The surety in our relationship came not from individual aspects of our id
entities, not from the wounds we carried, but from confidence: that we could love each other as we needed. That we could share in each other’s joy. That we could heal each other.
* * *
We never did finish writing the artist residency proposal. Our best form of collaboration had been, quite simply, in loving and supporting each other.
For both of us, our relationship allowed us to reclaim parts of ourselves. For her it meant reclaiming her sexuality, climbing, and the centrality of intellect to her soul. She worked anew toward her dreams of an art MFA, edited her portfolio and artist statement, attended her top pick.
For me it meant moving into myself unapologetically and giving myself permission: to write, to value happiness, to choose faith over doubt or criticism, to choose, however temporarily, self-worth over the power of negative commentary and judgment.
For both of us, our relationship meant shedding layers of defense. In receiving each other’s gaze, in being seen fully, in confronting each other honestly, there was nowhere to hide. Stop hiding, we told each other, with regard to different aspects of our lives.
This nakedness allowed us to access new understandings of not only ourselves—and our work, and our creative visions—but also of how boundless, rewarding, and generous love can be.
Part Two
If our beginnings were tangled and complex, our ending was infinitely more so. The ways in which our relationship imploded would require its own essay.
I wanted to believe that a first queer relationship didn’t have to be tragic. I wanted to write a happy essay about love. Life interfered.
When queer people heard of our breakup, I received more than one knowing nod. “First queer relationship,” I heard, alongside comments about how unsurprising it was that it ended in catastrophic fashion. A shorthand, subjective version of our ending might include her stepmother and father’s dislike and disapproval; resultant friction in our relationship, from which we couldn’t recover; our breakup; and, in the days after, her father’s death in a tragic accident.
Even so, I can’t ascribe our relationship to a category like mistake or regret. There was an inevitability to it. We met as our suppressed desires were surfacing and intersecting, as new worlds were opening—for me, writing and art and emotion; for her, climbing and a return to intellectual pursuits.
I still have the sheepskin rug she gave me, a handful of her paintings on my walls. Life moves on, but these vestiges remain. They remind me we shared something beautiful, once.
11 GOLDEN DAYS
There are the days, after a walk on the elevated abandoned-then-converted train track a few blocks from our apartment, snowflakes blowing and slapping me lightly in the face as I walk, when I lie next to my girlfriend in bed, her lips moving slowly as she reads words aloud from her book, edited by my mentor, me reading essays as research for the book I need to complete. She shares opinions on each story as she reads. I share stories about the workshop drama mentioned in the book’s introduction. We snack on popcorn, salted and garlic-powdered and dusted with nutritional yeast. I wonder, if, despite everything, these are my golden days, our golden days.
As soon as I uncovered the diagnosis, on a piece of paper, while I was sorting through my latest mess of medical bills, I texted her the news. She was in Abu Dhabi, en route to her family and home. We received the diagnosis, both of us, absorbed the shocks separately.
The month we spend apart clarifies this fact: we want each other for the right reasons. Our happiness is genuine, and it’s intensified in light of health emergencies, not diminished. We’re happy as two otters in each other’s company, slipping and sliding and tucking their paws under their chins. I can’t point to grand gestures to signify. Love comes in simple forms.
My best work has always included her. Nothing comes across so clearly in nonfiction writing as intention. To us, at least, the pureness of our intentions for each other is clear. But then I wonder, too, how pure love can be, once need enters the equation. That’s why these days feel the golden ones—because the truth is known, life is hard, and yet. And yet we’re still happy as we ever were, stronger than we’ve ever been.
This is remarkable given everything that’s happened in months prior. I signed with a literary agent; sold my first book; due to the possibility of such a sale, suffered a fracturing blow to my tenuous remaining relationship with one of my sisters. I received word of my mother’s worsening condition. I landed in a state-run mental hospital. I lost my mother to her decades-long degeneration from early-onset Alzheimer’s. My girlfriend and I moved in the middle of Chicago winter from one apartment to another, after conflict with our previous landlord over a heating system that was never fully constructed, an electrical system that was never brought to code, rat feces making us both ill, cockroaches, and every other plague. This litany might seem unrelated, but for the diagnosis: schizophrenia. A disease in which episodes are triggered by stress, by family hostility and turbulence, by triggering of past childhood trauma, by the death of a parent, by economic adversity such as we faced with our landlord. A disease, too, whose risk factors paralleled many of the themes I’d been writing about: childhood trauma, abuse, ethnic isolation.
In the hospital and in the lead-up to checking myself in, I was afraid of everything, including my girlfriend. She was the one who convinced me to commit myself voluntarily, who tricked me into going into the hospital by claiming that she felt sick. My second episode was the first time my mental illness intruded on the life we built together, in tangible ways, in real-time. She and I experienced, in tandem, two different versions of the same reality.
In the first emergency room we went to, she explained to doctors what she knew of my history, from before we met: a first psychotic episode, a suicide attempt. To her frustration, they didn’t listen to her, the person who knew me best, when she said something was wrong. Instead they chalked up my combativeness to personality, discharged me with nothing more than a headache and insomnia written in the treatment notes.
I landed at another ER after I worsened, after my girlfriend called an ambulance. She explained my history again, and this time the doctors listened. I took an Ativan, which helped me sleep, but did nothing for my suspiciousness, my distrust. She reached out to my oldest sister to learn the medications I’d been on in my previous episode, and again, doctors listened to the information she passed on, and this time I got the help I needed.
Other, lesser, more self-protective people would’ve walked away. Unfamiliar with the coldness of American institutions, the rules that barred her from sharing with me what she’d made with love, she made kaali dal later and brought it to the hospital, instead.
During this time I was lost in my own nightmares, which I didn’t share with anyone. This, I think, is why people stigmatize and fear diseases like schizophrenia so much—because they sympathize with the people who have to deal with the outbursts and symptoms, rather than the person with the disease.
It was my girlfriend’s presence during this episode that clarified what I hadn’t understood the first time around. I could reconstruct the narrative, both my own crossing from reality to unreality, as well as from her perspective.
“They don’t know your personality, so they don’t know you’re different,” she told me, about the doctors she encountered, those who ignored her words. As events unfolded and after, she was fed up with the American medical system and its unpreparedness for mental health emergencies. “It’s so obvious, when you’re fine and when you’re not.”
My girlfriend experienced the same frustrations I’d experienced with my mother’s illness, which my oldest sister and father had refused to acknowledge, and which doctors had, as well. Throughout my teens and early twenties I’d been the unwilling caretaker for my mother, in the decade before she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. I resented it. I resented dealing with my middle sister, too, both her temperament and her struggles with an undiagnosed mental condition, because of the toll taken on me. I was young
. Given my youth, as the youngest in the family, and my general quietness, I had been easy to ignore.
My mother went to the doctor unaccompanied. My oldest sister and father didn’t live with my mother’s behavior and changing personality, or her, day to day, and they chose not to pay attention to my warnings. They left me to deal with her fears and her caretaking, on my own.