As a grant writer, I am constantly making very specific decisions with syntax in order to reach my objective of getting a woman with generational wealth to fund the institutions that employ me. It’s a very calculated pandering, informed by research, key words, and guilt. Wealthy people want to feel like they are doing something meaningful with the money they acquired through their father or oil or banks or whatever. Guilt is a tool.
Since I am a poet, my language also has an objective. It is much more divorced from money, however. I suppose my objective is to take the reader somewhere, to make them think of a topic in a different way, to make me understand my own life in a different way. As with work, I can go back and forth on a single word for hours, questioning whether or not it should go here or there, if it’s the right sort of language to get my point across.
I am less careful with language in my ordinary interactions, and perhaps this is inevitable. People are not a glowing word document on a computer screen; they are living and breathing, attached to narratives, looking at us, waiting. On a sleepy November Saturday morning, I ended my seven-and-a-half-year relationship as the words casually fell out of my mouth: “I think I’m gay.” My partner was silent, then angry. I sobbed. A tower fan was thrown, by him. I changed out of my pajamas and left our rent-controlled Los Feliz apartment—perhaps the true loss being that I would never sleep there again. I had uttered a truth that would shift time and space in an irreversible way. Yet the words were also a fragment of many other truths—I’m gay. I’m unhappy. I’m confused. I’m sexually dead inside. I’m curious. I’m tired. I’m panicking. I’m bored. (...)
The months leading up to this are a flurry of site visits and phone calls. I stalk Instagram wedding content until I want to throw up. I take a quiz online and learn that the style of wedding I want to have is “Bohemian.” So, I go on Pinterest and I type “bohemian wedding” and then “bohemian wedding inspo.” I begin to save images of baby’s breath garlands, exposed wood beams, long 100-person dining tables with flowy linens, clusters of thick white votive candles in borderline fire-hazard arrangements, dresses that give off a vibe of white people in a barnyard being whimsical. On every phone call I have with a potential photographer or wedding planner, I try to make myself clear—I’m looking for something different. I have to try not to say the word “indie” even though I know that’s what I mean.
My mother comes with me to visit venues and we both swallow in silence as they begin to tell us numbers. Weekend rate is $15,000, or we could do a weekday for $8,000. This does not include food or anything else, simply a room with a lot of plants and exposed brick. They offer a discounted rate on the metal folding chairs that are described as “minimalist” and I imagine my whole family flying in from Mexico just to sit for hours, unsupported, on the tiny metal seats. I cool my fiery nerves by thinking of the wedding as an abstract dinner party I get to plan. And my mother soon turns her hesitation into excitement. Because this—her firstborn daughter’s wedding—is the ultimate symbol of successful parenting. The price is steep but she is willing to pay whatever it takes. We have worked hard for this, both of us surviving my rebellious late adolescence, my hatred for institutions and family normalcy. No, we’re here, with a high-strung girly venue coordinator holding a clipboard, and we’ve made it.
In these planning months, I barely sleep.
Before one friend proposes, she tells me about her plan to do so. A fancy restaurant in Ojai, over a short stay, maybe I could be there, hiding at another table, taking photos. I feel privileged to carry this secret. She even shows me the ring online, the one she ordered. It is an ugly lesbian ring that is dark and blunt. I tell her it is beautiful.
She ends up scrapping the Ojai idea and proposing in the Philippines while they are with her family. They have a blissful photo shoot on the beach—a masc and a femme gallivanting on white sand at sunset, rings on their hands. I have never seen a more beautiful sight, and my heart bursts with happiness for them.
They are both overwhelmed by the entire thing, and I remind them: I’ve done my research. I offer to send them my Google documents, slides, spreadsheets, references, vendor list, budget breakdowns, anything. We all speak about the logistics without acknowledging the strangeness. Like a ghost, this thing I planned for that never existed. Maps with no destination, piles of documents that will eventually be moved into the trash, after enough time passes that they have not been opened.
Millner recalls the slow deterioration of the straight relationship—opening with an initial intent to escape, pushing the threshold of disagreements—and the messiness of the enlightenment that follows: “I’ve hurt people I love being so / late to my desires.” She muses beautifully on the inevitability of queerness, “the knowing gaze / of Destiny,” and the tumult of those first queer months, at once full of freedom and strangeness.
Turning page after page, I felt deeply that Millner understood me. Understood that it is hard to hurt people, and to admit you have been deceitful, but that it is harder to swallow the truth forever. Both of us mourn and celebrate at once.
“You could have had everything you wanted, / had it been what you wanted.”
¤
The wedding is already fully planned when I call it off. The venue, DJ, photographer, and wedding planner all booked, with nonrefundable deposits.The months leading up to this are a flurry of site visits and phone calls. I stalk Instagram wedding content until I want to throw up. I take a quiz online and learn that the style of wedding I want to have is “Bohemian.” So, I go on Pinterest and I type “bohemian wedding” and then “bohemian wedding inspo.” I begin to save images of baby’s breath garlands, exposed wood beams, long 100-person dining tables with flowy linens, clusters of thick white votive candles in borderline fire-hazard arrangements, dresses that give off a vibe of white people in a barnyard being whimsical. On every phone call I have with a potential photographer or wedding planner, I try to make myself clear—I’m looking for something different. I have to try not to say the word “indie” even though I know that’s what I mean.
My mother comes with me to visit venues and we both swallow in silence as they begin to tell us numbers. Weekend rate is $15,000, or we could do a weekday for $8,000. This does not include food or anything else, simply a room with a lot of plants and exposed brick. They offer a discounted rate on the metal folding chairs that are described as “minimalist” and I imagine my whole family flying in from Mexico just to sit for hours, unsupported, on the tiny metal seats. I cool my fiery nerves by thinking of the wedding as an abstract dinner party I get to plan. And my mother soon turns her hesitation into excitement. Because this—her firstborn daughter’s wedding—is the ultimate symbol of successful parenting. The price is steep but she is willing to pay whatever it takes. We have worked hard for this, both of us surviving my rebellious late adolescence, my hatred for institutions and family normalcy. No, we’re here, with a high-strung girly venue coordinator holding a clipboard, and we’ve made it.
In these planning months, I barely sleep.
¤
It is summer when my two best friends get engaged. We joke that it will be the gay wedding of the century.Before one friend proposes, she tells me about her plan to do so. A fancy restaurant in Ojai, over a short stay, maybe I could be there, hiding at another table, taking photos. I feel privileged to carry this secret. She even shows me the ring online, the one she ordered. It is an ugly lesbian ring that is dark and blunt. I tell her it is beautiful.
She ends up scrapping the Ojai idea and proposing in the Philippines while they are with her family. They have a blissful photo shoot on the beach—a masc and a femme gallivanting on white sand at sunset, rings on their hands. I have never seen a more beautiful sight, and my heart bursts with happiness for them.
They are both overwhelmed by the entire thing, and I remind them: I’ve done my research. I offer to send them my Google documents, slides, spreadsheets, references, vendor list, budget breakdowns, anything. We all speak about the logistics without acknowledging the strangeness. Like a ghost, this thing I planned for that never existed. Maps with no destination, piles of documents that will eventually be moved into the trash, after enough time passes that they have not been opened.
¤
Maggie Millner’s 2023 poetry collection Couplets: A Love Story centers on a narrator who ends her straight, long-term relationship after falling for an older academic dyke—“she was queer and edited periodicals / and I was a poet who had never dated a woman.” Without disclosing too many details, I found kinship in every stanza.Millner recalls the slow deterioration of the straight relationship—opening with an initial intent to escape, pushing the threshold of disagreements—and the messiness of the enlightenment that follows: “I’ve hurt people I love being so / late to my desires.” She muses beautifully on the inevitability of queerness, “the knowing gaze / of Destiny,” and the tumult of those first queer months, at once full of freedom and strangeness.
Turning page after page, I felt deeply that Millner understood me. Understood that it is hard to hurt people, and to admit you have been deceitful, but that it is harder to swallow the truth forever. Both of us mourn and celebrate at once.
“You could have had everything you wanted, / had it been what you wanted.”
by Sarah Yanni, LA Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Little Women/Sony Pictures
