Welcome to Opal Age
We’re so glad you decided to read our ramblings. Let us tell you a little bit about ourselves. When we first met, our gaydar went off pretty hard. Neither of us said anything about it for the first couple of days, but we knew when the tarot decks came out at Home Hostel, Lisbon that something LGBT was afoot. Something inherently debaucherous was in our future. Katie was visiting from Florida and just sprained her ankle real good, and Claude was a trans-dude growing his first shitty mustache who had just quit his job. The two of us schemed over day beers limping through the streets. The scheme was that one fateful day we would move to Europe and get far, far away from the treachery of queer American life. Somewhere to more peacefully exist than in silence, in fear, and in constant shock. As it turns out, to have a true space of your own, you have to create it yourself.
So for you, we have an offering. An effervescent refuge. We are creating something just as delectable and addictive as the digital hot chips of fearful, divisive media. Instead of scraping the tummy-turning cheeto dust off your fingers with your teeth (you fucking goblin), we want you to savor Opal Age like a sticky but wonderful honey dripping down the side of your hand. Sensual, sneaky vulnerability. An eloquent, but raunchy escape from vapid trends. A legacy of our nectarous, wondrous selves. Something, someplace as profound as how connected we feel, but with a place to feel that way shamelessly. And maybe that’s not just found in France, Lisbon or anywhere else. Maybe it’s not away from you, but right here within all of us. And we want you to tell us about that feeling within you. Opal Age seeks to be a borderless decadence for you to explore with us.
When we see our community, we see so much unappreciated brilliance dimmed by our circumstances. Beautiful, eccentric, waiting, wondrous, intellectually intoxicating beings. Hell, most of us are wiping tables with a twelfth-used rag while holding a well-intentioned degree, and for what? And that’s if you even got the chance to go through the financial, institutional, and mental turmoil of university. We want to celebrate and bask in your clandestine brilliance. No embossed paper necessary. All of us have an inherent knowledge about ourselves, the world, and where we come from if we just allow ourselves the grace of boundless bountiful expression.
Tell us. What aches and flutters in you as you rustle around the floor for your pants after a tinder hookup? What do you discover about nature when you take a picture of a dewy, delicate flower on your walk? Or when you feel a hearty laughter brewing in you after reading stupid shit on a bumper sticker? How do you feel when you gaze at the aging hands of a stranger reading a book on the train? We want to leave a record of our sweetness, our vulnerability, our limerence, and our infinite capability. And that can be fucking hard to share even with yourself. That’s why there won’t just be one opportunity to submit to Opal Age. We’ll be waiting for you next month too. Someone out there needs to hear what you have to share.
Our inaugural editor’s edition, Chariot, welcomes you home. Everyone has an origin story, and this is both ours and yours. The Editor's Edition of Opal Age serves as your permanent invitation to create and share your vision. Reveal your lush inner essence. The world has been waiting to see you glimmer.
We invite you to see the world through Opal glasses. Our maiden voyage into Opal Age pulls us forward after a long period of darkness and stagnation. We invite you to dip gently into the water; everyone is invited to our idyllic home. Opal Age mirrors the seasons of the zodiac cause who wants to release a magazine the same day they pay rent? The themes of our Editors Edition take inspiration from the sign of Cancer – because home is the only place from which we can begin our metamorphosis.
Thank you for showing us the chambers of your heart. And of course, thank you Mama from Home Hostel for bringing us together over bacalhau and bacalaughs.
Your gracious hosts and editors,
Katie & Claude
Buh Bum
by claude joven
he/they
Home is water bottles lining the bedside tables and the dusty silver cd player.
Pinesol rags.
Home is the smell of chlorinated towels sopping off the side of brown 70s leather seat.
Granny's glowing yellow office
Poolside, go fish.
Home is the box cars racing down Beryl
paper crayon memory.
Rickety into the pink, smoggy sunset. Lined by cocky palms.
Home is where there's music still.
Etching cd’s for 5 bucks
boom goes the garage.
Where the guitar hums in the other room
while lychee simmers over the stove.
Syrupy, sweet.
Home is where the mice skitter around as we go mad together
Together in darkness
cackling betwixed the death garden and twinkling yard lights.
And at times you will find, that home is where body meets self.
Scattered, wistful, and alone.
Clamoring in bed with no one to cry to but your future self.
Gently holding your everything and all, at once in time.
Breakfast photos as a reminder you love yourself.
And maybe home is languageless.
Chalk hitting the bricks, blue heart,
buh bum.
Where her little eyes look up to mine nodding, knowing.
buh bum.
Maybe screaming doesn’t need to be a prerequisite to home.
Doesn’t need to be a means of staying.
But songs of the precious celestial,
joyful honest
laughter
holding tight
needlessly.
Buh bum, buh bum.
White Wall Series
Ingrid Martinez
she/her
white wall no. 1
Medium: oil on paper
Dimensions: 25.4cm x 25.4cm
white wall no. 2
Medium: oil on paper
Dimensions: 25.4cm x 25.4cm
white wall no. 3
Medium: oil on paper
Dimensions: 25.4cm x 25.4cm
Read This Right Now:
GIOVANNI’S ROOM by James Baldwin
by Katie
she/her
Proceed with caution – contains a few spoilers
“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you do, you can never go back.”
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin has been on my book list for years. It’s been recommended to me over and over again, and I finally picked it up when nothing else looked worthwhile at a Budget Books a couple months ago. I have a degree in English Literature, and James Baldwin is an author that I’m embarrassed to have never studied or read. But I nearly put the book back because the entire plot is revealed on the back cover. I still think that this is a poor design choice – but I’m happy I read it. I completed it in just a couple of days; in a couple of different parks and occasionally surrounded by bees. The plot could’ve been about anything or nothing and I think I still would’ve enjoyed Baldwin’s writing.
“Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.”
David is torn between two people and two countries; both problems that are never resolved. Saying he is torn feels like a stretch. The strongest emotion he expresses for either Hella or Giovanni is disgust. He is seemingly indifferent about living in France or America – he feels like he cannot be himself in America, but he is equally unhappy and unfulfilled in France. This mirrors his relationships. After Hella leaves to consider his marriage proposal, he relies entirely on Giovanni for housing. Both Hella and Giovanni express love for David, but he is incapable of reciprocating. He rejects his own bisexuality and treats each sexual encounter like an opportunity to remedy his desire for the other gender. His revulsion towards their bodies and confusion about his own wishes make him a complete monster devoid of empathy and the basic ability to love.
“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”
Despite knowing Giovanni’s fate before I even read the novel, I still found the circumstances that led to his death surprising. I did find it a bit hard to believe that the heartbreak from losing David would cause Giovanni to go on a downward spiral…because David sucks. I’ll leave it at that. Ultimately, David’s indifference towards Giovanni, when he leaves him to rot in his room surrounded by creeps who only want to use him; leads him to his death. As Giovanni dies, David loses himself. By the last page he is left with nothing and no place where he belongs. Exactly what he deserves.
"If you can't love anybody, you are dangerous; because you have no way of learning humility."
I went on a James Baldwin YouTube interview spiral seconds after finishing the book. In his interview with Maya Angelou called Conversation with a Native Son, James Baldwin discusses his life moving between France and America. Angelou describes France as Baldwin’s “adopted home.” It’s easy to see the resemblance between Baldwin’s geographical situation and David’s. But calling France David’s “adopted home” would be inaccurate. Baldwin lived in France as a necessity to avoid violence from racism and homophobia. David went to France because he had nothing better to do. David’s intention when he moved to France was to find himself; but he ultimately loses himself along with everyone who ever loved him.
I have more I could say, but instead you should just read the book and then talk to me about it later. Final rating: five stars. Read it NOW.
samsonite hardshell
by claude joven
he/they
I take my blue blanket with me to the third to last day. Teal, serene, stitched, unstitched, stately. It’s nothing much. Thousands more have the same ikea shore lining their coastline.
Bedded and unbedded, roaming about the world. Couch to lonesome couch. I pretend I’m Dean Martin, Gentle on My Mind.
They say those with the CHIRONIC wound of the fourth house* are bound to be unmade by home. A fated homelessness, destined by the stars. Destined to be left by home. Home alone in a samsonite shell.
My samsonite was left to me by my great-grandparents. Rovers themselves. Stickered with their travels, loosening the seams with mine. And it’s a good thing they left that hardshell samsonite since the home they left, once dappled in sunlight ‘midst the wood-paneled walls and iron median now lays shuttered and shelled. Locked clattering hearths. Empty rooms, haunted by the living. And my annuals.
I folded all my lover’s black clothing in a box for him one day in April 2020. That was quick. A capsule carefully stuffed with Martin Luther King's most obscure manifestos and his black clothes. I always asked my mom why she never wore colors I thought she would look pretty in. She just liked black clothes. Shadows echo.
The day came when I left my empty black closets behind, headed north to promised home. Brought to mid-century home, only to… well. Our last weeks were flooded, flies covering the windowsill. Biblical proportioned plagues sent upon my northern home. It was going to be different this time. Pacific omen.
More belonged to me then, until nothing belonged to me. Not even myself. Denounced by all my homes, my country. En route to exile myself to a French village, no-thing of mine lingered. En route to being a hidden, slouching, double-d tranny, shadowed by the Pyrenees like a medieval bandit.
A carry-on filled only with granny’s painting of Spain, tarot cards, scarves knitted by friends, and a tome of Oscar Wilde every work. A hard-shelled samsonite filled to the brim with winter wares.
A profound, repetitive, melancholic familial loss pangs blinking in Rudolph’s nose over the Burnside bridge. A stranger asked, Do you want to talk about it? No. I’m leaving soon.
To give away my blue blanket and Rav4 on January 19. Departing with my samsonite shell, 20 January. No false tether to home. We need to talk. We can’t take you in exile, but a woman interested in you in a more distant hamlet** can. Shit happens. That’s what I say to anyone shamelessly poising themselves to let me down in the most impressive way possible.
I stay in homes for a living, cherishing sweet creatures. Leaving homes clean as if to ritualize and honor the concept of home I so desperately crave. Small, loyal, eager companions and a place to rest my wretched bones.
I’ve slept in beds that tower, beds in the very center of rooms, beds made like heaven, beds barely screwed together, beds left unmade in haste or depression. And when I roam, the rooms with only the felt blankets that barely cover your shins, Portuguese grandma oasis, beds with two pillows down the middle cause bros toes aren’t meant to touch in the wee small hours.
And for a year now my blue blanket and hard-shelled samsonite have taken me to my wits end. From floor, to cot of air, to cots shifting atop shipping pallets, to blue velvet love couch, to coven couch, to haunted home emptying, to my little niece's bedroom.
It’s been a year of living in home’s void. Or has it been 9? I think the last time I felt home was in Spring of 2012. Cosplaying an American family for my first honored guest. Yearning ever since.
I think of that scene in Kajillionaire where the old man is trying to die. He asks if the family, illed by chronic scarcity of love and money, could act like his family. Louder so he could hear it. How was your day? The piano chariots him to death. The family ceases and hastily disintegrates. Grab the bucket. The bubbles are coming.
Every hour I remind myself that I am not the dying man. Not everyone is pretending to be wonderful. Not everyone is building a “shit happens” tower. And not everyone will shame me for needing/getting.
And hope, aching hope is patched together gently. By a little voice in the tune of one year and eight months.
Hi Shel. Pray Mr. Silverstein makes O of peace missing on this fool's journey home.
*The fourth house in astrology rules parents, homes, maternal or feminine energy, homeland, and foundations.
**A hamlet is a town with fewer than 100 people.
Negative Capability
by Katie
she/her
I’ve been sitting here for days trying to come up with something to write. What I originally wrote felt too fragmented. I originally wanted to write about what it was like to move to a new country and how I felt about the trend of convincing yourself to be delusional. I wanted to connect the two ideas together. What I created was the most boring and preachy personal essay ever written. It’s been weeks since I came up with the idea, and I’m completely stuck.
Occasionally I get creative bursts, but it does not happen as much as I’d like it to. My novel still sits in my drafts with only a few chapters finished. My excuse for not finishing it is because it takes place in my apartment and it’s about a ghost. I’ve got a tangled checkerboard knitting project in a basket somewhere; waiting to be finished or tossed away. I tried to get into watercolor painting a few times, resulting in a gallery of unfinished paintings. The purpose of writing this, and the sole purpose for posting this for the world to see and judge is so I can get myself unstuck. But the entire reason I’ve been stuck is because I have a particular idea of what I want my writing to look like. I want it to feel velvety, if that makes sense. I keep comparing my ideas and my writing to all the other writers and creative people I admire.
I taught myself years ago that writing was just a formula with a set structure. Now I’m trying to break out of the structure that I created for myself. I struggle with the fact that my ideas have been feeling forced, but the more I try to resist the worse it feels. One of my favorite poets is John Keats. I love both his writing and his philosophy on how the best ideas are created. In 1817, John Keats came up with the concept of negative capability in a letter: “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” I am still reaching after fact and reason and I can’t seem to stop.
A few months ago, I watched an interview with Donna Tartt that happened right after the publication of her first book, A Secret History. She started the book when she was nineteen and completed it when she was 29. She was basically a different person by the time her book was actually published. A Secret History was successful when it was first published in 1992, and it’s still a hit after 30 years. The ten years were worth it.
A couple months ago I submitted my first poem to a magazine I found on IG. I have no idea where the poem went, at the time they didn’t have anything on their website. This was part of the appeal – it was like throwing my poem into the void. It was chosen, but I have no idea what happened to it. I thought this would be comforting, but now I wish that I had some proof of it to serve as exposure therapy. So instead, I’m just going to use this entire magazine and essay as exposure therapy. Someday I’ll relax and magically think about something good to write about. It’ll be worth it even if it takes decades.
Eulogy for Muvico
Parisian 20
by Katie
she/her
This was the place where I saw the Twilight Saga for the first time. No other movie theater in South Florida will ever compare. Walking into this theater was like walking into a cheap and better Versailles. Three or four floors, I don’t know, but the floors are covered with red velvet in my memory. Behind the movie posters there’s pictures of cherubs. We watched this movie theater start as a novelty and end still as a novelty, but more decrepit. The upstairs bar closed. Fewer people bought tickets. I never recovered when the arcade closed on the bottom floor. I played Dance Dance Revolution there once in high school with my friends, after seeing some unmemorable movie.
As a kid I dreamed of walking through the mysterious black door beneath the EXIT sign next to the screen. If the ceilings were painted with bright blue baroque scenes of angels, surely every square inch of the theater was equally decadent. But I would be scared to turn the lights on during a movie. I sat in chocolate there once. The chocolate wasn’t mine. The path to the EXIT sign would be littered with melty Junior Mints, a candy that should not exist outside theater doors.
The very last movie I ever saw there was Minions: The Rise of Gru. I was a fool and spent $25 on snacks and a soda. It was worth it. Rest in peace, Muvico.