Heaven Will Be Mine: Remembering

The start of this essay is Heaven Will Be Mine, though it’s not the ending. I struggle to find the words that will do justice. Like Colin Spacetwink wrote, “It’s a lot, and I like it a lot.” Like Dia Lacina wrote, “I’ve never felt a game speak to the totality of me.” The singular struggle of critical work can be finding the words, but the gravity of this is too much. The weight of each pen stroke, each click, grows louder and louder.

I am reminded of mythology. Not because of the astrology, but rather the use of myth — stories that don’t fit neatly into a linear history, a timeline already made by others that comes to exclude rather than expand. The post-Cold War ’80s, counter cultures vie for recognition and assimilation, fractured communities of queers flirting and fucking in the face of an uncertain immediate future, an existential threat that looms. Pages on the philosophy of bodies, of “Jungian Newtonian” physics and celestial mechanics, notes trying to piece back together webs of complicated relationships that I stumbled on, already broken, not really understood by those who were there. 

Think of how we read myths differently when they’re “our own,” when we can purposefully read the (not-so-subtle) subtext that goes under the radar of those neatly putting together our past under their own constraints. Heaven Will Be Mine could be a myth of radical queer activism, the joy we will always make under genocidal institutional oppression, or of the tangled webs of sapphic lovers that we cannot know. It’s a myth foundational to queer spirit. A story about abuse, but not abusers. About the end, and about our beginning.

Nothing will make sense of the loss, nor of the love, because none of us could have this world. It wasn’t meant for us — these lab rats, these pilots, these mech bodies, these trans bodies. And so we reach for the next and beg, what is a better ending?