All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

How unbearable it is to desire what another person can deny you.

Housing, he said, should be something you should pay for only to eventually own, not a way for rich people to make an investment off of other people’s precarity.

but the anger did not arise from what he was describing; it rose from an expectation for a much better life than the one he owned.

It’s very expensive, poverty.

Two friends locking into each other, choosing what seemed so rare to me: to trust and to forgive.

To return to the new place makes it less new, moves it something closer to comfort, to safety.

This was the thing, when your politics all started as abstract theory, as axioms at their most distilled. You had to negotiate the growing gaps between the principles you railed about in darkened bars and how you actually lived.

It doesn’t do to dwell in fantasy, even if your only fantasy is that you end up a normal boring person: wedded, safe, loving, loved.

What nobody told me growing up was that sometimes your friends do join your family, fusing care, irritation, loyalty, shared history, and affectionate contempt into

a tempered love, bright and daily as steel.