i remember being taught by my butch lesbian neighbor how to figure out if a button-down shirt fits properly, and her femme wife teaching me how to tie a tie. it was in my dining room that we used as a makeshift nursery for my sister. the walls were blood red, and the floors and ceiling were dark. the whole world felt like it was suffocating you in that room, much like life felt for me at the time. i was fifteen years old, and it had been seven months since my mother had last spoken to me. my father was drinking. i was failing my classes partially because my brain couldnt stop projecting old home movies onto the backs of my eyelids and i couldnt stay present and partially to see if anyone would notice. no one did. no one but my neighbors.
they invited us over for dinner. the butch always greeted us while the femme finished dinner and we took off our shoes and one would take our coats and the butch would clap her hand on my shoulder, and the femme would touch my elbow gently while she took out my chair. they fed us, we played board games, they talked openly about being gay. they held hands across the dining table, and twirled their wedding rings, neither seeming to notice they were doing it. watching them methodically work, hosting this beautiful dinner, moving together like two pieces of an intricate puzzle, like weaving together yarn and hemp, like gears, like one soul split evenly between two bodies–
i had never seen love like that. i had never met women like them. women who wore athletic sandals in november. women who wore sundresses with denim and cowboy boots and called her wife “sonnyboy,” whose wife was always quite put together, button-down buttoned to the top, tie straight (with the constant help of her wife), hair short & cropped to the scalp all the way round. women who both did the dishes.
i didn’t know love like that was an option. i had only been shown angry, volatile love. i didn’t know i could be a woman like that. or rather, i didn’t know i could be loved as that kind of a woman. i had been taught that women like that are lonely. they’re ugly. but i watched her. her crisp leather jacket, her darkwash, baggy jeans on summer days that she folded once over her brown boots with the yellow shoelaces. she wasn’t ugly. i watched her, and i bought brown boots.
