My love and I are at a house-party. It is
dark and late, with loud music thumping
through the wood, and blue-white fairy
lights on the bannisters. They hold my
hand as they introduce me to their
friends.

 You see, my love and I are newly named,
and they would like me to meet their
world.

The people across from us are drunk,
about to drink, already drinking, and smile
wide grins of presumed understanding at
our arrangement:

"So you're the infamous girlfriend!"

"It’s so lovely to finally meet you. We've
heard so much about you."

"You guys have been together for how
long? I could have sworn you'd been
together for years. You seem to know
each other so well."

As though we skipped something, some
other part of the ritual and now lie, string
unwound between us.

And I can already hear the future in which
they demand that I confess what they see
to be failings.

And in that future, I refuse. These are not
failings, I say, but the things you have
been given and never questioned. Its ok,
language is fallible.

Perhaps I should explain-

My love does not call me lover. I do not
light fires or cradle their nightmares when
they wake.

I do not sleep next to my love. I do not
want to know how they twitch in their
sleep. (our understandings are built on
constraints).

But my love holds my hand when I am
anxious. And I have held them tightly
when they cried.

We have haunted malls together.
Haunted people in tandem. We are the
'and' that always follows a great premise.
We are almost what you expect us to be.
We are the perfect image of love.

We are our own perfect image of love.

We will not be predetermined. We do not
follow some path, some tradition of our
forefathers. We follow merely the soft
moonlit animal of our bodies as we walk.

My love holds me across distance. That is,
my love is my partner, not my girlfriend,
not the person I will marry (and if I do, not
because I feel it is asked of me). We share
an open field of flowers between us and
walk out in all directions. Freely, together
and apart, and in whatever direction our
bodies will take us.

We fall outside your language, and have
more, and less, and fill the cracks of what
you know. We are our own. And we are
happy for it.

But there's only so much I can account for
between their drunken breaths and sober
assumptions. And this is not the place.
They would not stand to listen to
whatever dull explanation of my life I
could give them. They have already
decided they understand us.

So I let them think they know the map we
hold, and turn, holding my love's hand to
kiss their face and walk another way.