All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

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

Nobody wants anyone to have more freedom than them, I said. Maybe some very good people will settle for: as much.

But like, respect is free, I said. Costs me nothing to call you what you want to be called, like maybe I’ll forget, but I love you. Generally our friendship is not work, whatever you may say, but an ongoing pleasure, pretty much any day. If this is what you want, if you feel like a galaxy or a rocket ship or an asteroid versus a lady, that’s fine, yo. I can do a bit of work and call you what-the-hell-ever you want to be called.

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 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.

But if living in the nerve center of American politics had taught me anything it was that it is foolish to pretend we have no enemies. It is our enemies who have chosen us, stamped us from the beginning. Counting on nothing but continued power for their own thriving. The truth is, eventually people find targets to repay the pain inflicted upon them. That the targets are so often inaccurate is glided over, an accepted part of the way things are.

The world has ended a thousand times and my name called in each new book of it.