All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

This is not a story about work or precarity. I am trying, late in the evening, to say something about love, which for many of us is not separable from the other shit.

I lay on the sun-warmed wood floor of my paid-for apartment and decided I would be a slut.

Thank god I was now far away, from the people who had hurt or overlooked me, the neighbors and cousins who had lionized my parents when they achieved a modicum of success and visibly scorned them when it had been taken away. I would never, if I could help it, live there again.

I get, I really get like, if you want to transition to living your truth as a woman or a man if you were born the wrong thing. I support that completely. Anything beyond that is elitist leftist American nonsense, honestly. Is she pretty?

UMMM this is offensive no?

This book called Never Let Me Go. At first I was going to give up on it, but all of a sudden there was one part that almost made me cry, and I love to cry, I sometimes think I should be a professional crier, and anyway, I’ve kept with it.

My shame lived on independently from them. An inherited trait, like straight eyelashes or fat lips. To be gay, to do what Marina and I were doing, was beyond the pale, unsayable.

While two people are still alive to try, he said, it’s never too late, and it’s never the end.

But when I am back, I remember how the people treated us, what my own kin did to me, become reacquainted with how much I wish every single one of you would fall down dead. And to escape my hatred, to stop it from burning me up, I jump back where I am stuck, between these worlds, in thick, dusty space.

Truthfully I had no recollection of the story he’d related. Most often when I considered my childhood, a miasma of confused sensation and blurred events rose in me. I looked at the trees, some of them my height, and thought, You are here because I was here, because I made a choice that I barely considered.

You belong elsewhere, the cells of my body appeared to chorus as my belly clenched. You come from a place that is not here, a hot place with red soil, where everything bursts with life.

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.

Fact is, I used to feel like a woman, but now I do less and less. I was drunk last weekend and we were watching a galaxy on TV and I thought, I feel more like a galaxy forming than a woman. I don’t know though, I think about if I weren’t a woman, if that would mean I was less in solidarity with a feminist struggle. That matters to me. It matters to me a little that I have that category in common with my comrades like you. But I think I still would anyway.

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.

It’s hard because I am so incapable of it, of love, it feels like a weird terrible ironic rebuke, like I was never able to say it to Marina, even though—like I did—yeah. It’s just weird. To feel the lack of what your own name says about you.

I would say there is something especially American about second chances, but my father’s timeline gives lie to that.

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

Mollé, she said to me over grainy video, we do not know what to do with all this. But we can tell you this: We do not want you to end up alone, end up by yourself. We would like to see you settled, in some way, before we die. We want you to have somebody who will take care of you, okay? Because we all are brought to our knees at some point in this life. The idea that no one will be there for you when that happens—my heart cannot take that. We want you to have family, to have somebody.

Love of most kinds could not feed you, could not house you, could not protect you from permanent bone loss that would eventually cause your very teeth to fall out of your head.

We create our lives saying one small yes to one small thing at a time. We create the world that way. 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.

I’d thought, The world we knew has always been half-terrible, made as it is by the powerful, for the powerful. We were crowning a different one. Its birth would not be easy; no birth was.

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