⇦ Essays | Untitled ("I want to see the marriage of freaks")

Note: I wrote this a month before I got legally married, a month after the pandemic began in America.

I want to see the marriage of freaks, married leatherdykes, married leftist activists who still eat vegan and who still cook for Food Not Bombs.

I want to see marriage with eros, I want to see marriages where straight people who see them have no idea what the fuck is happening inside them, I want to see marriages with 6+ dimensions and contour and range.

Marriages where the spouses edit each other’s literary works. Married hikers who start at opposite ends of the long road to find one another. The marriage I want to see is one where people who have no value, who have never been given value, bestow it upon the beloved and have it bestowed upon them.

I want to see marriage as another way to live, a way that causes disapproval in the Powers that Be. When getting married is questionable and strange and a little shocking, so you know you’re doing it for the important reasons.

Show me marriages where one bird flitters on the three dimensions of the land and never rests, and one bird stays at home. I want a love that can abide these changes, a love that grows in distance and that settles in flow. I want to see a marriage of freedom.

I want to see the marriage of people trying hard, where trying hard is not a synonym for fucking up. I want to see married people who get weirder, not more normal. I want to taste a marriage that bites like lime juice and fish sauce; never the taste of your own saliva or a dry thirsty mouth, never to feel the yoke on your shoulders, the cage that grows smaller the more you think about it.

I want to see the marriage of the unloved. I want to see that partnership of love and that avowal that love will always come again. Where you don’t know the meaning of the words, but you sing them anyway.

April 2020