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On turning 40 but still being 12 inside

Adolescent obsessions, middle-aged desires, and 'the sweetness of my own continuity.'

Tracy Clark-Flory

Jul 31

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I’m republishing this post from last year—because I was reminded of it the other week when a friend turned 40, and because it expresses a sense of wonder, aliveness, and desire that I hope to remember to keep living inside.

Last week, I went to Mexico City with a friend for my 40th birthday. I put together a packed daily itinerary that I detailed in a spreadsheet and coordinated with an annotated Google Map. I don’t know if this is how I’ve always been or if the vigilance of motherhood—all the scheduling and anticipation of my child’s needs—has turned me into a travel agent of life. Regardless, this was notably different: the scheduling and anticipation of my own wants.

It turned out that one of my wants was this silly, stupid thing: to visit a couple of the filming locations for Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.

The film came out in 1996 when I was 12 years old, and it awoke something in me—or else became a repository for something that was already starting to emerge. I saw the movie so many times I memorized the whole thing. I started a daily Leonardo DiCaprio newsletter. I campaigned for my drama teacher to choose Romeo and Julietfor the school play, and then I got the role of Juliet. I talked the manager of the local Blockbuster into promising me the stand-alone cardboard display for the film’s VHS tapes once they were done with it.

I hadn’t chosen Mexico City for my 40th birthday trip because of the Romeo + Julietfilming locations, but once I squeezed them into our itinerary, it seemed like a kind of poetic revisitation of my youth ahead of this big milestone, and I leaned into it.

One of those locations: Chapultepec Castle, which was used for the exterior shots of Juliet’s mansion. I narrated to my friend Sarah as we approached the castle’s tall wrought iron gates. “These are the gates when Romeo is leaving the party after his fateful encounter with Juliet,” I whispered with faux seriousness. “He hops out of the car and runs and scales the palace walls to get to her. These gates were in the backdrop. He was here. He was here.”

I’d come prepared with a dozen or so screenshots on my phone of key moments from the film. As we passed through the gates, I told Sarah, “Let me cross-reference my screenshots.” I was not serious; I was very serious. I spread my fingers across the screen to zoom in on the pattern of wrought iron fence to determine exactly where Romeo had stood. Then I stood in that exact place and took some pictures.

As a 12-year-old, my favorite scenes were not the ones where Romeo and Juliet kissed or touched or professed their love. In my favorites, Romeo was bloody and/or screaming: killing Tybalt in a rage or yelling at the sky in sorrow over the ostensible loss of Juliet. (Any error on my adolescent computer triggered a recording of Leo screaming: “I am fortune’s fool!”) I didn’t identify with Juliet or Claire Danes; I found her kind of prissy and, quite frankly, boring. Sitting in her room, talking about marriage.

Romeo drove around town in his cool convertible with a bunch of rowdy friends. He wrote poetry and stared off into the sunset. He took drugs and climbed palace walls. I identified with his big feelings and I admired the way he wrote them on the world.

The pop cultural wisdom at the time explained the Leo fandom by his piercing blue eyes, the non-threatening nature of his androgynous looks, and the romantic subject matter of his films. Now, I think: What about the way his androgyny, paired with the adventuring entitlement of his fictional roles (not to mention his IRL “pussy posse”), allowed girls to project themselves onto him, dreaming about a bigger and more powerful life for themselves? Maybe it was just me. All I can say: My 12-year-old desires were about so much more than a cute boy.

Most desires are about so much more—and desire itself doesn’t just live in one domain. As I wrote in my memoir, “The answer to the question of what I desired didn’t live in the vacuum of sex and sexuality. It was a borderless hunger that touched every area of my life.” At 12, I was discovering sexual and romantic feelings, as well as a larger spark of passion and hunger and aliveness and obsession. I wanted to climb some castle walls. “My desire doesn’t need another person. It doesn’t even need me. It wants to be poured into the world,” writes Sophie Strand. “It wants to feel itself as a wave of matter, a crescendo of stone, poised, summiting, ecstatically and erotically strung between life and death.”

At one point during our trip, I found myself alone in a leafy cafe parklet reading one of the books I’d brought with: Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man. I didn’t realize it until cracking it open just days ahead of my 40th birthday, but it’s a real midlife crisis kind of read: Ernaux writes about her affair, in her fifties, with a man in his twenties. I hadn’t paid attention to what it was about: I’d put a bunch of her books on hold at the library and grabbed the thinnest of them all as a convenient item for my carryon. Sitting there in the cafe parklet and feeling not at all in crisis, I nevertheless found a strange point of identification:

When he was at my place, he put on the hooded dressing gown that had enveloped other men. When he wore it, I never saw any of the others in particular. Gazing at the light gray terry cloth, I felt only the sweetness of my own continuity and the consistency of my desire.

There is a coldness in this observation—in the erasure of the men in her life—that inspires a swell of both judgment and admiration in me. It also made me see these adolescent revisitations of mine in a new light: as a way of taking delight in “the sweetness of my own continuity and the consistency of my desire.”

On our final day of the trip, we visited the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, which is featured in Romeo + Juliet’s marriage and death scene. The church was closed, but I recognized a cement planter out front: Romeo runs past it, right toward his tragic fate with Juliet. It was painted gray, but in the film it’s a bright turquoise. I kneeled down and looked close, examining that planter with the seriousness of a forensics expert. And there it was: a deep chip in the paint revealing a decades-old layer of turquoise.

I reached out and pressed my fingertip into the dent with a sense of worship—for that early spark of desire, and the fact that it is still here.