I’ve learned to love in a way that means listening to myself as much as I listen to the person I love, that love comes and goes and grows and shrinks, sometimes permanently, but sometimes not. That you can never hold someone — or yourself — up with only love to stand on. That it’s as much about building something together and choosing to nourish it as it is about a thunderclap.
Not that we’re without thunderclaps. When I first saw their picture, I fell in love with their mouth—with the perfect bow of their top lip, with the tiny sneer that poked at the corner of it. Our first kiss felt inevitable, a magnetic draw we wouldn’t resist, up against a pool table during a perfect night in a neon-washed cowboy bar. The first time we slept together it felt like we fit, and we knew one another, our bodies and our wants, already. I woke up in the morning and knew I had to find ways to keep them around. We spent the whole day together, doing nothing, and I knew this was good. Love is also full of knowing and unknowing—the former which only makes you love someone more, deeper it goes; the latter which surprises you and lets you know you still have more to learn. To hold in the softest part of your palm.
But like, imagine watching The L Word pre-Discourse, and having only seen a handful of queer female characters prior to this entire show chock-full of them, and it’s this very very cool show with all these hot girls who don’t give a shit about men! And you’re a woman in her early 20s which means you’ve recently experienced college, which was full of men who emotionally tortured women for sport and sexual benefits. And the men you and your friends have dated have been on the whole, low-key monsters! So you’re like, wow!! Maybe life doesn’t have to be like this! I could have my life ruined by a woman instead!!!!!! At least she’ll be emotionally available!!! And then you realize that the reason you feel that way about a life of women is not because all women should feel that way but because YOU’RE GAY.
Sometimes being queer and black, bisexual and biracial, feels like contradiction, like too many things, and sometimes sometimes feels like always, and sometimes I’m not sure that I’d recognize myself if I walked by. I don’t know if I’m just more fucked up than I know or if everyone feels like this. I don’t know if I need to just breathe deeper or get a therapist. I don’t know who I am, but I’m trying to be kinder to whoever that is, to touch myself with intention and kindness, to find that point of connection, even if it’s only skin to skin.
Black Panther is about more than stunning CGI set pieces and slick fight choreography, though it has more than plenty of both. Set in an explicitly black context, it grapples with new questions of morality that uplift community over the individual, explores the roles we play in each other’s salvation. It wants to know, what are the obligations of those who have been granted freedom to those who remain without? Asking questions that hinge on the lived reality of systematic oppression is not something that Superman had to deal with, that’s for sure.
Black Panther gives us more women, in more speaking parts, kicking more ass than any other Marvel film. More than the previous 17 Marvel films combined.
Ultimately, what does anyone say to someone who’s just met anyone? More to the point: what does anyone say to anyone? The other day I overheard a guy ask the cashier at the grocery store if she was having “fun today.” Hello? We are all searching and failing.
Heather and Riese reviewed Everything Sucks! for you because it’s sweet and cute and crammed with nostalgia: http://bit.ly/2ofpjjM
