Riding my bicycle next to him, I remain torn between worlds.
Neither here exactly nor there. I wonder whose fault it is and I think it must be my own. I’m questioning everything. He asks me what I mean when I say all my friends are queer and I give him some
answer like, “We are politicized. We reject heteronormativity and we
interrogate it for its roles in oppressive systems like colonialism,
capitalism and white supremacy.” He says his friends are queer but not like that and I ask him what he means. He says they are less aggressive about it.
I wonder how I have been aggressive but I take his word for it that I have. I want him to invite me over to his place. I want to see what the insides look like. I want to sit on his couch and sleep in his bed and seep my presence into the sheets. He tells me a story about
another first date and how he invited the girl over and she started
doing coke in his living room. It made him uncomfortable. I want him to invite me over so that on his next date with the next girl he can tell her about me.
He can tell her he went on this date with this aggressive feminist who really had no sense of humour. I have no reason to believe he would say these things.
He asks me if I think the differences between the sexes are biological. I find the question boring and irrelevant and I want to talk about other things. I opened the door by saying I’m a feminist so now we have to discuss this. He talks to me about cave men and testosterone and male aggression. He is wedded to these things. I don’t care about them. I want to talk about construction and community, critical
analysis, possibility. Or maybe I just want to talk about the sky changing shades above us, deepening its blues. Maybe I just want to lay my head on his shoulder and breathe out a long sigh.