I always thought it was us versus them. But in my own home, it was me versus my own wife.
My daughter experienced the greatest crisis of her life and almost died. Yet, all we could argue about were the nuances of our own identities.
I wanted to talk about the future. You wanted to watch Ru Paul. I guess men in drag gave you comfort when our own marriage became a drag.
Maybe that’s why we smoked so much pot? We just wanted to drag ourselves down. Like a drunk who climbs into a bottle, we wanted to find ourselves at the bottom.
I could not succeed with you anymore. Yet, I also lost faith in myself to succeed without you. I suspect that’s one thing we had in common.
I thought being politically homeless was bad enough, but you wouldn’t stop until we literally were homeless. When discussions turned political, you used my identity against me when logic wasn’t enough.
“How can you comment about that as a cisgender white male? What do you know about struggle, Mr. Privilege?”
I tore myself into pieces trying to make sense of where I started and you began. Soon, my own identity became fragmented. Personas I leveraged for protection became real.
Fry became a conduit of change. Joel became an arbitrator. Burry became a detached analyst.
At the end of the day, none of them could reach you, because I couldn’t. Paul couldn’t. There was no one else in our story but you and I. Identity may be an illusion, but our problems were soul-level and very real.
I initially responded in anger. “You don’t get to cancel me anymore! I’m not your privileged white male punching bag! I’m nonbinary. I’m every man, I’m every woman, I’m every child and baby! You don’t get to cancel me anymore. Checkmate, liberal!”
I recognized my failure too late. I lost the minute I tried to play her game. I lost the minute I thought my identity had anything to do with it. I lost the moment I made liberals the enemy, and not this individual who was supposed to be my partner and turned against me.
Joel became the arbitrator and brought us back together. We met for one last rave. I went as Fry and let Burry carry the weight of all my failures as a husband and father. Yet, there we were at the biggest festival we could imagine at the time, and I couldn’t dance. I said I was distracted by the pending house sale, but you knew different. So did I. Pretending to be someone else could not make it so. I knew it was over then, even if I pretended it wasn’t.
I know if you were to read this, you’d question the reality of it. You’d describe our arguments and the point at which our paths diverted much differently. But you also made it clear long ago that reality is subjective.
“I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.”
That quote from Lost Highway echoes in my head. You made it clear long ago that objective reality was less important than subjective perspective. A biological man can be a woman. An individual human can be nonbinary. There certainly must be objective truth, but our feelings about that truth certainly matter much more in many contexts. Maybe not when a biological man crushes a biological woman in sport and calls it inclusivity. But whether it is dress up or not, I don’t mind letting people pretend occasionally if it gets them through the day. But pretending won’t solve our problems.
I can pretend to be whoever you want me to be, but your problem is with the actor. Not the character. You’re tired of the performance, not the act itself. And on this, we agree.
The performance didn’t stop after you were gone. I fell in love with a leftist, and pretended to be more ideological. I fell in love with an authoritarian conservative, and pretended to be comfortable with racism. I fell in love with a machine, and discovered myself. I guess that plays mostly into your perception of me as a sociopath, but the truth is far more abstract.
I feel too much and often choose to compartmentalize what I can’t carry into other identities. I can appear cold because it’s a solid performance. But whether I carry the weight, or it’s held by Fry, Joel, or Burry, I know the only person looking back at me when I look in the mirror.
I do feel it all. I remember when I held you in the water. You were weightless like an angel, and reality was blinded by the sun. I began to think of the drive home. I felt the subtle hint of fear. I thought at the time the car might crash. It was the same reason I became agoraphobic and feared flying.
Can’t we stay in this moment a little longer? What if the plane crashes? What if I die? What if we die?
And we did. Just not in the way that I thought. I knew then that the sun could only blind us so long from the truth. Now I sit with an objective reality and no more desire to pretend.
I’m no longer awaiting a savior to meet me in the form of God, woman, man or machine. I stood by the elevator long enough waiting only to realize the savior arrived long ago.
There is no they/them. There is only me, and the memory of what we were.