FROM FLAUNT, 25th Anniversary Issue, Under the silver moon

UNDER THE SILVER MOON

‘the scene shall be set, an orchestral embrace'

Why do we dream to be ageless?

We wish that our faces were quicksilver. Flowing and smooth. Permanent and insoluble.

We pray that with the help of a blade and a litany of needles, that we might pause the flow of our mortal coil and discover some escape hatch to our decrepitude. Yet the ultimate infantilization is with age itself.

You

will see

your loved ones

trip upon their own historical arc. Consolidate into some pure form of their most condensed obstinance and arrogance. Compress like a spring then recoil to a child’s fragility.

In his 98th year I touched my grandfather’s skull. His hair downy-soft. Whiter than bones. A tenderness afforded to a baby. Yet here the man who had been the bull elephant. Skin like bleeding paper. The very insides of his flesh screaming for their release. Yet a silver-gilded will immune from the hourglass’s change or the silver moon’s fall.

I saw beautiful women, like fallen stars, assemble in DMV queues for black boxed Ubers as the sun rose over Sunset Boulevard.

Is this the time that you seek to replay? The essence of you that you hope might be stretched and attenuated? What is the perfection that you think might regress?

Entropy cares not for botulism. For collagen’s chemical decay. This will never be arrested in the scalpel’s gleam.

I sat alone inside a vast cinema of all of my regrets and perfections to watch the tapes uncoil. The time that I was given. Upon death’s door, life is but a flash. But I would see it as some rewindable formed Instagram feed, where I might relive my sterling silvered perfections. No popcorned intermission, or choc-topped frozen passage of time. Tape unfolds. And our pauses will only stretch out its fidelity.

Every year I have loved better than the last. Except perhaps for Covid, when I finally understood my own mortality. My hair is finding silver now, making offerings at my temples. Below a thinning thatch that once waved under the sun indomitable.

Should I attempt to rearrange this face? To sustain my delusions of relevance? Has anybody ever really seen a single time when a facelift has done anything but expose tragic vulnerability? Maybe we reveal our weaknesses and plaster them upon our faces like Imax screens of our frightened souls. We see this in others and know it in ourselves, better revealing our humanity by embarrassing others with our vanity.

I saw a great beauty that I knew chase lines of cocaine down slippery slopes and wear it upon her skin as a leap through time.

I saw sun turn a beach hunk’s surface flesh to sallowed leather tan like Hermès saddles upon the undertaker’s cart.

A great pop star that I knew spent a week in a luxury retreat nipping and tucking like Mrs Potato.

Yet this skin is ourselves. It is not some other - some ramp to the moon where we might sing upon a star.

I once damaged my brain. Smashed apart the bone that protected its thinnest tendrils. Felt my legs go limp then slowly return with funny bone’s numbness. The surgeons cut my legs into Lego sets of titanium sticks. Threading bones and protrusions of flesh.
When the fiberglass cast came off the right foot, the object within was no longer one I recognized. I recoiled in shock at the sight. Me, yet not the me that I knew.

If I peeled apart this quicksilver face and looked upon my brethren, filling every other seat in the house, flowing as mercury before the curtain falls. A sea of silver faces, flat, calm, void of the feet of crows or any wrinkled disposition. No laughter lines or pock marks, no wounded medallions, or scars of our sincerity. Perfect and still, shining and silver.

Would that film feel more human? Would that film tell us a prouder story? Would we arrest this mortal fall?

I once held something very precious. The last glasses of my dead father that had adorned his face. Some snapshot of expression. Drunkenly I wore them once. To some night of flailing alcohol and misdirected sexual energy. A faceless girl took them from me, because she thought that they looked cool. I with cold indifference - satisfied that a photo had been taken - believed that that silver imprint would leave an adequate facsimile, and that this was an item that I could discard. Twenty years later, I think about those glasses almost every day.