I Feel Like Falling In Love
Notes on Beyoncé’s Cuff It & The Boundaries That Free Us
I. I wanna go missing / I need a prescription / I wanna go higher / Can I sit on top of you?
It is 9:45 PM on a Saturday and I am scrubbing the grout around my bathtub with a spare toothbrush because what I want to do with my hands instead is text my worst and favorite ex, who is moving across the country the day after tomorrow. Well, for the sake of specificity, I don’t really want to text him so much as I want to fit my forehead into the bowl of his sternum, inhale, and trust there is at least one person on earth who knows exactly where I am — who might even be glad for it, might even want me close. This specific vision is half-mirage and half-memory. It makes me dizzy with yearning.
While my knees go numb against the tile floor and Renaissance hums in the background, I repeat the taxonomy of humiliations I endured over the course of the relationship to myself like a protective spell. If I pause too long, I am ambushed by gentler memories — the bounce of his laugh, the sureness of his hand on my thigh underneath a sticky laminate table. It took me a few decades, but my inclination towards my own best interest is finally in the same weight-class as my inclination towards the type of love that feels like a chemical bomb, so I fight the metastasizing ache the best way I know how: I twist the tub faucet close to boiling and plunge my hands into the water. My fingers turn pink and pruny while my phone screen stays black on the sink countertop. I swear to myself I’ll never feel this way again. I keep scrubbing.
I am not new to this, not a stranger to finding myself amidst the tattered strips of a fresh grief, know what it takes to papier-mâché a mess into something that resembles order. I snooze my alarm too many times so I memorize the side streets that condense my morning commute by eight minutes. I overcommit to plans so I color-code my planner. I date men who joke about needing therapy so I play therapist. My friends attuned to constellations tell me this desire to impose order has to do with my Virgo rising. I suspect it has more to do with a childhood spent determining whether it is safe to open my bedroom door based on the mood of the footsteps in the hallway, but I’ll gladly opt for the stars, particularly if I can share any of them with Beyoncé, Queen of Virgos.
II. Don’t miss this roll call / Is you here or what?
I have been a lifelong fan of Beyoncé as a vocalist, performer, and cultural icon, but I am most fascinated by her as a person who achieves artistic singularity through an unyielding commitment to diligence. The legacy of her particularity and self-determination predates her career as a recording artist and extends to the way-back stories of childhood, the legends repeated at every family gathering as evidence of an unassailable essence of character, proof that we have always been destined to become who we are now. According to Knowles family lore, Beyoncé began perfecting the art of performance at six years old — an age when knuckles are still soft with baby fat — for the customers in her mother’s beauty salon. Beyoncé’s father is puffy with pride when he tells Rolling Stone magazine his daughter blazed through Texas’s talent show circuit with a formidable 35-win streak. One performance ended with a standing ovation for the young star, who performed early in the night’s program with many other contestants (most older, more experienced) still queued up behind her. Upon her final bow, Beyoncé danced off stage with the confidence of a girl who knows she just defeated anything and anyone coming down the long tunnel of the night. She whispered to her mother, “I’d like to get my trophy and my money and go home,” both a statement of intent and a declaration of victory.
In the earliest recorded performance I can find online, a professional camera pans wide over a live audience before zooming in on a softer but still distinctly recognizable face. Beyoncé is eight years old (an age when I could not sleep through the night without the hallway light on) belting a ballad from The Wiz, wearing a blue sequined dress and two sparkling bows fashioned from matching fabric in her pigtails in the likeness of Dorothy. Not yet out of the embrace of childhood, she already gleams with a professional veneer. Every move is rehearsed, purposeful. Clutching the microphone in her right hand, she uses her left hand to gesticulate, sweeping broadly to the viewers, occasionally clutching her heart for emotional emphasis. As somebody who works in close proximity to young people, I recognize this ability to parrot adult mannerisms — an imitation which only emerges from careful observation. She ends the performance with six full twirls, landing the turns with her little legs in a delicate cross at the ankles right as the last piano chord reverberates in the air. She holds the gaze of the crowd as it bellows its approval.
III. I wanna go where nobody’s been / Have you ever had fun like this?
Doing what Virgos do best, Beyoncé manages her presentation of self with expertise. Most of our glimpses into Beyoncé’s “private” life are, in fact, a different kind of performance — the staging of candor. We are never behind the scenes of Beyoncé’s mystery, we are just sometimes invited to a smaller stage carefully designed to emulate intimacy. The Formation World Tour and the Netflix documentary Homecoming are each peppered with rare personal footage, altered so iPhone videos appear grainy and nostalgic to those of us with a stack of VHS tapes labeled with yellowing tape at home. The breadcrumbs of her offstage life are effective. Despite watching the montage of her private life playing on a jumbotron to a crowd of 70,000 screaming fans, despite knowing these moments have been heavily edited, produced, directed, performed, and sometimes filmed by the self-proclaimed perfectionist, we still feel as though we’re let in on a secret. Curation and candor exist in diametric opposition to one another, even when the curation is engineered to beckon us closer.
The superstar’s pursuit of excellence has always been interlocked with her desire for control. In film shot for the Sasha Fierce: Platinum Edition album, you can hear the strain in her voice when she says, “I am completely critical and very, very particular and no one can see what I see in my mind.” This is not a lament — this is a description of the conditions from which miracles are wrested. The boundaries around Beyoncé rise in response to the force of her celebrity. This wall functions not only as a shield around her legacy built over the course of decades through painstaking effort, but also to protect the person behind the persona.
Beyoncé is a successful Black woman in a country which sustains itself on the systemic punishment and exploitation of Black women. This is the history which is never history, the beast which feeds on the frenetic vitriol directed at Beyoncé and her family. Each swarm of public outrage is often more heinous and more explicitly racist than the last (broadcasted burnings of albums, accusations of Satanism and involvement with the Illuminati, torrents of online abuse directed at Blue Ivy’s appearance before she even crawled out of toddlerhood.) The louder the public screams, the more Beyoncé restricts access to her personal and professional life. She retreats deeper into the fortress built by fame and excessive wealth in order to take shelter from the elements that continue to rage against those without the same protections. If she waits until it’s safe to come out, she’ll stay inside forever.
IV. I feel like falling in love / I’m in the mood to fuck something up
Cuff It is Beyoncé’s fourth track (notoriously her favorite number) on her seventh solo album, Renaissance. In a project overflowing with rhythm, and abundant with inspiration from decades of Black/queer dance music, Cuff It still manages to distinguish itself as a track that seems designed for a place with low ceilings and bodies glittering with sweat, a bass line traveling up a thousand legs through a floor sticky with the night. It is distinctly exuberant, which is why I feel a growing sense of perplexity here on my bathroom floor, sodden with nostalgia and oxalic acid, as I hear the artist notorious for her grip on self-restraint proclaim, “I feel like falling in love / I’m in the mood to fuck something up.”
My point of access to an otherwise untouchable Beyoncé has always been the shared understanding that the self is something to be dominated through relentless criticism and tireless maintenance; the belief that life is best understood through a type of pointillist work ethic — each detail has a perfect place, and only through the careful attention to those details can a masterpiece emerge. She is, to me, the living embodiment of what it looks like to follow the rules of self-mastery. Even as the tide brought in the wreckage of another failed relationship at my feet, I felt like I knew how to pick my path forward, armed with those shared rules. As Cuff It continues to warble through the tinny speaker of my phone, I feel as though I’m reading the wrong instruction manual, even as my head begins to move in time with the music. Dancing and falling in love and fucking the night up feel in complete violation of the commandments I thought I would need in order to pull my dripping heart back to dry land. But here Beyoncé is, on track four, celebrating the ultimate cessation of control and daring me to join. Anywhere / anytime / I don’t mind / I don’t mind.
Sometimes I feel like falling in love, which is another way of saying: sometimes I’m in the mood to fuck something up. I have managed to fuck up a lot of somethings with this last swan dive into love. (A non-comprehensive list: my appetite, the ability to sleep through the night or look in the mirror, my attention span at work, a sense of inner peace, my cortisol and oxytocin levels, a stable relationship with my body, and any sense of optimism for the deflated condition of my love life.) But I know Beyoncé is working with a different definition of the term. When she stacks a harmony on the line, “unapologetic when we fuck up the night,” I know she is not talking about destruction, at least not the type of destruction that ruins or soils, but she is instead referencing an indestructible belief in her own buoyancy. She is talking about meeting the moon hand in hand with a dozen lovers and a stiff drink and a sense that whatever the darkness holds is more likely to bow to Beyoncé before she ever bows to it.
I dry off my hands to pick my phone up. I stare at the text thread I’ve had open all night long, rereading my last received message for the hundredth time. “Kayla, the love I have for you will never…” I can feel myself running my hands along the wall of my own boundaries. I am getting a sense of which pieces are immovable and which corners crumble to dust when I apply any pressure. I am beginning to believe the internal drive to create order out of my messes might be working to protect me more than punish me. I consider what it would it look like to resist the gravitational pull (Towards this man? Towards punishment? Are these just two different ways of saying self-abuse?) in favor of something further from easy, closer to freedom. The cursor in the empty text field box winks up at me. I exit my messages and restart Cuff It, pushing the volume as far as it will let me. I am dancing empty-handed in my bathroom and it feels like self-preservation.
V. I can’t wait to come out and play / Come and cuff it, cuff it, cuff it, cuff it, baby
What I’m really wrestling with here is that it does not feel like a coincidence that one of Beyoncé’s most sonically playful albums — one that fizzes right on the tongue, crackles right at the feet — is also one of her most meticulously crafted. The sequencing of the album is flawless, as each song melts into the next the way leaves take to September. In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar (notably conducted via written correspondence — the artist preferring to submit edited personal essays in lieu of face-to-face interviews over the past eight years), Beyoncé reveals it took her creative team over three years to perfect every sonic detail on the Renaissance album. This is to say, I do not think Cuff It is a double-back; it is not a “never mind” to thirty years of militant precision. This song feels like a victory lap. I believe Cuff It is a testament to the space that is created when the necessary conditions for playfulness have been honored.
I have always conceptualized my propensity for romance and my drive for discipline as two entities engaged in a lifelong battle of which I am often the casualty. I’m asking here — What if these are not oppositional forces? What if discipline is not the enemy of pleasure? I have been learning the choreography of this fight for so long, it has started to move like something sweeter — less of a tug o’ war, more of a dance. And what is dance if not bodies at play? Maybe it is true, after all, that a lifetime of building walls might be less about keeping other people out and more about protecting the dance happening within. There is music coming from inside the fortress, when I put my ear to it. I think Beyoncé knows love requires an annihilation of sorts, knows we will survive it, knows we might even be in the mood for it. Knows playfulness requires protection, first. Knows to end with a promise.
Bet you you’ll see far / Bet you you’ll see stars / Bet you you’ll elevate / Bet you you’ll meet God
