Tag: Marriage
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But, hey, now it does.
The first day of my unemployment, I called my parents on the way home from the beach to tell them about my impromptu trip, to discover in shock that they were not only moving to Denver but also giving the car they had given me for graduation to my brother for no real reason.
When I protested, my dad said it quite bluntly to me over the phone: “It doesn’t matter what you want.”
(My mom, understanding this could be their last impression they leave me with, would later give me her car, at cost to her, as remediation.)
For six months I’ve been repeating the same list in my head of everything that happened to me over the past two years: estrangement from my family over marrying a man, malicious workplace outings, disappearing roommates, the layoff.
Each recitation with the specter of that awful sentence ringing between the spaces of each bulleted trauma, loud and unconquerable to me – “It doesn’t matter what you want.”
This week was a new list.
Not of things that happened to me, but things that I did.
⁃ Graduated from cartography school
⁃ Accepted a mapping job
⁃ Earned admission to a top-tier urban planning school
⁃ Celebrated with a family that cared
And when that sentence tried to come back to me, it could’t.
It couldn’t, because I’ve finally proved the premise false.
Maybe, at one point, it didn’t matter what I wanted.
But, hey.
Now it does.
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I Dress to Impress, so I Can Lie About My Age.
[Pictured below the essay, a postcard reading-
Dear Julia,
Being back in Frederick brought back so many images of all the versions of myself that I’ve been. My favorite: a Tim wearing a black t-shirt and bowler cap who sits perched on the cushioned seat of his pedicab. On slow nights, he’d park under a street lamp on Carroll Creek, handlebars pointed toward the reflected lights on the water and read books of essays to the hum of passing cars and quacking ducks.
I was a Tim who had just graduated from college, and I was a Tim who didn’t understand much. The beautiful thing, though, was that I was a Tim that didn’t need to quite yet.
All my best,
Tim Kuhn]
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My twenties were completely unfair. Every success was borne out of an urgent, desperate need of escape, and it was only ever granted at too-high a cost.
And it was always so lonely.
I like to remember the Tim I wrote about on this postcard, shown below, written way back when I was 23 and the years between then and now hadn’t happened yet.
Back in that moment, I was wearing a bowler cap and reading a book of essays on my pedicab, parked under the warm glow of Carroll Creek’s lamplights. I reluctantly put my bookmark in its page and tucked the book away, before I backed up my cab and then pedaled away toward all the people on Market Street.
Toward every single one of the them.
Pedaled right into the future that is today, where , actually, hey, I did it.
I finally figured it out.
I figured out:
1. That Kevin and I would one day be free.
2. That they would never be able to stop me, no matter how hard they tried.
3. That I’d make a lot of good friends. Even some who would teach me to see an angry red, to see how incredibly green I once was.
4. That the world couldn’t stop me, no matter how hard it tried.
5. And that, a decade later, I would be a man, walking straight-backed and dignified into a coming new decade.
Thanks for sticking with me this long, everybody.
I’m excited to be 30 🤗
#birthdayboy #instagay #MAGA
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Precedence
Broken glass rained like confetti
on the night of the Stonewall Riot,and atop a glowing lamp post,
beautiful with her dolphin smile,
it was Marsha P. Johnson
who threw the first brick.a warranted departure from her
philosophy of “pay it no mind,”
sparking a revolt
when the bar tab
came out to be way more
than just the drinks she orderedThat debt she paid, she paid in full:
a broken high heel,
a billy club to the rib,
the chaos of a tipping point
reached at two in the morning.When she
and her friends
(and her old lovers)
(and the strangers she’d flirt with
but would never charm)
burst through those doors andinto the streets
into our offices,
into our classrooms
into our viewthey catapulted us down the aisle
where we’d stand together before a decorated arch
and calmly declare our relationship
in terms never before seen:A marriage
afforded the same rights and obligations
as our parents’ before us
and their parents’ before them.A link in the long line of their history,
the first fruits to be officially named together
on the same branch of the family tree.I vowed,
then you vowed.and together when we walked from the altar,
confetti rained like broken glass,Each of our rings
a societal terror
gleaming with one demand:Respect.
Our everyday forward
its own quiet revolution. -
Nine.
9 is
A perfect square when it’s a 3×3 grid
The start of the workday (attractive when without income)
The time of sundown at the height of summer
The French number -mon neuf- my friend told her high school language teacher to put in his mouth
A German “No”
Something about cats
How many years I’ve been sitting next to this guy
#maniversary
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Valentine
On our first Valentine’s Day together
You drove eight hours in a blizzard
to prepare a spaghetti dinner
and give me a book of poetry
specifically meant to be read aloudIn the subsequent years
you would give me
Political anger
Hampden kitsch
a fountain pen
and a ring made of
enduring white goldBut, hey, that first poetry book, though.
Do you remember the one about
the newly freed man
who can’t stay here?It was heady and exhausting, but
godDAMN
It was the best thing I’d ever heard.I’ll always be glad that,
even after your eight-hour drive
in heavy snow,You
would be the one
to recite that poem tome.
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Being Different Means Being Free
“But most importantly and, honestly, the most difficult, Kev, I promise to tie my liberation to yours. I promise that no matter the historical moment we find ourselves in, we will always walk hand in hand down that street with both grace and dignity. I promise you that no part of my love for you will ever be hidden in the shame and shadows I once knew, that we will only ever stand together, proudly, in the daylight.”
-Excerpt from my wedding vows,
June 24, 2017
It really has been raining quite a lot on us these days. Whether we say our marriage has been the umbrella you hold above my head or the canoe with which you pulled me out of the flood, here I am, afloat in a rising tide and dry as clothesline laundry on a warm, spring day.
I love you, Kevin.
Every day with you, I say “I do.”
Happy six-month wedding anniversary, my huzz.
#BeingDifferent means #BeingFree
