Five.

One.

The day after the day we meet for the second time, I am in a hotel room hungover and spiralling down from an adrenaline high. I can’t remember when I put on the mascara that shadows under my eyes like sleeplessness. My lips are hard-edged still in red like a comic strip, the color within fading and feathering from neglect. In the weirdly dim glow from the fluorescent bulb over the mirror, I scrub at them, at the bruises I thought were mascara circling my lids, at the vestiges of the woman you thought I was last night or this morning with my bass cradled against my hips like a lover.

Four days ago I did not know you existed.

Two.

It has not begun to rain, yet, and neither of us is prepared to clamber down these slick rocks in our leather-soled shoes. The night is thrumming just under my skin, the smell of the crowd’s sweat and your aftershave and the ozone tang of the microphones effervescent. I pull you down to sit too close to the surf, and notice that I was wrong. Your shoes are not soled with leather; they are low-top canvas sneakers, the ubiquitous kind that are so ordinary that they have attained a sort of mysterious cool. The cocktail of your sneakers and the show, the vast susurration of the tide makes me want to press the perfect crimson of my lips against your pulse. I am desperate to know if the night is coursing through you, too.

Six weeks ago you did not know who I was. Six hours ago you did not know my real name.

Three.

It is the day after Valentine’s Day, and I did not kiss a handsome sailor in a karaoke bar last night because I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would be breathing your air this morning. I am crouched on a dirty sidewalk outside a thrift store on Broadway, trying to parse the whispered apologies and excuses you’re doling out in equal measure. I had been luxuriating in the skim of a silk shirt when your name lit my phone; I had left it carelessly crumpled, abandoned in the dressing room in my haste to bask in your voice instead. I can’t will my mind away from it, even while you chant: I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. It’s urgent that I return, drape it back on its hanger, suspend it meticulously on the rack where I found it. Back away. Refuse to think of it again.

It is the month before she finds out, the month before the the first time you leave me.

Four.

Some days the gulf between what you want and what I need is so broad that we cannot even speak in terms of ‘want’ and ‘need’. I am prone to analogy, to simile. I draw parallels, tell parables. You are given mostly to silence and reproach. The more I beg to see into your heart, the tighter you draw the blinds. I ask you once, only once, if I should stop singing the songs I wrote in anger during the tense week when you wouldn’t answer your phone. You recoil as if I’d slapped you. It occurs to me that I talk too much in metaphor; maybe you presume to think that I sing in metaphor, too. I try not to feel resigned during each second set, which is when the songs invariably are played.

You have played the guitar just a few months longer than you have been the rhythm guitarist in the band. This thing between us is no longer new.

Five.

It is four days after I stained my body as a reminder to guard my heart. I am standing on a pier outside of a bar that serves only tequila, wondering if tomorrow’s headache would be worth feeling known for a moment - provided the pretty young man working will grace me with his name as well as a professional smile. I have already decided that just like when I went to Texas, just like with the sailor, just like when I introduced myself to you, I am not me, I’m the best invented version of me. When my phone rings and I see that it’s you, I thumb it on and answer, “Stella,” because that is who I have decided to be tonight, and that is all that you deserve. I haven’t answered my phone like this for you in a very long time. You draw a breath, take a beat, and then you say it. I know I am beautiful today; I have made extraordinary effort to be beautiful for these strangers who will never know my name. You cannot see me in my flawlessness; it’s wasted on you, too. I want nothing more in this moment than to feel the urge to test your heartrate with my mouth. The pretty bartender smiles at someone I can’t see.

It’s been nearly a year since the last time I could feel your pulse.

+

She is a lovely, lace-clad porcelain doll. You are blatantly, joyously in love. I am drowning in guilt that I cannot simply be glad for you, that your happiness diminishes me, that I am muted by your brightness. I am taken aback by my defenselessness; even all this time has failed to dull the sting.

Five years later, I am caught by the memory of my faultless kiss just under your jaw, marking the spot where your heart beats, sure and sound.

Two Decades.

I never really wanted to.

When he asked me, wind whipping my hair into knots, the fly of our tent unstakeable, the round river rocks pressing into my shoulder blades and hips, I said: Are you going to let me up if I say no? He laughed. He did not move. I said yes.

Seven months before that, I had told him: Whatever question you’re trying to ask me, the answer is yes. He made me a salad with wild things, led me over moss-covered fallen trees that terrified me. Yes, I kept saying, even when the leaves were bitter in my mouth, even when my heart stuttered with fear of falling. Yes.

We waited until we had rented a two-room apartment in a converted government office building to tell our families. My sister asked if he’d given me a ring. No, I said, I don’t care about jewelry. He bought me a flute in a pawnshop in Rifle, Colorado, asked me to play etudes again and again. I said yes. He never learned to read music. I struggled through solos without an accompanist. I played anyway. She told me it wasn’t real.

It was two years, almost, before we stumbled into the courthouse to say: Yes, yes, we will. I wore an ugly blue dress. My hair was filthy, I had missed a nap. Our son was turning restlessly, endlessly inside me. We used a borrowed ring. We used a borrowed witness. There was no music.

Afterward, my mother took us out to a steakhouse. Until I learned that I was pregnant, I had been vegetarian for nearly a year. I ordered the sirloin.

A year after that, we had a proper ceremony, with rings and a cake that I baked myself, champagne and the baby in a backpack. We wrote our vows; I quoted Hemingway and he spoke about how much he loved my breasts. I can’t recall what we ate. There was no music.

The girl who kept saying yes although she didn’t really want to is a foreign country to me. I know my borders, now, I know the rushing rivers and the spits of sands that reach out into the sea, I know the roads and hills and byways of my heart.

Today is my wedding anniversary.

My lovely, unknowable girl, I wish still you had had the courage to say no.

Exception

Let's make no bones about this: I am a middle class woman who is neither so young as to be ignored nor so old as to be dismissed, ambiguously ethnic enough that it makes no nevermind to those who "don't see race" and also enough that it confuses racists long enough for me to see a friend across the room and escape at parties. I'm past the point where Planned Parenthood is the only healthcare provider that is not a strain on meager resources.  I am educated, but I don't work a white collar job. So far, the President's poisonous net of executive orders have literally zero effect on my day to day existence.

Except. Except.

Except, I used to be so poor that Planned Parenthood was the only place I could get a pelvic exam. Hell, I used to be so poor that my mother bathed me in ice water rather than taking me to a doctor. We were so poor we got food stamps and still ate white rice and hot dogs the last week of the month.

Except, once I was a terrified 18 year old filled with guilt and regret and sorrow who had $200, a borrowed couch, and a phone number for an empty apartment in Van Nuys.

Except, a Neo Nazi looked me in the eye on a city bus and told me Mexican girls needed to be raped to be taught a lesson. I'm not Mexican. I told him I was Cuban. I'm also not Cuban.

Except, when my daughter was three she took swim lessons but was scared of the water so I took her out and decided to wait until she was old enough to be brave. When Alan Kurdi was three, his family fled Syria, fled civil war, left everything they knew behind to climb aboard a rubber raft. The raft was overloaded. It capsized. Alan drowned. He didn't have a chance to be brave.

Except, I don't call myself an artist but I write and I sing and I try my damnedest to make the world come alive for an audience, even if it's only for a night. All of my friends are artists, too, pretty much all of them, painters and photographers and actors and musicians and tattooists and poets and dancers. Every act of creation is a tiny spark in the darkness that is smothering us. We are struggling. We are trying. We are trying. I am trying.

I am failing.

I have a script next to me, marked with 44 scenes that need blocking and revision. I've done two of them. I have a ukulele and an unlearned song. I have this, whatever this is, this story or essay or cry in the night.

I feel as though this is not enough.

It does not mean she cowers

Two weeks ago, I asked one of my best friends if I should do NaNoWriMo. I need to do this more, I said. I need to practice. I need to vent a little of the pressure that’s in my head.

Do it!, she said. I’ll do it with you. We won’t write a novel, we’ll just write. Maybe we’ll send each other prompts, or maybe we’ll just sit down and let the words come, but we’ll write.

So I did. I wrote a story about All Soul’s Day, and I wrote a story about our ancient urge to tell stories, and I started a story about the power that language can have. I felt like I was on a roll, like I was accomplishing something. I wrote four thousand words in six days.

Then the election happened. It feels as though it should be capitalized: The Election, as if it won’t require a footnote in a history book in some distant future. The Election happened, and that night my writing time was squandered obsessively refreshing the New York Times, Fivethirtyeight, Huffington Post, the Guardian, watching the margins narrow and the numbers pile up. Words escaped me. I just kept saying over and over to those around me, What is HAPPENING.

I didn’t write on Tuesday. On Wednesday, in an attempt to spit out something, anything at all, I brought my computer with me to a technical rehearsal for the show I’m performing in. I opened up my story about language, intending at least to make a pass at its next paragraph, and instead I found myself writing the beginnings of a blog post about the time my mother took me to stand within sniping distance of a guard tower on the Berlin Wall. Coincidentally, Wednesday was the anniversary of that wall falling, and with it the tenets it symbolized. I got as far as describing my mother’s boyfriend’s car, a magenta muscle machine that should never have had children in the backseat, and then I tapered off. My two day total was 167 measly words. Not a one of them felt valuable or useful.

I brought my computer again tonight to rehearsal, and I opened the story I wrote over a week ago, just to see if the woman who wrote that story was still with me. Here is what I think is the best line from that story:

She could feel fear, but still practiced boldness, because just because a woman fears it does not mean she cowers.

I feel so much fear right now. I fear that we may see attempts (and likely successes) to strip us of our rights, especially those of us who already are vulnerable. I fear that the morals and values that I have worked so tirelessly to instill in my children will be seen as worthless or laughable by those who feel they hold a higher moral ground. I fear that those whose beliefs differ so wildly from mine will be emboldened and weaponize those differences, turning them on me and those who believe as I do in order to dominate and control us. I am full of fear.

But I will practice boldness, and I will not cower. I will offer up what I can, build a resistance out of my very existence, and use the power I have to hold up those who feel powerless. I will practice radical compassion, fierce love, and ferocious connection.

And hopefully, I will write.

Peaches

You say there is no way to know

but to know

you ghost your loops and whorls over reddened skin,

linger over the deep seams and high curves.

There is no way to know

but to know

your palm rounding, thumb denting the resistance.

There is no knowing

but to know

you drift closed and open

lift and breathe in -

push and close again.

You know

latching on with delicate suction,

pulling off,

the sweet of it deep

the wet of it long.

You know

if you had a knife,

every translucent shaving would

lay on your heat

like it was a benediction

like a blessing

a prayer.

Debate

I thought I was done talking about what happened in that nightclub when I told the story of the candle that's been burning in my heart for three decades. I flung those words out onto a page practically before the last strains of the requiem died, trying to give shape to my grief so that it could be dealt with. I almost succeeded.

I didn't see my son the day we gathered to voice the names of the dead. It's not an unusual occurrence; although he lives with me, he is an adult - a busy one at that. What was unusual was that he missed a moment of remembrance, especially one for LGBTQ+ people. When I saw him finally on Tuesday, I asked him where he'd been.

"Dad's house," he said.

"I saw the list. I couldn't read all the names."

My son came out to me as bisexual four years ago, on a bench by the sea. It was the middle of the night, very dark. He was nervous, shaking, couldn't meet my eyes. I asked him why he was scared, and he said, "I dunno. I just feel like it's something I'm not to supposed to be." I reminded him of the time when he was in third grade and he came home crying because another boy called him gay. That day, I had looked him in the eye and told him that the boy meant it as an insult, but it wasn't, because there was nothing insulting about who or how anyone loves. No one could dictate that, I had said, no one can tell you how you can love. The night my son came out, I was angry at the world that made him afraid to tell his mom that he had feelings he hadn't been taught to expect. I was angry at the world that made him think I would be angry at him for loving. No one can tell you who to love, I repeated. Not even me.

The day after the vigil, my son came to me at work and asked me to hold him. There had been fireworks in the night, he said, and he panicked, thinking they were gunshots. He was shaking, breathing too hard, holding too tight. The mother in me automatically soothed him as if he were small: "You're okay, little man. I've got you. You're safe."

He held me even closer and whispered, "Are we?"

He didn't mean me and him. 

He meant his sweet friend who is "them/him" to me and him and on social media, but who is "her" to their mom and their dad and their baby sister and to the university that made them sign a piece of paper promising not to be gay. He meant his musical theater teacher, who is wise and calm and the strongest man I've ever met - he can hold another full grown adult with one hand - and who just married the love of his life two summers ago. He meant his boss and her wife and their Latinx son. He meant the gawky blond 10 year old who planted himself next to his formless 5 year old self so they could share the illustrated story of the Nutcracker. He meant himself.

No, they are not safe. They are not safe. My queer son is not safe.

I keep seeing people saying that gun control is not the answer, and I keep wondering if they are being asked the same question. Yeah, there are a lot of ways that someone determined to hurt my kid could do it. But could they do it to a roomful of people like my son in seven minutes? What about a roomful of people like your child? - that happened, too, except most of the 24 people killed in minutes in Newtown couldn't even have hefted the gun the killer obtained legally, because they were actual children. Somewhere along the way, someone decided that the right to own a machine that was designed with the express purpose of ending another human's life took priority over HUMAN LIVES.

I am angry at the world that has told me to fear for my son's life. I am angry that it could be so easy for someone to take it. I am far, far angrier at those who refuse to make it just a little bit harder.

Vigil

The first time I went to a gay bar I was seven years old. My mother frantically wrapped me in a red plaid Pendleton blanket and firmly pushed down all the locks. I laid with my head propped on the armrest on the door in the tangerine sodium light, listening to the waves of passing cars until she returned, my Uncle Calvin tucked into the shelter of her embrace.

I don't remember his injuries; my mind has created scrapes and bruises on his freckled cheekbones and smooth forehead because at some point the story of that night became family history. I seem to recall a ripped shirt, icepacks on his kidneys and ribs, but I don't know if these are things I saw or things I heard in whispers later on. What I do remember is this: my mother's best friend - so dear I called him my uncle - begged her to marry him, begged to father my sisters and I, swore he'd be true and faithful because he had no choice. He was very young, maybe twenty two. He was gay. He'd been beaten, and was afraid. And my mother and my sisters and I were the only family he felt he had.

I loved him with a fierceness that is unique to children. Every moment I was with him, I loved him more than anyone else in the world. Now, here, half a lifetime later, I have so little left of him - his freckles, yes, and his quick smile but not the color of his eyes or the timbre of his voice. What I have left of him is the sure knowledge that I loved him, and was desperately upset with my mom when she turned down his proposal. I wanted to hold him and keep him and love him forever.

I got about three years.

I don't remember the last time I saw my Uncle Calvin, but I do remember the time before that, or maybe a couple times removed. He had met someone and fallen in love, and although he was stationed hours away from where we were, he and Rolf made the trip so Calvin could introduce him to my mother. Calvin was ebullient and talkative, Rolf quiet and observant behind his glasses. Rolf was thin and wore a turtleneck, even though the day was not particularly cool. They and my mother shared a bottle of the sweet white wine she was so fond of then and in passing Calvin mentioned that Rolf was having a hard time recovering from a winter's illness - bronchitis or the flu, something. The record player went on, and Calvin teased my mother about her country music. I think we must have had dinner a time or two after that - there were avocados - but that day is the last day I remember the feeling of loving him so well settling in my body like impending sleep. I was ten years old.

If you are my age or a little older, if you grew up with an Auntie Jeannie and an Auntie Ingrid who made their own pickles and didn't want kids, if you took a trip to see the quilt - you know the quilt, they could wrap the Washington Monument in it like it was a red plaid blanket - then you've been holding vigil for a long time. This afternoon I knelt, leaned my head against another and wrapped my hands around his while we struggled to light a candle while the wind whipped. All of our candles snuffed out, even after we pressed shoulder to shoulder in an effort to shield their tiny flames, but we knew that the light was there. I have to believe that it is. I am still holding vigil.