marriage-bending: a fiction

Vacation for me is any time spent dreaming about an existence that lets me be in community, be with all of my family, feel loved and give love, heal myself and heal others without feeling split in two. I want to create or locate the cultural space where I can be happy. I want to generate possibilities for people to do the same things on their own terms. At the very least, I want to to gather far-flung and disparate musings, imaginings, rituals, relationships, performances, prayers, and fasts, and narrate them into just one romance. I want to matter, though I'm wrestling with the idea that this might be a flaw I've inherited.

I want to return stolen wealth. I want to confront and redress colonial trauma. I want to hold up the love I feel in all the waiting and listening when I sit with my uncles. I want to feel an abundance without taking more than I need. This may mean remaining unmarried in an increasingly marked way as I get older. Or it might mean being strategically and unromantically married to someone else,  maybe someone that also feels fictional sometimes. And I want to do all of these things in a way that is dutiful and accountable, not wasteful and egocentric. Pious, even. Can I do this with taqwa?

I'll likely fail. And I may or may not keep trying and keep imagining. Maybe I'll get tired and I'll just fucking get married. But the imagining does me a lot of good. I'm in a space where my imagination, the None-Of-The-Above, the empty spaces have been extremely important. I've kept my faith, my queerness in the cracks and I've actually been pretty happy. To me, today's media explosion about SCOTUS upholding marriage equality loudly proclaimed: this type of Love is really important. 

So, today I feel irrelevant, I feel like a frivolous and unlikely fiction. I think that's at least partially untrue, and I don't even feel bitter. But I had to at least say it: Other genders, other kinds of togetherness are possible. And it bears repeating that they aren't the kind that determine your access to healthcare, housing, or membership. The way they move you will not be measured by distance from a border or a nation.These are the fictions that I want to celebrate.