m happier these days. I’ve been working on my album and it’s going well - purgative but in a fun way. The three weeks I spent in Mexico feel like they took something off of my chest - I breathe deeper, easier, lighter. It is always like this.
The night before, I was on the dance floor, shaking my ass to Soundcloud bootlegs of Rosalia and Beyonce. My stylist, Angie, had invited me out and I brought some of my girls with me. We had a blast. I love the ones I love. And I’ve been working on trying to be more open, trying to re-cultivate a certain expansiveness to my relational vibe that I used to have before I knew anything about betrayal. Under red lights, I kept thinking about how life is really all about surrender. The anti-thesis is always suffering.
We watch Willem Dafoe’s Jesus writhe around on the desert floor - hearing voices, seeing things that aren’t there, persecuted for his loving heart, expelled out of innocence and into the real world, a reluctant destiny, a taking up of the sword. When they hang him up on the cross and he has his “what if” daydream and imagines a life where he refused the call, I think about the pain of living, the exhaustion at the end of a day, an age, a lifetime. Maria and I exchange a special look.
I turn back to the screen, back to his bleeding temples and gaunt figure, and I think about how Jesus was really just an artist, a romantic, and most likely a Virgo. I watch him cry out to God, deny his mother, apologize, go insane, close his heart, wrench it back open, succumb to fate.
I think that he and I aren’t so different after all.
