My 2023: a Diptych

by A.G. Perez | 12/1/23

Flying over the Appalachian Mountains, I thought about migration. I thought about how it's practiced by countless species; how few humans are more than two generations removed from a leaving and an arriving; how it is and isn’t like a death. One way it is like dying is that despite being the only thing everyone ever has or will do, it felt quite lonely when it happened to me. I knew I was doing the right thing by leaving Houston for Boston, but I felt I was making a mistake by leaving my loved ones for my own art. Sometimes, there are gulfs between knowing and feeling. The truth about the situation, as with most situations, is both constantly in a state of being revealed as we accrue new layers of experience through which we look back at memories, and likely somewhere between and around what I know or feel.

So I decided to believe that I was doing a good thing.

Orientation Week at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee was blurry. I stayed on the air mattress when I could (this turned out to be just about every waking moment for the week). I thought I was too achey to make new friends, but one by one, new friends changed that. I went through the motions. The motions moved me to the next week. Everything was overwhelmingly foreign still, but everyone else seemed to be in the same boat.

That Wednesday, I met my teacher Tim McCormack in person. They’re the reason I’m in Boston. I found their music inexplicably moving when I first found it, but more than that, I felt after one conversation with them in March that I saw myself in them somehow. I got the feeling that their soul is made of the same material as mine. But less hazy. More certain.

Before the 27th of August, before I was hanging over the Appalachian Mountains, I was on my own. Better put, I had plenty of dear friends and collaborators around, but I was left to my own devices. I finished undergrad in December, so I spent the first eight months of the year taking commissions, producing a show, and generally figuring myself out one gig at a time. I learned that community is essential and that my work should somehow aim to build and affirm community. I learned that the lateral support of my community could not replace the feeling of groundedness I could get from engaging with my ancestry—one that, due to the American settler colonial project, has been obscured. I learned that my queerness is a gift that can help me interface with my past, gather my present, and synthesize it for a future. But how to synthesize these values, especially in my music, was beyond me.

In these final four months, once a week, Tim pours over my drafts and reads me. They use earthier language than most of us. Words like excavate, tectonic, barometric. More than words, they give me a grammar for articulating the things I’ve tried and failed to describe by myself—in and outside my music. Despite their access to specificity, they know when to surrender to mystery. Words like inscrutable and ineffable are offered regularly.

They make it easier to believe that I am doing a good thing.

Whether my doing has anything to do with it, good things are happening to me. After the grief of uprooting and replanting, I’ve accepted that my life has been made a diptych—at least that, for now—but my loved ones in Houston are still accessible to me. We still make plans to see each other. I’m writing this in New York City while my old friend Zach sleeps down the hall. We’re here to visit Maggie, a mutual friend from back home. They’re precious to me. They’re from the left panel of my life, as it were. I’m listening to Éliane Radigue’s Occam Hepta I, and it’s moving me for reasons I’m sure I’ll be able to explain in a few months. And with my new teacher’s guidance, I’m learning to see myself more closely through the fruits of my labor, the materials of my writings. I’m learning to speak.