The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

or if she meant that I should accept that my sister and I were now on separate trains on diverging tracks, experiencing different childhoods that would lead us to different adulthoods, and were helpless to do anything other than wave through the window as we passed each other.

It was then that I understood that these encounters were fundamentally about loneliness, flashes of intense intimacy so awkward and fragile that they had no place in real life. The men I met online were not secret initiates into a world I could take part in, but refugees from the world I already knew too well.

But I also had a sense that I could continue with my actions only if they were entirely unexamined,

“I just want to take my time. I want to replace everything I imagine about you with something real that I know about you,”

read these books in such a fever that I have feared to ever read them again, lest the golden, irradiating magic they held for me be replaced with dusty, actual words.

didn’t know how things faded, became simple facts, until they were things you hardly thought of anymore.

was not confident enough to tell him what I myself barely knew, which is that being true to yourself, even if it makes everyone hate you, even if it makes people want to kill you, is the most radical form of liberty, and when you make contact with something as electric and terrifying as the unadorned truth of yourself, it burns away so many other smaller forms of bondage you weren’t even aware of, so you find yourself irradiated and unencumbered.

“And maybe justice needs to be made manifest on earth, I can see the human impulse to try to make the world look like it should, where bad people are punished and good people succeed, but, like, sometimes it seems very weird and childish to me.”

“You are a brave young man,” he said to me. “You are considerate and kind and strong and brave and I just marvel that I’ve had a chance to meet you.”

“Maybe we knew each other in a past life or something,” I said. “Maybe we knew each other in this one.”