I pick up the flame patch. Red and orange, round, the size of a silver dollar. It looks like it belongs on turnout gear. It looks like it belongs on Zoe.
"This one's good," I say.
"That one's my favorite."
I put it back. She zips the case and puts it in her bag and it disappears, her collection, her record, her portable history of the person she's becoming. Different container. Same function. My jacket, Zoe's pencil case.
She's not becoming me. She's becoming herself with the parts of me she wants to keep.
"Okay," I say. "Stay here. Watch the bar."
"What?"
"Watch the bar. Pour Jeff another PBR if he finishes. Don't touch the playlist."
She slowly blinks at me like I'm speaking another language and she's trying to keep up. "Where are you going?"
"To sew."
I take the patch and go to the office. The office is small: a desk, a chair, Carl's filing cabinet, the safe, the contract in the top drawer. There's a sewing kit in the bottom drawer that I keep there for jacket repairs because patches fray and leather pulls and the jacket needs maintenance the way anything that matters needs maintenance.
I sit at the desk. Thread the needle. Black thread, because the jacket is black and the stitches should disappear into theleather, holding the patch in place without calling attention to the mechanics. The mechanics aren't the point. The position is.
I lay the jacket flat on the desk. The patches face up: BLM on the left chest. Trans rights below it. Kids over guns on the right shoulder. Eat the rich on the back, center. No more billionaires below it, slightly left. Each one placed years ago, stitched in whatever apartment I was living in at the time with whatever thread I had, and they've stayed because I made them stay.
The new patch. Blue. White embroidery. NO BORDERS ON COMPASSION.
I place it on the right chest, below the shoulder seam, across from BLM. It sits there and I look at it and adjust it a quarter inch down and look again and the placement is right. It's right because it's new, the only patch on this jacket that I didn't buy myself, the only one that came from someone else's hands, and it belongs where I can see it.
I sew. Small stitches, tight, pulling the thread through the leather with the steady pressure that keeps the patch flat against the surface. The needle is thin and the leather is thick and each stitch takes effort, which is how it should be. Things that stay require effort.
It takes ten minutes. I finish, knot the thread, cut it, check the edges. The patch is secure. It's not going anywhere.
I put the jacket on. The new patch settles into place against my chest, and I can feel it there, the slight raised edge of the embroidery, a new weight in a familiar landscape. The jacket has changed. It's still mine but it has Zoe in it now, a piece of a Saturday rally carried through a door and handed across a bar and sewn into leather with black thread.
I walk back out. Zoe is behind the bar. She's not pouring anything. She's leaning on the counter talking to Jeff, who is telling her about Patton, the golden retriever, and she's listening with her whole face the way she listens to everything, like Jeff's golden retriever is the most important topic in the world.
She sees me. Her eyes go to the jacket. To the right chest. To the blue patch, new and bright against the old leather.
"You sewed it on."
"I said I was going to."
"Right now. You sewed it on right now."
I smirk. "The sewing kit is in the office. It took ten minutes."
She comes around the bar. She stands in front of me and she reaches out and touches the patch with her fingertips, tracing the embroidery, reading the words through her skin.
"It looks right," she says.
"That's because it is."
She looks up at me. I look at her. The bar is half-full and the neon is going and Jeff is watching and the college kids have finally sunk a shot and somewhere in Zoe's bag is a pink pencil case with four patches in it, and on my jacket is a fifth, blue and white, and the distance between her collection and mine is the distance between a pencil case and a leather jacket, which is nothing. Which is everything. Which is the exact amount of space between two people who are different in all the ways that don't matter and the same in the one way that does.
We care. About the neighborhood, the bar, the station, the lot where Scorched Ordinance plays, the rally where awoman makes patches by hand and a high school student tells three hundred people about her mother. We care about things and we show up for them and we carry the evidence on our bodies, in our bags, in the spaces we build and protect.
I kiss her. In the bar. In front of everyone. My hands on her face, rings against her jaw. She tastes like ginger and lime. She always tastes like ginger and lime on Saturday nights and I'm going to spend every Saturday night for a long time learning new things about a flavor I already know.
