"Cylinder" excerpt 2

  Sal took the bus home to their non-binary partner (both had gotten mastectomies and took T, their gender was, in some sense, connected to their art, for both of them), Zeke. They kissed and started to prepare their vegan dinner. Everything in the apartment was just so, Zeke burned some incense, sensing that Sal had had a hard day, Zeke could see the tremors in Sal's body from the anxiety. As they ate dinner, they talked about their goals and aspirations. They referred to this as "G+A talk", and it was one of the items on the checklist that sat to their left on a dry erase board. They always tried to make time for "Goals and Aspirations" talk, which was separate from "Day to Day Necessaries" ("D2D talk") which included repairs, grocery shopping, clean-up, and so on. They were extremely organized, as a couple, and a lot of people really admired them for that. When Heidegger wrote about "care" in Being and Time he could have been describing the Levinasian mutual care of this guileless queer couple. The grief and complicated emotions that their queerness brought up were something they could process together, and they resorted to new age methods which were perhaps not grounded in any kind of rigorously scientific episteme, but which "worked for them." They would take baths together, meditate on kundalini awakenings through the chakra system, joke about being "star seeds" (which was only half a joke to them, they could have been Sun-Ra and Stockhausen the way they talked about being Mintikan star seeds sometimes, especially when drunk). Zeke was a poet and sculptor and when they got writer's block, Sal was right there to comfort them. It didn't feel distracting, because it was an infusion of pure love-energy, which quenched Zeke's sadness and tremors. They had 2 or 3 cats and a dog. They had a lot of plants. It's hard for some straight people to understand the kind of loving care that goes into a queer relationship like that. It's sort of like the love that keeps a family going when they're living in a war-zone. Today Sal is feeling a bit down, a depression so laced with stress they are practically grinding their teeth, rocking back and forth, shaking. Zeke sees this and wraps them up in a hug so soothing it's convulsive. The safety of a catharsis unobtainable outside of a loving relationship. It was the heavy clasp of a couple, each of whom has been through hell and had to learn how to be alone, something not everyone gets to experience, or lives through. Many would rather trod through broken glass than experience that kind of heartbreak.