by Vita Tate

August 2025⸺

On the bus from Annecy to Geneva, my hands fumbled for three passports in my backpack, two of which belonged to Louis. The Franco-Swiss border came fast, an enfilade of soft edges: an expanding highway, multiplying lanes, national flags, little green posts, traffic cones. The bus glided indefinitely to the right, lane after lane, past checkpoints and parked cars. We slowed but never stopped. 

And just like that, we were in Switzerland. There was no need for passports. No one was concerned about us. 

This is not the experience of crossing the U.S.-Canadian border nor the U.S.-Mexican border, both of which require ID checks and interrogation. Once on a Greyhound from Boston to Montreal, I had to convince the border agent I wasn’t going to overstay in Canada. Thanks, but New England winters were brutal enough. 

These are my insecurities: 

The border is a monument to fear. Both the erector’s fear through its enforcement and my own in encountering it. My palms were still sweating as we crossed Geneva’s city limits. The heatwave didn’t help. Our bus crawled through rush hour traffic. I stretched across Louis’ lap to snap a photo of Le Plaza’s marquee, which read, 

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH FREEDOM 

C’EST QUOI LE PROBLEME AVEC LA LIBERTE ? 

The first statement is a provocation; the second, exasperation. Artist Christian Robert-Tissot quoted the marquee’s line from Easy Rider. In French, the line loses its biker coolness. In French, it demands an answer. Tell me, what is liberty’s failure? And why the fuck do people have such a problem with liberation? 

English has two words for la liberté: liberty and freedom. I wouldn’t know how to translate Tissot’s French translation back to English without losing the connotations gained through the statement’s first linguistic transformation. The trap of living between two languages, between two cultures, is the translation gap widens the longer you dwell in it. The longer thoughts volley from one language to another and back.

I grasp and fail at these nuances in my burdened, footnoteless, spoken translations between English and French speaking friends and family. I hate playing intermediary. Bilinguality complicates everything. Except with Louis. With Louis, the gradations of language swell in the mélange of our polyphonic speech. With Louis, life feels incredibly easy and beautiful.

Everything is incredibly beautiful: 

Like me holding Louis’s hand on that bus as we arrived at Geneva’s Place de Cornavin, across my knees a copy of The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula opened to page seven. Sweaty and drained and in clotted mascara and nourished by Kathy Acker, I felt beautiful. Equally sweaty and tired and annoyed by having to now take a train and ready to shower at the airport hotel, Louis was more beautiful than me and certainly more beautiful than anyone else in that bus. Louis is the most beautiful person I know. 

(Louis pauses at this sentence. “One day you are going to wake up and realize I’m Quasimodo.”) 

Kathy circulated unpublished sections of The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, her first novel, to Eleanor Antin’s mailing list for her 100 Boots project. These chapters, riddled with plagiarized passages relating to sex and death, arrived at unsuspecting readers’ mailboxes. Kathy pressed against the boundaries of these recipients and her interlocutors. 

Borders destroy beauty. The beauty of the landscape, of communities, of personhood. Borderlands cleaved in two by watchtowers and traffic stops. 

Louis and I spent sixteen consecutive hours in Geneva, one of our longer stints. We usually spend our time in the region with frontalier family on the French side of Lake Léman. These sixteen hours are passed riding in buses and trains and shuttles and fucking in the Nash Airport Hotel. At the Geneva airport, there is an interior non-territorial French border, but passport control is no more rigorous than flying domestically. These borders, territorial and representational, seem more porous than those in the U.S. This porosity is a deception. Border crossings are a confidence game. 

This is a list of what’s necessary: 

During our layover at Charles de Gaulle, we drank shitty coffee and nibbled shitty sandwich wraps and sat around deleting any texts that mention the names of politicians and political theoreticians. We had become fearful by the dozens of stories from friends and friends of friends and colleagues who had problems entering the U.S. in early 2025. I got bored after deleting dozens of dumb texts, frustrated by analyzing every joke I’ve ever sent in questionable taste. I gave up. Fuck it. Maybe I have no sense of self-preservation. Maybe it’s just that those messages are still floating around in the cloud. Data is forever. Bad faith can weaponize anything.

Some text threads had gone cold and there was not much to delete anyway. Like with Molly. Over the last few months, the boundary between Molly and me has been steadily eroding in a unilateral, nonconsensual kind of way. She got her first tattoo in the same place and in the same shape as my first tattoo. Her email signature is formatted identically to mine. She joined my online writing group. Her work has taken on an antagonistic bite that it hadn’t previously possessed. She cried when I wouldn’t join a local writing group with her.  

I’m trying to claw my way out of that pit of enmeshment but keep chickening out. I’m not this avoidant with anyone else. Enough mind remains in me to want this prison to disappear. I feel like a hypocrite for demanding boundaries.  

Which boundaries should I enforce? Which ones should I break down? 

Goddamn it, woman. We need space. I thought it would get better over time, but it’s not. Every time I see her tattoo my anger comes back. I told her before she did it that her choices felt too close for comfort. I’m not a sucker for sisterhood tropes. I’m freaked out and time isn’t fixing this. The awareness of time (prison). 

I like a firm boundary between self and other. Emotional borders should be hermetic, watertight. No grey space allowed. 

Slice off your tattoo and I’ll text you back. 

Kathy tried on many voices, one after another after another, letting others’ words tumble from her mouth. She tried on their lives like a series of masks. Her literary boundaries were porous.  

Maybe my personal boundaries are firm, but my literary ones aren’t. I imprison her hand, imprison her so I can become her. The academic in me wants to cite Kathy, wants to pay deference to her ideas. The other part, the thief, couldn’t be bothered to write down page numbers in my notes. I made the conscious decision to not cite her on the plane to LAX. I typed out lines from The Life of the Black Tarantula on my Notes app for no other reason than I wanted her words to be mine. 

My reading was interrupted by the arrival of my special Indian vegetarian meal forty minutes before anyone else. The older French couple behind us grumbled. 

“Not fair,” Louis pouted.

“Yeah? Well, Lou, you would be eating right now if you gave up meat.” 

Getting served airplane food early is a small consolation for not condemning a chicken to be served up as some grey waxy tasteless mush. I normally don’t weaponize my vegetarianism as a morally superior stance but on airplanes I become a smug twat. 

In the land of the free, seven-week-old fattened debeaked chickens are packed so tightly in cages that their feet barely touch the ground before they are swept away to their deaths. This is your freedom and mine. Freedom like ours does not belong to the chickens.  

So much for only being a smut twat on airplanes. I guess I just don’t want to be the kind of animal that consumes other animals. I don’t want to masticate on their muscles to nourish mine. I don’t want their bodies inside me.

I like that firm boundary between self and other. Except when it comes to sex. Sex is temporary. A moment in time. Completion and separation are implied in the act of consummation, just as death is implied in life. Sex has an end point. Its boundaries are never firm. 

I’m queen because I fuck a lot I don’t let anyone reach me. 

Louis and I made ourselves half-sick taxiing on the jetway in LA thinking of what fresh horrors await us at border control in 2025. I tell Louis to stick closely by me and let me do the talking. From the length of the lines and triple the normal amount of police, serious control seemed to await us. There was no logic to the queues. Officers closed lines in front of us and opened others. We weaved from this line to that, arriving finally to a tablet equipped with face scanning technology. The agents stood around these tablets with fuck all to do but usher us towards the tablet. 

We were afraid for nothing. No moody agents. The algorithm thought we’re fine. But that’s the thing about stoking fear at national borders. The panopticon works. Surveillance doesn’t need to be constant to be enforced. Fear is enough for complicity.   

The border is a place of fear mongering. 

What is at the border of myself? What is at the border of others’ minds? The thoughts of others are available to me as fragments captured and curated in print. I like encountering others this way. It is the safest form of socialization. 

My revolt against the death society collides with my desire to be touched, I have no identity.

Thing is, as I poured over The Life of the Black Tarantula over the course of our thirty-seven-hour voyage home, I heard Kathy’s voice ring so loudly through my exhaustion and resign I could no longer recognize my own thoughts. I only heard Kathy. I could detect when her voice ends, and the Marquis de Sade’s began. Maybe that’s why I am compelled to cite her. I fear plagiarizing her because I’ve integrated so much of her through the years. Where does her voice end and mine begin? 

Do I have a voice? 

I’m not sure if I think of myself as a person.  

How to sort one feeling from another? My distaste for hard spatial borders. My need to desire to get as close as possible with Kathy. My need to preserve myself from my influences, from my friends. It’s as if I’m trying to become other people because theirs is what I find interesting. I must preserve myself.  

Intention: I write. 

Intention: I become invisible as I cross state lines. 

Intention: I become her. 

Intention: I cannot become her. 

Intention: I become a murderess by repeating in the words the lives of other murderesses: (but I cannot become them. To become any of them is impossible.) Inside me, I begin to shiver. I am her. I’m her child and her mother so that I’m completely safe I’m inviolable and there’re no men around (I cannot become her.) 

Intention: I separate myself from others and then fold back myself in. The dialectics of relationality. 

Borders run along the contours of fear.  

Intention: I devour borders.  

I’m going to speak the truth because this is the apocalypse.  

I am compelled to preserve the border between fact and narrative—the one boundary that opportunistic assholes seem so eager to erode these days. Separation between reality and the mirror world is critical to human survival.  

I am compelled to preserve the border between self and other. 

I am compelled to devour the border between Kathy and me. Our thoughts merge. 

I’m a failure. This is a failure all I’m causing is my own disintegration. What’m I trying to do? My work and my sexuality combine:  

The tragedy of my life is that I’ll never be Kathy Acker. 

my cunt is my center my cunt is my center my cunt is my center  

Kick me again in the cunt please.  

The tragedy of Kathy Acker is that she could never be those murderers and pornographers that she sublates in her writing. The real tragedy is that she would never be Sade. 

The tragedy in my friendship with Molly is that I feel guilty for not wanting to experience myself as a fun-house reflection through her whenever we hang out. I feel guilty for wanting to go back to how our friendship was before she fell into her current crisis. The real tragedy is that I feel guilty for writing the truth.

The last stint of our journey home is the three-hour shuttle from LAX to Santa Barbara, most of it spent along the California Coast on the 101. I grew up on the 101, know its every curve and bump. With my eyes closed, I can feel the spot where it merges with the PCH, the moment when it loses its urban sprawl identity in the wedge between mountains and sea.  

The Pacific is the most dangerous border that I know. A border of existential threat. The eroding coastline has been swallowing up the PCH in chunks since I was a kid. Now it is claiming homes. In the future, it will take whole towns. The ocean seems like a firm boundary, an impervious border, but it is famished. It will devour us all as its tides rise.  

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Excerpts in italics from Kathy Acker, “The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula,” in Portrait of an Eye, 1-90. New York: Grove Press, 2020.