The following is adapted from a paper that was accepted to the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. It is a mixture of prose and theoretical exposition, each component texturizes the other. Enjoy!

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      We’d lived in the house six months to the day when it caught fire.  A cold San Francisco morning, the sun hadn’t yet risen and the downstairs neighbors were screaming bloodcurdling screams for their lives and barely made it out.  I called my friend from the street half naked, woke him up, “the house is on fire.”  I was freezing.  He was in Arizona.  I waited tenuously, nervously the few remaining days before he returned.  Another friend and I sat quietly in what remained of armchairs.  The sun was setting and I wanted my friend to see how bad it was.  We collected fetishistic souvenirs: alphabet magnets from the refrigerator whose letters had been singed off, books whose covers had bubbled and blackened from the immense heat.  I traced the path of handprints still screaming in the black soot of the bedroom windows where my neighbors eventually jumped from onto hard concrete two stories below.  He arrived around ten o’clock, and it was dark.  The fire department had long since turned off the building’s electricity.  We sat in the darkness in the living room of our apartment, breathing in the residual dampness lingering from the ghosts of fire hoses.

***

      I was in Phoenix, the last place I wanted to be. I was awakened by a phone call; it was my friend. The time: 5:47am.  He said calmly, but with more seriousness then I ever remember him speaking: “This is serious … the house is on fire, I have to talk with the fire department … I’ll call you back.” The fire department would never fully determine the cause. I returned to San Francisco a few days later.  He was waiting for me in what remained of the house. We had never smoked in it; the irony of smoking in a house that had just burned down did not escape us.

***

      Our burnt down house was at least one place where our friendship happened.  Of course, our friendship is always happening, in different spaces and different times, but this was a moment.  We say “moment” because there are few other ways to think about a friendship’s temporal arrangements. Friendships are constellations of moments.  The lines we draw between moments tell different stories, even though the moments remain the same.  This means that there’s an infinite number of ways that we can tell the story of our friendship.  We came to understand our friendship the way we’ve come to understand most things in our friendship, standing outside in the cold smoking.  Looking down at the ground, an array of cigarette butts sits randomly.  Like the long-since burned-out stars whose random arrangements form images in the night sky that tell ancient stories, the cigarette butts on the ground represent the constellations of our friendship—moments, stories of shared humanity—that live on long after each cigarette has been put out.

      The cigarettes that we smoke are not the stories themselves; they serve more as “commas” that divide “otherwise uninterrupted waves of experience into punctuated intervals or separate temporal units” (Lenson, 1995, p. 37).  The cigarettes become transitive, creating a run-on sentence between the stories that we tell so that their ideas, thoughts, affects, and circumstances come into conversation with each other. We can look back at those sentences and rearrange the appositives and independent clauses to represent different ideas, accentuating different points. The temporal logic that cigarettes afford us is that the past, present, and future—as normative truths—fail to serve as an intelligible regime with which to situate stories.

      Representations of the past, present, and future control the ways that we understand, tell, and interpret stories. Such control must be loosened if we are to reclaim a queer temporality of friendship. Benjamin (1968) has theorized a space of reconceptualization in his ninth thesis on the philosophy of history. Referring to a painting by Klee depicting the “angel of history,” Benjamin’s angel can do nothing to resolve the catastrophes of history; he is being thrown forward by the storm of progress. Below him the past and present erupt. These eruptions of past and present are those stories we tell. Cigarettes serve the same function as Benjamin’s angel: as a trope that exposes the past and present as constantly changing and never settled. Thinking of history in this way allows us to bring the past together with the present/future, creating a resonance that might be called queer temporality.