All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

She stepped around me, spoke to me gingerly, as though I were some great glass sculpture sitting in her house.

What ruined me, standing before his stone, was feeling, in place of the sweet creamy hatred I hoped to savor like soft-serve, a terrifying dissolve into pity.

From pity my heart moved, sliding in a neatly fluid mass like egg white, to a terrible, shamed love.

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

You belong elsewhere, the cells of my body appeared to chorus as my belly clenched.

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.

I felt a small bolt of sorrow at this, and a grudging respect for her sensitivity.

Happy birthday, my dude, he said with his easy smile on a leash, a nod substituted for a hug.

The flicker of warmed surprise, delight, relief across her small sharp face told me all I needed to know. Even as it cut me.

One real kindness in this moment would pop me like a balloon.

How was anyone expected to dream loftily about the future when the present ground them down to powder and nothingness?

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.

Years later I can look back on that moment and see it as the act of devotion it was, to pick up somebody’s disgusting mess and dispense with it.

But that night we laughed, feeling as though we had won, making the oldest, most time-honored mistake this land had seen—bringing the knife to the gunfight.

I was silent for a long moment, vulnerability descending upon me like dew.

I cannot set down what came right after, other than to note that for days I dreamed nearly every night of the two of them, Marina and my mother, blurring together, wearing each other’s clothes, upbraiding me for each other’s grievance.

Somewhere within me a wound reopened at its lacy edges, a wild regret spurted bright and dizzying and carotid.

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?

Those early days, before the mess was visible to all.

Our laughter filled the kitchen, sound confetti, fluttering down and around us.

As the applause faded, wiping wet from my face, I knew, for once in my stupid life, what I wished to do.

I wish I could say a single smart thing about it.

The freedom I’d found in splitting my life like an atom was a ruinous one, and I no longer desired it.

I heard the words as sensation and outline, like the hands of small children moving beneath a bedsheet.

With all the ardor of a new believer, I said, It’s never too late. It’s never the end.

The head spin of realizing that her sweetness is not contrition, not forgiveness, but simple forgetting, a blacking out.

Nothing is implied here besides the opiate nature of time.

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

You need help, was one of the last things I had screamed at Marina during the end, the words foreclosing the possibility that had until then existed: that the two of us could save each other.

This anticipation was layered against something else. Something like dread.

Sometimes he’d read articles about permafrost melt and the diseases and methane that would be released into the atmosphere and wonder: Will I get to see the world end, how do I want to live when it does?

I longed to say, I am proud of you, but the sentiment was too small.

Sex with her was an earnest, earthy thing. Like gardening or proofing dough.

So I said simply, You love her. Despite it. Maybe it’ll change. Maybe it never will.

Seemed like the only other person I knew who had the same thin whine of pain in the background of her brain, some fraction of always.

I want to not be alone, I mutter into the earth, skin prickling with longing and shame.

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.

I don’t want to burn down her house, Tig whispered. I just want her to also know what it’s like, for even one minute, to be scared.

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.

Joy cut with shame.

I’d leaned back in my lover’s arms, bumping against two older brown men, who beamed down at me. Marina’s eyes blazing. Long nose red from tears. I will love you forever, she had said to me.

Voice full of gruff tenderness.

Somewhere within me a planet begins to break apart, its gravitational force juddering to a halt.

It is then that I see it flicker before me like a promise. The empty room full of light.

This is my tragedy and my great good fortune, to be the recipient of this bond, to be kept alive under its crushing warmth and weight, to be given it so freely, so much more than I have ever deserved.