21st Century Romantic
You are now in 19th grade, and you’ve been re-taking seriously the possibility that romance might truly be imperative, or perhaps AN imperative (n.) — a command.
“ROMANCE IS NOT ONLY WONDERFUL, IT IS IMPERATIVE,” reads a magnet on the fridge of your high school English teacher. Beneath these words is an attribution to Maya Angelou. You have been thinking about this magnet a lot lately.
You read the quote for the first time while babysitting your teacher’s daughter in 10th or 11th grade; the beauty of it stuck with you, and you wanted to find out what text it was from. You looked up the sentence and could find zero evidence that Maya Angelou had ever said or written it (“No results found”), or any close paraphrase of it — zero evidence in fact, that anybody had said (or written) it, at least not anybody famous enough for their words to end up recorded on the Internet. You asked your teacher if the quote was actually Maya Angelou’s; “I thought so,” she replied, surprised; the mystery lived on. There was no company name printed on the magnet itself, no URL identifying where it came from (you checked). It was as if the magnet had been lifted from another dimension — a better dimension, maybe, where Maya Angelou’s life had been pleasantly ill-suited to autobiography, causing her to turn instead to writing romance novels — and dropped down here, on your teacher’s fridge, as a directive to you, specifically.
Fast forward 8 or 9 years. You are now in 19th grade, and you’ve been re-taking seriously the possibility that romance might truly be imperative, or perhaps AN imperative (n.) — a command. A moral imperative, in order to be a good person. A mortal imperative, in order to survive. “Romance” here does not refer solely to partnership or sex, though of course it does (or can) include both of those. You think of yourself in some ways as a 21st century Romantic (big-R: of or relating to the 19th century intellectual movement that prioritized emotion and subjectivity over logic and objective truth). You are affected by what Romantics of the past (Keats, the Shelleys) were moved by; you are affected by more than what they were moved by, too, such as Audre Lorde’s concept of the erotic (“the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings”) and James Baldwin’s definition of sensuality (“to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself”).
And you admit: It would be a lie by omission if you didn’t say that you are also moved by romance (little-r). You crave romance; you crave intimacy and mutually responsive need-meeting; you crave being in relationships. But sometimes a pandemic hits, your relationship self-destructs, and the possibility of even a rebound relationship requires breaching at least a dozen best practices. Sometimes you wind up living again for 7 unplanned months in the suburbs, where you can take comfort in your family but nobody else, and you notice in your psyche an unwanted turn toward misanthropy, suspicious as you are of who you can trust to follow proper public health protocol. Sometimes your grandmother dies of cancer in your house and you log on to teach a middle school Zoom class the very same day (too difficult to prepare a substitute teacher), struck anew with the cognitive dissonance inherent to modern (late-stage capitalist) working life.
In other words, sometimes you find yourself more isolated than you’ve grown accustomed to — Hell, you believe, is not other people, and thank God for your family for keeping you through the grimmest months of quarantine from being an island unto yourself— and it starts to feel necessary to manufacture your own romance. That’s not quite right, though, because the truth is you’re actually manufacturing very little, aside from your commitment to reject the aforementioned misanthropy and tap into a romantic life force that is already there, like a faucet you just have to turn on. It’s not easy to do, but then again, you’ve done it before, and not just when you were a child. You have a vague memory of how the world — your world, the everyday one that frequently bores and disappoints you— became more mysterious and full of feeling in periods of your life when you went skinny-dipping regularly in your creativity; when you built bridges between your imagination and your material surroundings. You start building these bridges in your mother’s house, with your family. You write and paint and learn to embroider; you plant and grow a cold-frame vegetable garden, which miraculously survives the snowiest winter Indiana has seen in years. You start projecting movies onto the long-unused fireplace. You remember you’re not really alone.
You also decide to start drawing: 1 portrait a day. One night you’re drawing a picture of yourself standing in your mother’s kitchen, cooking eggs. Your friend Auggie has sent you a link to a song called “Wellerman,” which turns out to belong to a concept album about sailors, produced by a British a cappella group whose entire discography, you discover, is concept art about sailors. You’re knee-deep in their music now, music which your sister hates so you’re playing it in your bedroom with the door closed. At some point while drawing and listening you start to fantasize that the kitchen you’re cooking in is on the ship the vocalists are crooning about. You imagine trying to cook an egg in a kitchen being rocked by waves; you imagine spilling something and watching as it spreads across the floor in whichever direction is currently down-angled, the same way it happened when you once spilled milk on the off-kilter floor of your college apartment (the whole building was sinking into the ground at uneven rates, or else there’s a tiny tectonic plate beneath Waterman Boulevard in St. Louis) and it traced a path for itself from the dinner table to a slight depression in the middle of the living room floor.
There may or may not be especially sexy sailors around in this specific fantasy, but the scenario feels romantic all the same. You are living through UNPRECEDENTED times, albeit times which are almost sure to pale in comparison to 21st century events (more pandemics, climate destabilization, death throes of the capitalist superstructure) still to come. But even then there will be drawing materials and uneven floors and concept albums about sailors. Your friend Auggie will still be there. Resist banality and despair. You must romanticize your life.
