- San Francisco.
So many years ago
the queers could still afford to live there.
I was in a woman's bed wrapped up in her sheets,
when she stood naked atop the mattress
and began to peel the glow-in-the-dark stars
off of the ceiling,
pressing constellations all over her skin,
Cassiopeia on her collarbone, Orion on her wrist.
She said, "I could be your universe."
And I made my wish, but it didn't come true.
My therapist, who I can never go a day without quoting,
has a theory about love.
She says, "Often we are believing a lie,
when we believe time is what helps us
see each other more clearly."
Says to consider the opposite might be true.
Consider the beginning might actually be
when our hearts have perfect vision.
Remember when she left her red sock in your white laundry
and you knew you'd never stop blushing.
Remember when her laughter was a disco ball
and everything around her sparkled, especially you.
Remember when you could find no flaws,
just quirks, you would've worn on a charm bracelet.
How you told her you were terrified of loud noises
and she snuck the balloons
out of every birthday party you went to.
You adored that she ate donuts for every breakfast,
called naps snoozers,
built her countertops from old chessboards.
You watched her fold your horoscope
into a paper airplane, and you hoped it had no exit row.
Found 64 lucky pennies in the five months
after you met, wrapped them for her birthday
in fabric you cut from the sleeve of your only warm jacket.
Learned to play the ukulele
just so you could write her songs.
Tattooed her halos on your arms
and left a space for all you'd both do wrong.
"You sneezed poetry," you said to her.
You could win the Nobel Prize just from getting the flu.
"What if what you saw then was the truth?"
My therapist asks.
Your holiest self seeing someone else's holiest self.
What if what came after was a lie?
What if the disco ball never stops sparkling?
Something just closed her eyes, your past maybe,
the terror you carry inside,
but enough, or too much that raised you
to do everything you could to ensure
you'd be hurt more than you'd be loved.
We were in our kitchen in New Orleans.
It was morning and I was sitting at the table
her grandfather had given her grandmother
as a wedding gift, when she told me
where her lips had been the night before.
I walked into our bedroom, picked up 64 pennies,
and threw them out the door.
She dove onto the ground, crawled on her knees,
counting the pennies one by one into her hand,
saying my name over and over.
And both of our lips buried in tears.
When we officially broke up,
I was so certain I had nothing left to lose,
I went to an open mic for the first time
and read a love poem I wrote for her
before we said goodbye.
I was shaking so much, my voice could not be heard
over the paper rattling in my hands,
but I knew wherever she was in the world that night,
that poem found her ears.
That was 20 years ago.
20 years I've been writing love poems.
Last night I was at her house
holding her son who calls me Ankle,
because it's a mix between Aunt and Uncle
and I was thinking how the straight folks in my life
don't always understand why so many of my exes
are my closest friends, but how my therapist says,
"It's the most beautiful part of the queer community,
how we've all lost so much family,
when we find people we call family,
we'll do almost anything to not say goodbye."
And because I didn't say goodbye, she was there
when I met the woman dressed in glow-in-the-dark stars,
and the woman with the checkerboard countertops,
and the woman who rescued me from the balloons
and the woman whose halos I tattooed,
and the woman who ate ice cream with her hands.
And I didn't call it a flaw, I called it a quirk.
And my God, I know that makes it sound
like I got around, y'all.
And let me say for the record,
I wish I got around, but I didn't.
I'm just old, and I wrote it all down,
every bit of it, the love who came out to her family
in the middle of Thanksgiving grace,
the woman whose eyes with a mirror,
where I learned to love my own face,
the day I got proposed to hours after leaving
the psyche ward, the stitches still raw in my arm,
how unready I was to let myself to be loved
by someone who thought even at my lowest,
I shined the sun.
My therapist is still working with me on that one.