This Is What You’re Missing: An American Love Story (Wow! Just wow! Poignant)
This is a story in search of a genre. Let’s be clear: I chose to write about sisters because that’s the only story that is mine, that I have any right to tell. But whether this slips into memoir, political essay, or eulogy, here’s what to know: this is, and has always been, a love story–cracked around the edges, too black, too queer, too short, more hospital room than beach at sunset, but fuck it. Love.
A story about a gay, black girl who wears fitteds, locks and J’s in a country that could not love that combo-special any less, is political from title to genre to The End–even without permission: girls like my sister get presidential speeches and sermons; but aside from the occasional “Pariah,” no love story or love song to hang their (snap-back) hats on. For sure, how they love is shaped in all directions by what this country is and is not, but that they loved–that this a story about two beautiful women who fought and loved hard for five years until the day someone literally pulled the plug–is not politics. This is in honor of my Baby Sis and Danielle**, the girl she loved, and what those two taught and continue to teach me and us about what it means to love someone.
On the morning my mother called me out of sleep, I had been holding my breath. Being Big Sister is a lifetime of holding your breath for terrible phone calls. When she was a toddler–even back then, so clearly and devastatingly bright and charming and daring–I thought the calls would only be about what my sister did to the world. As my sister got older, my fears evolved into how the world would tend to her. Even with a Master’s, a beautiful face, and an arresting personality–this girl would run the universe one day if we let her–I knew the world would only see the sag of her pants and act on its desire to manage or crush what terrified it about my sister.
Those calls had come before.
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