While visiting a friend in Fort Collins, Colorado, I decided to go on a date. I’d been spending a fair amount of time on dating apps, avoiding my writing, and coping with the lackluster holidays by juggling a few conversations at a time. I matched with Patrick while visiting an art museum. Bald, beard, blue eyes, lean muscle, octopus tattoo streaming across his shoulder and back.

My friend Charlotte was more excited about the date than I was. How long have you been talking? Where’s he taking you? What outfits are you deciding between? Do you want to use some of my makeup?

While I admired her excitement, I didn’t quite match it. There were 8 outfits in my suitcase. I knew which I was wearing. Umber sweater dress, almond cardigan, thigh high socks. I didn’t expect much more than passing the time with decent conversation. I tried not to expect much from the apps. Most matches don’t respond, those who do don’t get past lukewarm surface level responses that peter off after a few days. Very few ever lead to a date. I was just feeling restless in my own skin. Being distracted felt like a rescue.

“You look beautiful,” Charlotte said, coming up behind me in the bathroom after I got dressed.

“You know I’m not good with compliments.”

She smirked. “Well, it’s yours whether you like it or not.”

Charlotte is pretty. Petite yet curvy, pale skin, painted eyes. Her hair is dyed black, but her natural hair color is a fiery red, full and sweeping. She cuts it every year and within 6 months it grows back completely. Her style is a mix between slutty and 1950s beauty. Whenever I took a picture, she smiled perfectly on cue.

Later that evening, Charlotte’s boyfriend, Noah, came over to meet us. Bald, beard, blue eyes, lean muscle. His handshake was firm, he limited eye contact to five seconds or less, looking away when I looked directly at him. We connected over anime and watched a few episodes of The Way of the Househusband. He ordered pizza. Charlotte, mindful of the time, checked in with me. “Are you nervous? Here are some of the places that are still open.”

Noah said the logical thing. “I’m surprised you’re going on a date since you live in Iowa.”

“It’s just for fun,” I said.

Charlotte concocted an imaginative rescue plan, offering up her boyfriend as a service—more joke than truth.

I planned to take an Uber to the dessert bar, but was nervous about getting in Patrick’s car afterward. I showed Noah and Charlotte pictures of him, told them his full name, and the type of car he had. Charlotte concocted an imaginative rescue plan, offering up her boyfriend as a service—more joke than truth.

“If you’re ever in a sketchy situation, Noah can come in and pretend to be your husband and whisk you away.”

Noah snorted. “Can you come up with something more realistic?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I don’t remember how the conversation continued, only that it did. Neither of them heard the insult. The show played in the background. Loofah, Charlotte’s cat, stretched out on the floor, curling and uncurling his tail. It wasn’t awkward. My face is usually stoic so I’m hard to read. But Noah’s response echoed inside me. 

As a black woman with prominent facial features, dreadlocks, a thicker body with broad shoulders, my romantic options are limited. Definitely different from Charlotte’s. Though she’s Latina, she passes for white. I’d previously brought this up, but she wasn’t conscious of what it meant, the privilege that was available to her.

When I first moved to the Midwest, I worried about being surrounded by whiteness and feeling invisible. It was further complicated by the fact that I was primarily attracted to white men. Perhaps because that’s who I was around more. The older I become, the less interested I am in being defined by my race.  I saw my identity and interests as a human being outside of my race more as time went on. And as I moved away from home, finished grad school, and worked to advance my writing career, I knew that would impact the dating options that were available to me.

Back in the first few months of us meeting in Iowa, Charlotte and I had a picnic in the park where I voiced my concerns about dating.

“I just don’t know what’s available to me out here,” I said.

“That’s normal. Moving is a big transition” she responded.

“But who will see me?”

“I actually think you’re very attractive.”

I felt nothing after she said it. And it took me a few years to figure out why. Why when friends or platonic relationships tried to compliment my looks or character that it didn’t feel right to believe them. Eventually I realized my friendships didn’t hold me in the middle of the night, protect me from harm, or help me financially function. I want to be loved and touched and fucked. Most friendships don’t stretch that far.

As for the rest of the evening in Fort Collins, Patrick and I couldn’t get in the dessert bar without our covid cards so we went to Denny’s instead. Noah scoffed at this detail as I recounted the date later that night while we all hung out at a bar. “Not very original, dude.”

“Not everyone has a chance to plan the date like you did,” Charlotte said.

I asked about their first few dates, more so Charlotte would stop asking me about how things went with Patrick. Things went well enough. We hugged after he drove me home. But I knew a future was unlikely. I liked the fantasy of an attractive man with a decent job, who still believed in God and marriage taking an interest in me. I didn’t mention it to Charlotte, but I was also talking to a Nigerian engineer. We didn’t get a chance to meet while I was in Fort Collins, but he wanted to keep up our phone calls. Patrick unmatched me when he found out I was back in Iowa. I stayed in touch with the engineer for a bit while talking to a few local men. Over the next few months, one turned out to be married, another was my pen pal for 6 weeks until he finally ghosted the day we were supposed to meet, still another decided several months in that he wasn’t financially stable enough to be with a woman. Exhausted, disconnected, a desire to escape is all I felt at the end. It seemed cruel to keep up the charade, to myself or anyone else. The engineer in Fort Collins wanted to stay in touch, but I didn’t.

---

Charlotte had started dating two weeks after her breakup with her ex, Owen. She’d dated Owen both years of our grad program and lived with him the second year. I knew her pain as I went through the end of my own 2-year relationship the summer I moved to Iowa. I feared dying alone. Had to get used to sleeping by myself, abstaining from sex, grieving. For the first 3 months, I focused on writing my novel, but when I came up for air and remembered how lonely I was, I decided to go on dating apps. At first, I was excited to be picked. But I quickly learned how empty the process was.

Among the lessons and disappointments were several men. A white gay couple who had a fetish for slave master dynamics with black women. It remained virtual and eventually I left the chat, but I lingered in it far too long. Next was the cop, Nathan. Cold, handsome face, dead eyes. Mid-thirties and had only been in a series of situationships and one-night stands since college. He ended things after Christmas. I’m just not ready, he texted. Last was my rebound from the cop. A divorced Trump supporter. I wasn’t thinking.

I spent the winter in mourning, wanting to burn myself clean and new. Shame was my new lover as I watched Euphoria and skipped classes. I wanted Charlotte to avoid some of the damage and heartbreak I went through. I’d send her Instagram posts that’d been useful to me with messages like: If you want to lighten your heart…Reveal your secrets. Release your shames. Free your resentments. Feel your pain. 

But it was her void to fill. It led her to Noah. To this day, she’s still angry at Owen for mistreating her. When she first started seeing Noah, she asked me if I’d seen any life updates on Owen’s profile or heard from any of our friends still in the workshop. 

“I need answers, Jeneé,” she said half-jokingly.

“Even if I had them to give, what would it change?” I asked.

“You don’t understand. He left so many things undone in me…”

“I’m your friend, not his. So I don’t know.”

The strongest memory I recall of Owen are American Spirit cigarettes tucked in his shirt pocket and the group dinner where he told me how much he loved Charlotte. “My home is with her,” he lied. I’ve seen enough of his social media to believe life has moved on. While they were still together, Charlotte only mentioned that she and Owen were going through hard times. I let her know she could stay with me if needed. After their breakup she revealed Owen screamed at her repeatedly towards the end, sometimes for more than an hour. It’s interesting how our desire to protect those we love, even as they continue to hurt us, contrasts with our desire to hurt them after they throw us away. When all we’re left with is pain and rage that needs somewhere to go once the love’s gone.

While there are threads of shared experiences between Charlotte and I, the fact remains that she found love again. As of now, I have not. There may be other various factors at work: Location, likeability, being a stable, functioning adult, shared values. But I can’t help but wonder if appearing to be a cute little white girl made a difference.

Of the marriages I’ve seen, most of them have been with non-black people. An article in Time magazine reported that black people are more likely to be single (59%) and that black women (62%) are the most likely to be single of any sector. I asked my Nana and uncle why this was. 

“Most of us need therapy. Living in a trauma induced state makes it difficult to consider another person’s wellbeing,” my uncle responded.

Nana wrote, “Women and men, have lost their true identity and don’t have a clue about what they want and what they are willing to contribute to a healthy loving relationship.”

I found myself grappling with where I came from,. the relationships I’d seen. My life was dominated by women. My mother, Nana, my godmother Emery, my mentor Kalani. Single mothers, single women. Marriage was something I saw on tv or occasionally heard about from my teachers at school. My brother’s grandparents who babysat me in early childhood were married. My brother is married to his 2^nd wife. Eventually my uncles got married. One has since divorced. My father just recently got divorced. Nana and her mother have both been widowed and never remarried. “Even if I wanted to, what options are there?” Nana remarked during one of my visits.

It was expected that I’d have sex, have children, and go to work, because those would follow me throughout life.

Marriage and domestic life weren’t a prison to me because they were never even presented as options. It was expected that I’d have sex, have children, and go to work, because those would follow me throughout life. Men were never mentioned because they never stayed, in life or in death. My mother didn’t even acknowledge dating for me. When I told her an early boyfriend proposed to me when I was 22, she chuckled and rolled her eyes. I guess she was right given that it didn’t last.

---

I come from a single teenage mother. She tried to commit suicide for the first time when she was pregnant with me. No one but God knew I was there. She called her best friend a dozen times before swallowing a handful of pills. 

“I’d fallen in love for the first time. With your father.  It was overwhelming,” she said.

My parents’ relationship was over before I had memory. Within 6 weeks of the first semester in college, my mom had gotten pregnant with me. Among the things that brought them together were Daisy Duke shorts, dad’s grill, and Faith Evans “Love Like This” (Fatman Scoop Remix). 

My father didn’t learn what true love was until years later. The love of his life, my brother’s mother, died of an asthma attack on a winter’s day. Dad’s grief filled the Brooklyn brownstone as he remembered the mole above his beloved’s mouth.

He later married and divorced a woman in North Carolina. His kids weren’t included in his attempt at happily ever after. I’ve seen him a dozen times in my life. A familiar stranger whose smile I share. He’s tried to talk more than I have. Decent man, capable of laughter and kindness. He’s recently had a heart attack and stroke. Before that, his marriage was ending. He called me during both times. I could feel him reaching for a human connection, a woman’s touch. I was what was left. My father taught me about the men who marry so that they can be taken care of. After living as a nomad—once their mistakes and noncommittal lives catch up to them—a woman is expected to become their home.

There’s always surprise in his voice when I reveal wisdom that he didn’t teach me. I express empathy for him well, even genuinely feel it at times. But where was he when I needed it first? I used to wonder what my life would look like if he passed away. I quickly realized it would look the same. No holes, no tears, no pain, just a black dress and plane ride to New York for the funeral. How do you love someone who’s always been at a distance? I don’t know, but it’s there, made of obligation.

The love and honor my parents want from me is based on a dream. A dream where they gave more than they did, showed up for more than just my moments of success. I see my best traits in you, my worst traits in your brother, mom wrote to me my freshman year of college. But her best wasn’t reserved for parenting. She gave what came naturally, what made her feel good, what helped her escape, what didn’t question her, and allowed her emotions to roam. The food, the men, the money she struggled to manage.

This wasn’t the mother she came from. Sometimes I wonder why I wasn’t Nana’s daughter instead. “I would’ve been a housewife if I could have been,” she told me. I can see it in the way she cleans before the Sabbath, the scent of tea candles, and her zucchini bread recipe. I see parts of the woman I want to be.

Nana was the eldest of 5 siblings. A teen mother. Her father gave her an ultimatum:  abort my mom or get married. “I loved him and would’ve married him anyway,” she assured me. I believe her because that belief formed the fabric of my mother and me.

16 years later, when mom grew pregnant with my older brother, Nana told her she was having the baby. No discussion. Several more years, when mom was pregnant again, she chose me. “I saw your heartbeat and that was it.” My father wanted her to get an abortion. He has no claim on me. He has no right to be mad at my mistakes or celebrate my successes when he’s been less than a ghost in my life. Ghosts haunt, hold memory, desire to disturb or be laid to rest. My father simply wasn’t there. The lessons I’ve learned, the few men who showed up and the living that formed me don’t belong to him. He was a part of my mother’s beginning, not mine.

“If you could do it all again, would you have married dad?” I asked, sitting across from her bed.

Mom didn’t look up from her phone. “No. I wanted to do things my way.”

Her answer didn’t involve me at all. There was no depth or memory to it. Memory of the lights going off. The gentle eviction from family friends. The tears that had nowhere to land but the steering wheel as she drove. Unpaid bills old enough to be my siblings, or when I was touched and she responded, “I wouldn’t have let my brother do that to me.”

It was about control, or rather, being out of it. I watched her chase death, both fast and slow. Pills were the fast way. The rest of life slowly decayed her bones. She preferred having a blurred sense of right and wrong to wade through when convenient. If she accepted help, that might mean she’d have to change or at least admit to her mistakes. She would have to learn to speak the language of others, one that included patience and compromise. It was easier to just be right, to believe her way was the same as survival.

I left home to form my own story, but I’m still figuring out community after years of solitude.

While my parents are in me, I have to remind myself that I’m not them. I left home to form my own story, but I’m still figuring out community after years of solitude. 

Friends like Charlotte were practice for learning words again. How to speak outside of pain. I told her of my breakup, struggles with my mother, dating, depression, the past. She listened. I’ve seen her pain too and tried to soothe it. She posted online about Owen’s behavior in their relationship. I asked if she was okay.

“It sounds like you’re telling me I did something wrong.”

“I just want you to be able to heal and move on. Think of Noah.”

“My rage is helping me heal.”

“What about forgiveness?” I asked.

“What about it?” she shrugged.

Charlotte reminded me that while forgiveness is there, it’s not always useful. Some days I forgive my parents, other days I don’t.  But I know I have to forgive them in order to be forgiven. When I do, I prove to myself that I have a future that doesn’t involve reliving the past. A future that belongs to me and that I might share with others.

---

When I moved to Arkansas, Nana told me “not to get too chummy with the neighbor”, a college-age white boy, after he came over to say hi.

Whiteness was usually handled with suspicion. “They won’t be able to relate to you. How could you ever trust how they see you?” my godmother asked one day at a coffee shop. She and my mother expressed concerns over me dating white men, as if I was being disloyal to my race and the continuation of its legacy.

“His relationship to God matters first. Everything else is secondary,” I responded.

They spoke as though no white man would ever see me as his equal and I’d constantly be undermined. I know the person they described exists. Everything from music to porn portrays black women animalistically, playing into tropes that are projected on us. But regardless of who I’m with, I just want to be a human being who’s loved. Love has been the hardest acceptance to find. I cannot always measure myself by blackness and other identities when I already struggle just to get out of bed.

There’s also an irony to my family’s warnings on the dangers of white men, when their own checkered love lives were laid out in front of us. Men, black or not, who reflected their low self-esteem. Cheaters, narcissists, deadbeats, manwhores who used and left the women with more burdens than before. How could they speak of the dangers of whiteness, but not the danger they brought home with them, let into their wombs, next to their children? My own father wasn’t around to claim, protect, or teach me. These women, whom I love, were defending an idea, not reality. Or at least, not mine.

The two men I loved were black. The first was a mentor who wore sweater vests and coached me through thunderstorms with my mother. The second shared my love/hate relationship with Lena Dunham’s Girls. Their pants were pulled up with belts, they cared about my art and were patient. They didn’t accuse me of sounding or acting white. They understood that being black was more than music, dialect, and fashion. My personality didn’t remove my skin or the family that I came from. One was a father-figure, the other a partner. Both were my lovers.

Most of the men who are attracted to me are black. It’s not surprising, but I feel indifferent to this fact. It doesn’t make me feel more secure to know I share physical features with certain men. Of course there are cultural implications that are assumed with race, and yet it’s not a one size fits all ideology. We don’t automatically share the same thoughts and experiences around race, history, and culture. There are an infinite number of ways for black people to view themselves and the world. Skin deep is not deep at all.

When I told this to Charlotte, it was like I’d begun speaking a different language. Having passed for white all her life, it wasn’t a concern for her.

“My sisters are all darker than me and resented me for my lighter complexion.”

I found it difficult to sympathize with her. Her family didn’t view her as betraying her race by dating white men. The men who sought her didn’t make assumptions about her based on how she looked. The inconvenience she experienced in childhood didn’t remove her privilege at present. I admit to the hypocrisy of minimizing the importance of race in my choosing a partner, while being defensive of the motives of white/white passing people in choosing theirs.

My biggest rule was that I couldn’t be with a man that looked like my brother.

My biggest rule was that I couldn’t be with a man that looked like my brother. A mixture of thug and bum. Heavy, tattoos, beady eyes, gapped teeth, scraggly beard. Lips darkened by cigarettes, crooked fingernails from biting. Aimless and ready to pull any woman from her goals or journey if she let him. When I see these features in other men, I’m reminded of what was taken from me, of the danger my mother protects because it reminds her of the home she came from. Childhood wounds in the shape of a father, a man who slipped into the role when it gave the most leverage and back out when it hurt the most.

Two years ago, I decided I couldn’t use my mother as a metric system for my life anymore. She and I aren’t special for our contradictions. Everyone has them. But she was the true first love of my life, the first pair of eyes through which I saw, and my first heartbreak. When I think I’ve gotten over her, I see her in a man, one that I want to help or to love me back, but instead must escape. I keep running from her and she keeps finding me in men who are beautiful broken mirrors. Even now, my mom messages me about living with her or at least Nana and grandmom to be closer to home. The familiar is seductive. Even if it threatens to shrink or kill off parts of you.

The love my mother has for men who take and leave—her father and mine, other lovers, her son—is a dangerous road. I’ve traveled it in my own way, carrying the spirit of rejection, reaching out to people who leave, trying to convince them of my goodness, being the person who stayed and endured what they became. The only reward in it was the lesson. In all of these people lay the spirit of my mother somewhere. Her temper, inconsistency, mania, stubbornness, selfishness, fear of commitment. Lust and distraction.

Once upon a time, I believed the years would look different on everyone. No one wants to believe that today is the same as 20 years’ worth of yesterdays. It takes courage to love someone as they are, to accept what changes and stays the same. I’ve fed off places to blame, especially my parents. I have to remind myself of what they’ve given me, the good things that sustain and mean me well. The grandchildren who need them. 

My parents are the closest experience I’ve had to marriage. An old love, the kind that teaches me, that holds rocks that existed before and now next to me. Whether it’s quiet or dark, whether they’re held by glass or water, they only know how to be themselves. They age and erode along with me, their minerals and the history that formed them. I see in their streaks, smoothness and edges. The love moves though it doesn’t disappear.

---

In moving away from my mother, I was often moving away from the places and people who look like me. At times this surrounded me with whiteness. This wasn’t intentional,  just the available option to support my education and writing. Since kindergarten, I was used to not fitting in. I was too quiet, I wore the wrong clothes, I had the wrong conversations, my breasts grew too quick, I sought attention with sex stories, I wrote letters to boys who refused me. Being one of the few black people around was just another thing to add to the list. For a time I did compare my lips, hair, skin, and body to white women, wondering if I was enough when I talked to my first white boy. But my insecurities had been there for years.

Now, I don’t have the energy to constantly hate myself. I’m now trying to maintain a body and self I can love, that doesn’t have to carry the burdens my family has. Failing teeth, pain in their joints, hips, insomnia, weak heart, weight that keeps them from moving. I see who I can become if I’m not careful. And for better or worse, I still want to be desired. Desired, loved, married and fucked, knowing full well the last can’t happen without the first. While I don’t run from my features, I do wonder how best to accentuate them. How to smile, to look in someone’s eyes without instantly looking down or away, how to manage my weight and muscle tone. To be healthy consistently in ways my mom wasn’t.

Yet society continues to become more distant and foreign. I don’t need to explain what dating has become. The vapid, noncommittal, unhealed, sex-obsessed, and transactional playground that the apps are. The longer I participate, the more convinced I am that I should’ve found my husband in the 90s, a time where love might still have been alive and not hidden under rocks and dead things. Parts of dating seem less about race and more about the culture we’re currently in. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing financial stability, purposeful careers, singlehood, friends for visiting comic bookstores. But what about our desires beyond those things?

I consider the areas of my life that still need work. Finish the book, get a regular job, continue therapy, learn to drive. The Christian and relationship podcasts that advise to focus on God and the person you want to become. I’ve concluded, as I’m sure most have, that much of the information and portrayals of living online aren’t real. Most working-class people who don’t take trips to Cabo will remain working class people who don’t go to Cabo. While there are healthier points at which to enter relationships, there’s never a perfect time. Many of the couples I know didn’t have a clean start. They’d just ended or were still in previous relationships, dated under a year before marriage, met at a funeral, etc.

Charlotte Lucas from Pride & Prejudice said it best. I’m 27 years old. I’ve no money and no prospects. I’m already a burden to my parents. And I’m frightened.

I’m 30, poor, depressed, and abstinent. My mother still pays my phone bill. I’m not able to keep up with this world, and yet I know I’m far from being the only one. At times it seems like it’d be easier to be content with sex and companionship, to not expect a man to be more than a friend or lover. I’ve tried. A man with green eyes and no future stopped by to pick up his glasses from my place. He was neither friend nor lover, only a distraction that I wished could be more. We started to watch an episode of The First 48 when he picked me up like I weighed no more than his dreams. When I stared at the blue inside his green eyes, it was easy to forget pain. His growl filled the pit of my stomach with such hunger that all I could do was bite him. His hands and smell were strong and I wanted them both to fill me deep enough to forgive him and forget my own shame. He was a whore and reminded me of my capacity to become one too. In bed, I remember that he wreaked of my mother, and that there’s a God. Neither the green-eyed man nor I had condoms and nor did several stores he went to, so we didn’t have sex. My choice. Hard not to believe it was a sign. Eventually the spell was broken, he was gone, my life was the same, and there was still writing to be done.

---

Women who are smarter, prettier, more capable than I am, are struggling to find someone.

Women who are smarter, prettier, more capable than I am, are struggling to find someone. And yes, black women do still struggle in ways that other races of women don’t. Black women and Asian men are chosen the least on dating apps. The tropes associated with black women – loud, angry, ignorant, promiscuous, baby mama, welfare queen, rebellious, rainbow weaves, fake lashes and nails, and of course twerking—portray us as a flavor to try at best, rather than a potential partner to share life with. There are those who count us out before ever getting to know us as individuals. Assumptions about cleanliness, intelligence, and politics were made just from my dreadlocks. 

DEI efforts to diversify film casts (and shows created by Shonda Rhimes) are well-intended in showing interracial relationships, but as a black woman living in the Midwest, this hasn’t been my reality. White women are still prized first, then other non-black women, and then us. There are stereotypes attached to every race, but the ones attached to black women sometimes contribute to singleness, and the lack of solid family structures.

I find myself torn between this reality and the one where dating is harder for most people with limited time, energy, resources, and options. I struggle to find someone who isn’t trying to get the most of me for the least amount of effort. Many see the person on the other side of their screen as little more than a temporary distraction from boredom. Convenience has become a silent killer of intimacy. People want sex delivered to the door. “I want to get you pregnant,” one man told me. “I can bring snacks over,” said another. Everything has been commodified. Our bodies, emotions, stories, love, pain. 

I’ve discovered how little a man’s pleasure can have to do with a woman’s. While men obsess over their orgasm, women are often just another way to jerk off, used as human toilets for male release and validation. Very little thought is put into connection or making a woman feel safe, desired, and valued, let alone pleasured. The orgasm gap between men and women has been well documented. There’s no concern for how it might break the woman, or disassociate both parties from their humanity over time. How much harder it is to pair bond and trust. That kind of sex was too traumatic to be pleasurable for me. I tried and it left me empty, praying for parts of myself that had been stolen from me to return. Society had nothing to do with it. The truth is that it’s not even about white men. It’s about finding where I’m loved. Nothing less will do.

---

I’m not owed marriage or romantic love. No one is responsible for giving me access to their body. There’s a great chance it’ll take years to find someone, or that I’ll remain single. There was a time when imagining myself alone was too painful to bear. Until I remembered that being with the wrong person is worse than being alone; that there’s family in friends and community beyond romance. I name my contradictions, the ways in which I play victim. The truth is that I want someone to commit to me, but I haven’t fully committed to myself.

As I write this I remember that this is where my love lies, the place where I am given back to myself.

The closest lovers I’ve had are God and art. Prayer is honesty and perspective, the bible is a study of human psychology, and the church after years of searching, is friendship. Poetry is the closest I come to sex, to body, to kiss, to warmth, to the perfect sized penis, to hugs, to running the palm of my hand over the heads of flowers. Poetry is like breath. As I write this I remember that this is where my love lies, the place where I am given back to myself. Even if it’s only for a few moments. Sometimes I make the sky my diary, screaming myself into the air as much as I need.

I can spend time pontificating on how my race, sexuality, childhood, and singleness are politicized, or I can finish my book, but I can’t have both at the same time.

Charlotte is engaged. “I’ll wear the dress you got me for my engagement party,” she tells me. I know it fits her perfectly. She’s invited me to be a bridesmaid. A Texan wedding. Snake queen, Steve Earle hits, BBQ, and whiskey. Many kinds of love exist and will show up on her wedding day, and I’m happy to be one such love. If I cry at her wedding, some of the tears will be for her, but some will also be for me.

My mother and I are going to a P!nk concert in a few weeks. I will singshout words. I will scream my teen years back into existence:

So raise your glass if you are wrong

In all the right ways

All my underdogs

We will never be never be, anything but loud

Other than that, there’ll be too much present for the rest of the past to show up. I will wear mom’s pink Nikes as if they’re my own and pray we both stay sane with each other all three days. But even if we don’t, I’ll love her all the same.

There are days ahead filled with purpose, mistakes, meals that I’ll cook for loved ones, lessons in my words and others that I’ll return to. There is life and death attached to my name and every woman I came from. There is dancing, people in different skins who I’ve yet to meet, dandelion tea, family and friends I choose and who choose me. There is a life waiting for me.