ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women, trans, and nonbinary people who engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
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“I want a love that is disgustingly relentless,” I tell Blue. Perhaps we are in my car outside whichever Airbnb sufficed as their home, or in bed together, with my face resting on the memories of their top surgery. Perhaps I am lonely in the States and they are in Mexico, pretending to be happy—both our ears glued to our phones. Or perhaps we are still tentative fingers on phone screens, growing ever more confident by the day.
“What does that mean?” Blue says, stimming by lightly tapping their lip with a pinky.
The words find my tongue before they congeal in my brain, and I’m not exactly sure what it means myself, but in this moment, it feels like the thing I want and have never had. “It means . . . persistent, devoted. I want to feel like things are so aggressively good and connected and enmeshed and . . . we’re just so in love that it’s disgusting!”
Blue’s thinking face is always hard to read. A furrowed brow, tight lips, volcanic glass eyes focused on one point in the room. Their thinking face is interchangeable with their confused face, their disgusted face, and their two-breaths-before-explosive-anger face. I learn to keep talking when I see this face until two breaths become three, four, five, a nod, or tears.
The words tumble out of my mouth because they have to: “I love that you ground me. And I’ve been told that I pull away sometimes or test boundaries, cause, y’know, I have my own stuff. . . .” And then, when strategy leaves me and vulnerability is all that’s left, I whisper, “Don’t let me float away, okay?”
Blue’s face relaxes into love. “I won’t,” they say, with a smile at a thousand watts that was made just for me. “Hand squeeze?”
“Hand squeeze, my love.” And we agree to stay cemented to the ground together.
The lights blink.
This is what happens when we are in sync—connecting, vulnerable, agreeing to “ride or ride” because we’ve both danced too many rounds with death already.
The lights blink.
“The ancestors are letting us know they’re here with us,” says Blue, and I believe them, not just because I love them, but because it never relents and becomes a sort of heartbeat for our relationship. When we successfully navigate the danger of a public bathroom that doesn’t have an all-gender option for my trans-masc bae; when I jerk Blue off in a parking lot because it’s their shot day and we both need to relieve some pent up energy; or when we exchange engraved rings and I joke, “I’s a married lady now!” and Blue, in due Black canonical response, pulls out their best tenor Shug Avery and sings, “Sista, you been on my mind. . . .” Everywhere we go, in every vulnerable moment of our relationship: the lights blink. A holy water blessing if you’re churched, a Florida water cleansing if you’re nasty—either way a sort of certification. Validation from the known and unknown who walk with us that just maybe this could be that kind of Black Love.
But we never pay attention to the times when the lights don’t blink. The times when the dark overtakes us and we need the light of our kin the most.
I never feel more whole than when I wear my ring engraved with our initials. I belong to you. But my fingers are preoccupied with it, like wearing it too much will give me a zombie virus and turn me into an undead girlfriend—the slow kind, all moans and groans until someone shoots me in the head. When other people are around, I feel compelled to wear it, compelled to make a scene of wearing it at brunch with my parents, to show off this simple, black, eight-dollar Etsy ring with our initials in gold. I am yours and you are mine. An annoying rom com heroine in the first twenty minutes of the film has taken over my body, and I’m powerless to stop her: there will be tremendous fallout before she can eat, pray, love, but for now she keeps her head—my head—in the sand. In private, my ring squeezes the air from my lungs even more than it squeezes my left ring finger. I do not move from sand to air and instead blame Etsy for this dissonance.
We’ve both been so harmed, but I believe in my heart that two half people could make one whole love. One whole Big Love, that swallows you, wraps you in a gossamer blanket of protection and reminds you every day that you are desirable, you are lovable, and you’ll never be alone in the dark again. Blue does not believe in Big Love, but they try. They call me Wifey and shift from “I don’t believe in marriage. I just don’t buy into that whole institution. It seems so compulsory and not made for people like me. Besides, disabled people can’t get married without losing benefits, so I would never even think about marriage,” to “I’d marry you. Yeah. Yeah, I’d marry you.” We become Mr. and Mrs. in certain spaces because it feels good. Blue is haunted by their own darkness, their own past, their fears of a limited future. But there is hope in them too. They want to believe that we can outrun the demons that have made us both half-humans. I try to believe enough for both of us.
“I know your face,” I say to Blue constantly. They don’t catch the Lord of the Rings reference, but it doesn’t matter. It’s more than that. I let my hands map the bones under their skin, butter-smooth until you reach a few raised freckles on their left cheek. A long gray coil, steadfast in their growth-monitored beard that is tender when pulled. And always, those fire-made black volcano glass eyes—see-through if you’re close but hard enough to keep people from getting close enough to notice. Ready to shatter into razor-sharp daggers at any moment.
“You always say that,” Blue says, rolling their eyes.
“’Cause it’s true!” Blue has always felt familiar. Like I’ve known them before. The Hallmark movie in my brain says Like you knew them in another lifetime, but I would never be the main character in a Hallmark movie, so that can’t be it. My homie-lover-friend reminds me of my aunts. My father. Family I know but don’t know. Sometimes this deep knowing soothes me, and other times, it haunts me. There is a covenant in Black kinship. A casual responsibility for some, a constant debt to be paid for others—the difference characterized by each party’s relative idealism, cynicism, and desire to do their best. We live a tacit agreement made in flesh, unenforceable, left to be enacted solely by the most idealistic of parties: I will care for you more than the world has. I will not throw you away. No matter what it costs me. This, alone, is a disgustingly relentless knowing.
When the glass shatters, Blue rants at the top of their lungs or refuses to talk to me at all. The arguments run in loop-de-loops until nothing makes sense and that’s the point; I’m meant to chase the nonexistent, inconsistent logic until I question my own memory and sanity. There is no winning in this game, only the rotting of my self-confidence and the certainty of later punishments the longer it lasts. Every battle means I will wait longer until Blue will simply kiss me again, though their need for me to provide kiss-less sex does not wane. There is sure to be a shatter when I want to spend time with friends or family, so I don’t, and eventually my world becomes one long blue note of hypervigilance and isolation. But if I close my eyes, I can still feel what it was like to be a Black woman protected, a fat woman desired out loud, and a hopeful woman in love. Every day I try to get that feeling back again.
It’s me, in love, who says, “Anything you want, babe,” and means it, no matter how hard it is for me to deliver. Money, groceries, time, contacts, transporting their weed in a state that’s cracking down. Want is fleeting in ways that need is not, so I will fill the need. “You know I can’t say no to you.” I can, but I won’t. This is my chance at something real.
It’s me, in trust, who says, “I could get down with slapping. Maybe try choking. Let’s experiment!” I want to be the kind of woman who drinks anything but chardonnay at brunch with the girlfriends I don’t have any more and giggles about how sexually free I am. I want to make others blush because it’s the only way I can make them envious. And I want to stay one step ahead of Blue—offering them things MenTM want so that they’ll never have to think about leaving me. And they can stop mentioning it.
It’s me, in bargaining, who says, “Wanna slap me around?” when Blue is angry, ranting about the unfairness of a world I didn’t make and can’t fix, but I don’t want this to escalate. This is what they need right now: my body, offered as nonhuman heavy bag, because love means sacrifice.
It’s me, in fear, and love, and trust and bargaining who gazes up at them standing over me, widening my eyes and batting my eyelashes like a vulnerable innocent while Blue drinks in every moment where they can make me flinch, that says, “Yes, Daddy,” because “No, Blue. No more,” is too far inside my body for me to reach.
And later, when this cycle begins again, it’s still me, in love, who says, “Anything you want, babe,” and means it because I can’t let today be the day they’ve always warned me of: the day they take their own life. I know what it’s like to stand at the horizon, summon death and believe with every cell in your body that the world would be better without you in it, while still wishing that wasn’t true. I will not throw you away, no matter what it costs me. There is nothing I won’t do to protect my love from that choice. I will say yes to this beautiful covenant mess with dagger edges and poisonous thorns every day rather than living free and knowing Blue’s death was my fault.“You know I can’t say no to you.” I won’t and can’t because “no” is expensive.
But it’s Blue, who doesn’t believe in Big Love but wants to, who knows the flesh-price they will demand for their love and how I will scramble to pay it, and who knows somewhere deep down that every piece of me that is destroyed to “protect” them will never be enough, who says, “I know. That’s what I’m afraid of.”
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Many names appearing in these stories have been changed. Visit the ENOUGH archives here. Rumpus original logo art by Luna Adler.
