“She doesn’t hate me.”
“She’s not speaking to you.”
“That’s not hate. That’s stubbornness. She’s Dominican; we hold grudges like heirlooms.”
He didn’t laugh. “I’m serious, Jett. If being with me costs you your relationship with your mother…”
“Stop.” I rolled over to face him. Could barely see his outline in the dark. The shape of him. The pale line of his shoulder above the blanket. “You don’t get to take that on. My mom’s reaction is about her fear. Not about you.”
“But I’m the thing she’s afraid of.”
“She’s afraid of losing me. She’s too angry to realize that her silence is the thing doing it.”
He was quiet for a long time. Then, “I don’t want you to lose your family because of me.”
“And I don’t want you to watch your dad circle the airport forever because of me.”
“So we’re both trying to protect each other from things we can’t control.”
“Apparently.”
“That seems unhealthy.”
“Probably is.”
We lay there in the dark, not touching, both staring at the ceiling. Thefridge hummed. A siren wailed somewhere in the distance and faded.
“We should probably talk about this with someone.”
“Like who?”
“Like a therapist.”
I almost laughed. Almost. The word “therapist” coming from Ellis, Ellis who processed emotions through plant care and sprint reviews, Ellis who’d rather reorganize a database than sit with a feeling, was so unexpected that it short-circuited my usual deflection.
“You’re serious.”
“I’ve been thinking about it. For myself, not couples therapy. Someone to talk to. About the coming-out stuff, the family stuff, the…” He trailed off. “I don’t want to put all of this on you. You’re carrying your own version of it. You shouldn’t have to carry mine, too.”
He was right. We’d been so busy protecting each other that we’d started using each other as shock absorbers, and the suspension was wearing thin. Every unresolved text from his mom became our problem. Every Sunday silence from mine became ours. We were taking on each other’s grief as though we could somehow solve it together, but the only thing we were doing was drowning in two different oceans.
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, you should see someone. And maybe I should, too.”
“You’d actually go to therapy?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I’m extremely self-aware.”
“You named my fern Jack.”
“That’s self-expression, not a symptom.”
He reached for my hand under the blanket. Found it. Held on.
We didn’t solve anything that night. Didn’t fix the silence from Sunset Park or the circling from Long Island or the slow drip of being loved imperfectly by the people who were supposed to love you best. But we named it. Put words around the shape of what was happening to us.Acknowledged that love wasn’t always enough to bridge the gap between who we were and who our families needed us to be.
