The Ace of Hearts :: The Light
A Black non-binary person in a black and pink power wheelchair has their eyes closed and is smiling while being hugged from behind by a Black femme wearing compression gloves. The two have their hair tangled together from the embrace. The background is flowers and there’s a heart in in the top left and bottom right corner. Image from Disabled and Here. Link to stock photos on image.
I've had two lovers who, although our relationship was otherwise intimate, did not kiss.
With one, this rapidly reversed about six months in.
When you start kissing, if you start kissing, this sort of lover, you are in trouble.
And you are able to understand the beauty and the danger of the Ace of Hearts.
I learned someone always had to be the girl. The archetypical girl.
There's nothing embarrassing about being a woman, so long as you are one.
It was a sensual distinction, but not a flattering one. It doesn't mean "the person who is a woman."
It means, that in the absence of such a person, that someone must be the one who submits. The one who works.
If someone must lose in love, this person is the one set up for losing.
This is easy for straights, of course. It's set up with them in mind. What's good for the gander, one assumes, is even better for the goose.
When I was living as a lesbian, it was easy. It is easy to pretend. It is easy to highlight the parts of yourself that fit.
The hard part is digesting the rest of you, which does not.
I was an adult by the time I met a Black gay trans person. It was like putting on your shoes in the morning, and finding that not only do they not fit, the holes let in water.
It was as though in the noticing about those shoes, I found my feet, too, were gangrenous. That I was rotten to the knee, and I hadn't even noticed it.
And I hadn't noticed it because I was not living there. There, in my body. And I hoped it would get the message, that it would pack up and move somewhere too.
And though meeting them was gorgeous, and they were gorgeous, there was a snag. It like, totally broke my ability to be the girl.
A Kiss
At least, full time. There are many situations in which I relish being the girl. None I care to recall here.
There was the Ace of Hearts. Opening the heart. Renewing with sweetness. Awakening our self-empathy.
Like a kiss, the Ace of Hearts is a catalyst.
It's among the most blessed cards in cartomancy.
Hearts are the suit of the priest class and human desires. Hearts emphasize the turns of fate around our emotional lives.
In the past, the Aces had a relationship to letters. Now, we can modernize these associations onto other methods.
The Ace of Hearts may be a flirty text, a tinder message (for those unbanned), or the sound of the Grindr alert.
There's a softness and whimsy that comes with the Ace of Hearts. You may receive an email or text from an old lover. You could find hidden love letters.
This could be positive or negative. Perhaps the letters are for another. The texting lover may be a known quantity, and a dud.
But the Ace of Hearts makes it so hard to keep our head on straight.
With the Ace of Spades, it can as easily bring the end or uncanny start to a romance as it can a birth. The combination can lead to a spiritual awakening.
The Ace of Hearts may announce a new home. It may be the start to a lifetime love.
The Light
Yet, it's only that—a start. What grows is up to you.
How painful to know that?
It could be you that grows, regardless of where the relationship ends.
Common writes about a transformation in how he saw love. In his autobiography One Day It'll All Make Sense, he reflects on his song "The Light" musing:
For the longest time, I would measure how a woman felt about me not just by the love she showed me but also by how upset she would get at me. Pain was as good as pleasure.
That can be the Ace of Hearts.
But when he write this a few paragraphs later:
Over time, though, I’ve come to understand myself well enough to know the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy love.
That's the Ace of hearts too. That growth.
That deepening capacity to love and be loved and know love. That is the work of the Ace of Hearts.
Moonlight, Barry Jenkins' masterpiece, is full of moments where a half-born light enters. Like the Ace of Hearts, this light cannot last on its own.
It may be a welcome flash, but it is you who must find fuel to keep the lights on.
The light in Kevin's eyes when he knows he's still got it, still got him. The flashes between them in the kitchen.
The sun in Chiron's gold tooth smile before Kevin asks "what man, c'mon you just drove down here?"
The light is fragile. Like any small fire, it is subject to injury. Like any small fire, it must be protected.
Within all places of possibility, some would say vulnerability, we risk.
We risk injury. We risk rejection. We risk meeting ourselves and not liking what we see.
It is a kiss that allows possibility into out world. It's the moment where the camera zooms out, where the light pours in.
And for some of us, it is the moment when we see the audience. Where we notice the spectator. Where we find we are in danger.
I was encouraged to strike the word "faggot" from my first book SLINGSHOT.
Never mind that the first time someone called me a "faggot" I was 14. Emanuel D----- ran up to me in gym class and called me a "fat faggot bitch."
I whooped his ass because I could whoop his ass. It was the only thing about the situation I could change.
Then SLINGSHOT was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in the category of Gay Poetry. I was sure I wouldn't win.
What could a real gay man, as the ask to strike the word seemed to imply, have in common with me?
What would they know about being rejected at exactly the moment the curtains should swing open? When it feels like the whole world should sweeten for the love that's been made.
What would they know about being girled whether you are one or not and how often?
Of lovers who love you but cannot do so out in the open. Of family that nursed you, but hate you?
What could they know of that? What could I know of their lives? What overlap could there be.
A fair amount, it turns out. I won.
The Ace of Hearts Unites
It does not promise we will stay together. It does not ensure we will be kind to one another.
But for one single, brilliant moment, we are only one thing.
As Venus was in pisces when I was born, I crave the moment of merging. Of forgetting myself and becoming a third thing with someone also forgetting themself.
It's intoxicating. It cannot last.
This is a good thing. The Ace of Hearts’ hot room eventually stifles.
We must move ourselves, attached or alone, into the next phase of relating.
That could be defining the romance. It could mean abandoning it.
But you cannot stay with the Ace of Hearts.
It is ephemeral. It is pivotal.
It must end.
hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Temperance Queer Tarot. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.