my past, specifically, didn't go anywhere

I last tasted a lychee martini around 25 years ago, in Cambridge, MA, at a table covered in a white cloth, surrounded by women I knew from my job at the Catholic Charities GED program. They were quietly glamorous, hardworking, and determined. They had the kind of self-assured sense of purpose I wanted so desperately for myself, but couldn’t summon. The drink tasted light, sophisticated, sweet, and for a brief time I felt like that version of myself, the version I wished I could be. Self-possessed, poised, cosmopolitan.

I’ve lost touch with those women, these days. We quickly shifted apart, into lives that don’t overlap. That period feels now like a lifetime ago, like a time that no part of the life I have now even needs. As if I’ve pierced my ears and everyone back then wore clip-on earrings. Nobody needs those! Those screw-back ones, those are even worse. So pinchy.

But I do need that time. I need to be able to access some of the memories of how I prepared my lesson plans for my young adult students so, so carefully. How I encouraged them, designed math and vocabulary games for them, wept when they arrived without one of the girls and told me she was in the hospital recovering from a stab wound, a case of mistaken identity, lucky to have survived. I need the version of myself that was on the cusp of certainty, that stayed on that cusp for so long it morphed into an extended uncertainty that built and built and escalated toward a tense standoff between knowing myself and what I’m on this planet to accomplish, and just…not knowing. A close friend from my undergraduate years who also lived near Boston during that period discovered her life’s purpose as a soil and water scientist during that time. I remember the pride and excitement I felt when she told me of the citizen science work she was doing with water testing for pollution in streams, and how intensely the work held her focus. A Ph.D later, this friend is working with soils and water as part of NASA’s space science programs. I could not be more proud, though we are not in touch. My own internal standoff had more to do with me not knowing fully who I was, and my need to do more of that internal work before knowing where my effort would be most appropriately placed, and how much of it there should be.

The work I choose to do today in my corner of the planet has a far more modest reach, although it may ripple out into the world in ways I cannot see or predict. I began a new job June 18 as Executive Director of my shul, the remarkable radical Hinenu Baltimore, a congregation governed by disability justice and reparations principles that runs on queer love. I almost don’t want to talk or write about it because it is so special that I fear that its specialness places it at risk of being harmed by too much attention from more mainstream groups of people. What can we change about the world — and its collapsing systems and ecologies — with 300 committed Jews? I’m about to find out. I find that when love and work resonate with my vibrational energy, there emerges a sustained joy that fuels me to keep going with it. (Hence, this substack. I’m so grateful that you, dear reader, resonate with it enough to keep reading!)

Back to lychee martinis. In 2023, I sent letters to four people I loved in previous periods of my life; these have yielded bountiful harvests of reconnection and love that ricochet through everything I do now. I am sipping the second lychee martini of my life, in my own living room, made from lychees I bought and peeled and handed to my love, the boy I knew and loved for years as a teenager and young adult, now grown into a loving, fully present, fair-minded, emotionally skilled man. I couldn’t have predicted that our reconnection would unfold and blossom so wildly in the two years since writing those letters. I couldn’t have predicted how we would come back into each other’s lives, how we could, in the ashes of two separate marriages, build a home together in mid-life that could hold all our combined decades of grief and loneliness and transmutate them into joy. In my moments of honest self-reflection, I did know, in my core, that we could be happy. The lychee martini this time is sweeter, juicier, brighter, bursting with fruit and freshness. It doesn’t feel sophisticated; instead, it feels like something I knew would work, that does work, because I know my ingredients and I know how they will feel on my tongue. It feels earned.

My lover and I talk now, as we peel shrimp side-by-side over the kitchen sink or sip coffee together and read at the dining table, about many things, but some of the conversation includes comparing our memories of things we did and thought as teenagers. I feel like Marcel Proust except with a witness who can co-sign or dispute my version of events. I find even our disputes to be incredibly comforting, in the way that reminiscing as adults with a sibling who saw everything you experienced inside your family’s home can be both comforting and complicating.

All of this resurfacing of old memories, of past selves, is making me wonder: What is the alchemical process by which we can fight against the fascist takeover of our brains, can summon the current versions of ourselves to array our bodies to protect our dearest vulnerable neighbors from ICE kidnappings, from threats to their human rights, from having their passports denied or illegal searches and confiscations? What is the use of both memory, and present-moment happiness, in a fascist regime?