The Rothko Chapel, both the place in so-called Houston, Texas, USA, and the piece by Morton Feldman, is revered for the intentionality of its silences. They are environs of not-that and only-this. The stillnesses create a loud void. An agitation over what’s-not-there. An anticipation of what-could-be. Potentiality unscored. If you visit the chapel, you can hear confused bodies sounding, “What a waste of space.” As a closeted, neurodivergent, Mormon teenager in Bush-era Texas, I resented it much as I resented myself. A child asking to play in a time of what-for.

‘Queer time’, in Queer Theory, speaks to the experience of queer and trans bodies being ageless and unmapped as we chart our own life trajectories, “an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices,” says queer scholar Jack Halberstam. ‘Crip time’, within Disability Justice movements, speaks to the time kept by bodies deemed useless in a capitalist society—what is upward mobility to a body immobilized? Queer, disabled and mad artists, as other marginalized artists, are perpetually asking to play in a time of what-for. Without institutions to validate and fund our bodies of work or our bodies themselves—what societies largely deem “wastes of space”—we remain on the margins. The Menils to our Rothko Chapels silent too, our minds the secular sanctuaries—sketched, while we seek out sugar daddies of another kind to survive—sketchy. Unnamed muses for the artists privileged enough to sustain full-time arts practices, our stories told about us but without us, perpetuating exclusionary art scenes that can only favor the cis-heteronormative, able-bodied, wealthy and white who map time on CVs, not on their scarred bodies.

The voices I hear teach me of the wisdom of non-linear temporality that the multiply marginalized know most intimately. Time is a resource, and our survival depends on our ability to stretch every resource we have. We stretch it to care for our bodies and our communities. We stretch it to grieve, to radicalize, to resist and recover from occupying spaces that deny or vilify our existence. Vision with me the years between as whole rests on Feldman’s music staff, void as an anchor in a world demanding to know our utility. Future me called back and their words hang suspended like a conductor’s hand before the strings quake. Score this lucid dream with me while the triptychs are hung.