Right before the breakup, Barack Obama visits Iowa City. He comes to talk about student debt, and you are a student and you have so many kinds of debt, so you go. Your heart feels like a picked-off scab hot with infection. You get there late and are shuffled into an overflow room, where his speech will be viewable on a screen. You’re mad at yourself for being late, sad to be shunted off into another room. It feels, like so many things these days, a sign.
Then, just before the speech starts, Obama comes into the room where you’re stewing. The bleachers are crowded but there is room on the top step, a place where you’re definitely not supposed to be standing because there is nothing behind it but air. Your strongest friends pull themselves up and help you follow. You look out over the crowd and see the president—your president—walking before the crowd. You’ve never seen him up close before. He waves and smiles and begins to speak, and the air in front of you glints with smartphone screens.
You close your eyes. You can feel the metal of the bleacher step bending minutely below your feet like a tuning fork, and you think I am more than six feet from the ground. It would be so easy to die; a brief moment of faintness; a temporary abandonment of your body’s rigor. A man in front of you has a shirt on. “Obama ’08: He’s ready to go!” Yes, you think. Yes, she is. I know.
The day you break up for the last and final time is the day Obama announces, publicly, that he supports marriage equality. It is a Wednesday in May 2012. Your little brother’s twenty-third birthday. Joe Biden had, unscripted, bumbled into a public statement of support a few days before.
“At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama says in that sweet, thoughtful, politician-y way that irritates the hell out of you and also makes you want to hug him.
The first time you voted for him, in 2008, you woke up to the simultaneous news that he’d won, and that California had rejected the possibility of you marrying a woman. It was a sweet-sour morning; through the fog of a hangover, you watched his victory speech with your roommate. “I’m sorry about Prop 8,” she said softly. You shrugged. You celebrated him despite his position on gays marrying because he was the best thing possible at that moment; imperfect in a way that affected you but was generally good for the world. You did not believe this was a battle that would be won in your lifetime, and so you resolved yourself to live in that wobbly space where your humanity and rights were openly debated on cable news, and the defense of them was not a requirement for the presidency. You were already a woman, so you knew. Occupying that space was your goddamned specialty.
Years later, so sad and shattered, you laugh at his statement because you can’t think of what else to do. “Great timing,” you say to your laptop screen. “Thanks, dude.”
You figure it out: you take a Xanax and sleep on and off for days.