All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. I want an excuse to change my life.

I did not consider myself a sellout. What I felt was that I had been saved from drowning.

But my boss liked me. Early on he called me his rock star. This was funny to me, since in actuality rock stars get onstage, perform, fuck many girls, wreck the hotel room. I, meanwhile, sweated competence, a hungry efficiency. Waxed my arms, radiated deference, never met a Gantt chart I didn’t like.

So far being a slut had returned mixed results, and I suspected that, like swimmers with small feet or curvy ballerinas, I was not built for the championship leagues.

This is how I felt: alone and powerful. This is what I felt: the shock of how your life’s longing can sometimes be smoothly realized, without great strain or cost, easy as buying a clock.

That’s what a true adulthood had come to signify for me, a bowing down before the inevitable. For the lucky, this could be preceded by a period of freedom, the latitude of youth.

Always I was aware of my own melanin. I say this without self-pity. Some people look at your skin as if they are preoccupied with how best to scrub it without being rude. Thom, who was disgusted by Keith LaMarchese, did suggest that I was imagining this. I suggested he sit on his thumb.

We all have our truth of a place. There is no universal narrative of any city that is also real. Only marketing.

I didn’t know everywhere. I knew the place that spawned me, which, based on visits past, already was mutating beyond my recognition. I knew our college town, the way someone still essentially a child could learn a place.

It was Tig’s confidence, I thought, that left her serene in the face of rejection, that allowed her openness to possibility.

Winter appeared in earnest, moved in rudely. Something deadening in every morning, everywhere I looked shorn of color and beauty.

Somewhere in me I sensed that intellectually he believed these things, or was coming to believe these things, 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.

My white friends with their white faces and their white lives. Their eyes watching mine. Assigning me a place on their political grid.

I could not be in Allium a second longer, have this conversation a second longer, or I would break a plate of petite German sausages over someone’s head.

Pretty girls make nervous fools of us all,

It’s very expensive, poverty.

This is what my parents wanted for me, what everybody wanted. To be a dish laid out before a man’s hunger. To be taken, to be quiet. Disappear into hair and parts. Disappear, in time, into marriage and motherhood.

To shame me for wanting what I had been taught to want seemed like a callous cheat, a wanton shifting of goalposts.

We feel so much, most of us, and different layering things, like you can’t feel only one thing ever, you know? Can you think of a time when you’ve felt only one thing at one time? I think crying allows us to midwife our more intense, more complicated emotions, get them outside of our bodies, and then our body feels light and free again.

I’m not some indiscriminate U-Hauler. I have standards. I’m a picky bitch. I like you, I thought that was very mutual. You’ve spent eleven consecutive days with me. We have eaten every meal together and spent every night in my bed. You wear my clothes to your work. You use my makeup, all my products. I had to buy a new Stila lip stain! It’s like you’ve moved in unasked but I’m not good enough to be your girlfriend.

As their friend I was my better self: dry and laughing, spiky but kind, trying to peel the world like an orange, eat it by the segment. I wanted to keep it that way.

My only job was to study, I was told. To do well. Graduate with distinction, secure a decent-paying job. Success at these had been met with no celebration, only a transfer of expectation to the next desired milestone: marriage and readiness for it.

My family is a geode of silences. You would need a hammer to smash it open.

But nobody consoles you after a rupture with a beloved friend. There are few movies ideal for watching while your tears salt pints of ice cream, no articles in women’s magazines that you can skim at the hairdresser’s. You have only the ache. No script to accompany it. No ritual to give it shape.

To go through life can be so painful. Like being born or hatched, your body extruded into the screaming world.

Despite some degree of aversion to self-pity, I had longed, walking across the blue-carpeted airport, watching hordes of cheerful-seeming people greeting loved ones with unfeigned warmth, to have been born a slightly different person. Subtract my uncle from my life. Subtract my father’s deportation. Subtract the coldness and dislocation that appeared to run through my personality like electrical wiring ran through a house. All this, the very facts of who I was, could be different. I could be a person refigured: warm, charming, loving, loved.

Zero sum when it ain’t need to be. The whole thing is that some things multiply. Create feedback loops. Like love and honesty. Like generosity. Creates more of the thing itself.

For a time I was so happy that my own life appeared unreal, calling to mind phone pictures filtered to absurd saturation and luminosity, where dour midwestern skies were transformed to electric blue and everyone’s teeth blinded.

Yes, I wanted to say, that’s all very nice, but these are my people. They are my people. Yes, I am glad that I am here in this country, for a thousand reasons, including the latitude to hold your hand in public and kiss you on the forehead, but the people of this country are not my people, and most let me know every day.

In this person I had begun to feel a kind of safety.

There was something indistinctly moving to me, in a world where everyone was laser-point-focused on individual striving, to reframe anything around collective ambition. I also wished to throw my margarita across this restaurant. How was anyone expected to dream loftily about the future when the present ground them down to powder and nothingness?

The apartment had grown nearly unlivable from my neglect and dirtbaggery. In some strange way I found comfort in what I saw around me—the confirmation staring back at me from the sink and couch and counters that I was in fact slovenly, worthless, no good.

If you cured me of all these, I told her, I don’t even know who I would be. It would be like getting lobotomized. I would not recognize myself.

Her voice was very, very soft. It was as though you had taught a kitten human language.

Bitch, let me introduce you to a concept called: gay people. If you haven’t done yearning-filled long distance are you even a lesbian?

Goofy people, that was my private verdict on all this. You want to get married, simply get married. Really, the most ordinary, ancient thing imaginable. Could even be sweet, depending on how one went about it. But absolutely no need to be quirky here.

I think they’re trying so hard not to be bourgeois that the end effect is very bourgeois unfortunately

We were on good terms. But the faintest formality, a timorousness, persisted through our affection. I was shyer now about letting her see the mean, gravelly parts of me.

Because good love can rescue a person. Pull them out of the waves. Bad love is a rip current. It can drown you.

We spoke less often. We loved each other still.

Will I get to see the world end, how do I want to live when it does?

So I said simply, You love her. Despite it. Maybe it’ll change. Maybe it never will. Sometimes people just are that way, in perpetual recovery. But you were the one that told me, this is a commitment and a practice. You’re each other’s people.

My primary opinion on polyamory was that it seemed like a lot of fun for logistics fetishists.

I saw my past self, that switch of a girl, walk her belongings up to the side door. Lie down in the slats of sun on the wooden floor.

You actually lived here, you know. You act like the things that happened didn’t happen.

What nobody told me when I was a very young person was that obedience, fearful toeing of every line, chasing every kind of safety, would not save you. 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.