Vladimir

by Julia May Jonas

I, of course, was thrilled when she told me she was dating a woman. What a relief, I thought, to free oneself from the heterosexual prison. Straightness: the predictable container in which all possible outcomes seemed already etched into stone—happiness, unhappiness, complacency, strife—a life in which we were all operating inside of a story already told, even as we sought to live an authentic existence. Even as we tried to say to ourselves that it wasn’t who we mated with but the quality of the thoughts in our brain that made us radical, we knew that the patterns of our life were the patterns of our parents, were the patterns of all the dim, sorrel-chomping sheep living unexamined existences in all the homes all over this thoughtless, anti-intellectual country. We knew that the stuff of our lives was the stuff of normalcy, and how normalcy and its trappings and expectations were always there. There would always be couple friends who were a bit more square than you, who you would have to play some hetero game with. There would always be family who would ask the women to do the dishes while the men played chess. How fortunate for her, I thought, to be able to evade all that.