leta is beautiful and mercurial and everyone she’s been with has eventually left her because they were seduced by her beauty and enchanted by her intensity and her drama, but eventually they learned to resent it, learned to see her instead as erratic and unstable, and her mental health struggles as a burden. so when she meets tina she’s wary. she’s learned to be wary. she’s learned she’s erratic, unstable, a burden. newt loved her despite her flaws, loved her and was dragged down by her, loved her in the desperate way that puts love before centeredness. so she hesitates with tina, doesn’t want to hurt her, doesn’t want to be hurt again. doesn’t want to be a burden. but tina says, at the beginning, you’re not a burden, you’re not unstable, you’re just a person. and leta says (and doesn’t say) don’t leave me, don’t leave me, but don’t promise you won’t leave me. newt left me without a way to make it better, let me make it better, and tina says i’ll let you make it better, and not: but there’s nothing to make better. you are you. and leta thinks, well, maybe this women is strong enough to handle me, solid enough to weather my storms. but tina isn’t. she just doesn’t think they’re storms. to her, leta is like anyone else, a person with flaws, beautiful beyond belief and ethereal like the soft whisper of deep nighttime but not a mythical creature. not an answer to her dreams and not any type of dreamgirl, not pixie or doxy or billywig. just a person who struggles sometimes, who needs support. her struggles aren’t a betrayal of a beautiful image of feminine perfection, they’re just her, being human. maybe tina is stronger than the others who came before her, but she doesn’t think so. but maybe she’s softer, maybe clearer-eyed, maybe she’s seen more of the human condition, of what pain can do, of how to heal. maybe there’s nothing cosmic about connection and nothing shattering about struggle. it all just is, it’s all just about holding each other and letting the shattered pieces jangle in their casing, it’s all about the slow web pulling them back into place, it’s all about how sometimes when the world is crashing in you just need a hot dog and you’ll feel better. it’s about how the world holds her at arms’ length too, how she it doesn’t ask, only assumes. leta isn’t a burden for her. it’s not that she knows how to hold her up. it’s because she sees in leta a woman who’s been holding her own self up for years and years and years, and if leta leans against her, soft skin and satin dresses and hair like the comfort of nighttime, it’s not weakness and strength, it’s just love. it’s just knowledge, deep down, that i’ll be here for you, i see the thousand invisible ways you’ve been here for yourself for so long, the way it bruised you when men tried to take that on, i don’t take it on, i only make you soup on a cold winter day so that your strength shines with more intensity. maybe it was too bright for them. maybe it was like staring into the sun. maybe they wanted to bake in the sun, your beauty so inviting they could not help but want their skin to flay off in the brilliant rays, they threw the umbrella you gave them into the waves so they could disappear into the bright light, but i, i am already light, a small one, the little candle flame on the first night of chanukah, i can’t be consumed, and if my edges ever start to feel a little burnt, well, i’m not afraid to use an umbrella.
