Untitled

I’ll dance Volk at your wedding. I’ll mumble incantations under my breath at your funeral.

I hope your husband has a big dick and a big enough heart to let his guard down around you. I hope you don’t lie awake in bed at night thinking about how every decision you’ve ever made, whether actively or passively, has led to this exact moment and you won’t find out what’s behind the other doors. I hope you don’t start your day looking at a stranger over your morning coffee and think about how there’s some Palestinian-who-never-got-a-chance-to-become-a-refugee-because-the-IDF-shot-him-dead-for-throwing-a-rock-during-a-protest-at-the-border who could have loved you better. There’s not a man who lost his job and then his home and then his life as he froze to death on the streets of Chicago who was destined to be your soulmate so here you are. Or perhaps a teenager gunned down at school or he survived school, but got busted for something or other no one really remembers and the judge decided to make an example out of him and threw the book at him and after a decade inside with no end in sight he took his own life or maybe he did his time and got out, but found the job market less than welcoming to an ex-con so he went back to selling drugs or tried out selling his body and a cop or maybe a civilian who was taking advantage of anti-sex trafficking laws got him in a secluded area and now you’ll never raise a child together. Or maybe he had the misfortune of being a Uighur Muslim in China or Rohingya Muslim in Myanmar. Or maybe he’s still alive: that nice Latino man ICE deported for a decade old unpaid parking ticket. Or maybe he’s white: that angry young man screaming about how you’d burn in hell as you entered the clinic. You went inside and had the procedure done and that man went his own way. Or he’d already gone his own way too long ago and now there was no redemptive quality left in him, any signs of your true one and only long ago vanquished from his body. Or maybe you lost him in a way that isn’t so dull, something that would make headlines: one day he came home from school and his mentally unstable mother decided to lock him in a closet and feed him less and less with each passing day and after a neighbor had not seen the boy-who-would-have-grown-up-to-become-the-love-of-your-life for a month, they decided to call the police.

I hope you don’t ponder these alternate lives with other (better?) lovers while browsing the Craigslist Missed Connections section because anti-sex trafficking laws got rid of the men for women section and all the other personals. Because you picked the man you’re with and confirmed to Regis Philbin that it was, in fact, your final answer.

Your husband is here – or rather I’m here; I’m the one invited, it’s his event – and those don’t look like crocodile tears to me. I hope he never remarries because no one could ever live up to the bar you set.

“Untitled” was the only piece written for a zine entitled Pretend to Be Asleep which was never completed. It was inspired by Suspiria (2018), “Wedding” by Serengeti, and, obviously, politics.