Closing out Pride month, I thought of tolerance. I thought of virtue signaling. I thought of the ritual without substance, the tolerance without acceptance. The tolerance without love. The tolerance that pretends to be love but looks like indifference. That people contort themselves to act against their hearts and expect others to do the same.

“Pride sameach!” a former coworker responded on Mastodon, to my anecdote of hearing “Happy Pride!” echo through my heart with history and heart felt ritual of celebration and grief, as one would greet for holidays. Thirty years ago I knew I was queer, and I have seen how the story has been now passed on through generations. How a riot turns weekend parade into a full month itinerary of ecstasy and mourning. How we speak the names of our heroes who led the fight. Mourn the loss of generation due to malicious indifference. We are becoming the elders, with the responsibility to keep the history and traditions alive as we and our children are still under threat of death and silencing.

Ritual without belief is empty, but ritual can build a home for belief to come in. Tolerance as a virtue hurts when the longing is for love, and while I sometime ruthlessly hold myself to be consistent in heart and action — and with what is right — to ask of others what I ask for myself? I will never know peace. And I don’t know how long I should wait for that home, but I do know I must hold hope that in the performance one day, one day, one day…. And just know that, though lonely, tolerance may help me sleep at night.

What was I afraid of? Not to talk about relationships but I’ve entered and exited the most hallowed month of my queer existence in a (visibly) queer relationship. In this time, she has met a few of my friends, my kids, and my mom, whose opinion on the introduction remains opaque, and I remain unwilling to confront the answers, if I dare ask. They may be fine! But the nature of my relationship with her never held any security like that, which is how I figured out why I was (middle school, briefly) vocally against my mother remarrying after my dad died when I was 7 — I already felt so alone, the last thing I wanted was to end up more alone.

There is no guide for this. I come back to the basics, prioritize the kids, make sure they never feel as alone as I did.

‘Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’

By W.B. Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Bombs bursting in air. It’s the 4^th of July, my girlfriend is in the bath trying to soak through the tension of a body that won’t forget the other noises that rhyme. I’m in my bedroom, trying to put my current feelings into words. Grief is a kind of forgetting. If we’re lucky. Forgetting the parts that hurt, remembering only bits of the pieces that forged the stronger parts of our structure, leaning into object impermanence and that blissful state where there is nothing to grieve because nothing is there.

I’m fine now, today, this hour. And yesterday in the foothills of the Cascades, staring at Snoqualmie Falls, seeing a nurse log nourishing a tree. I’m fine now, for whatever that means. Tomorrow? We live in Tahoma’s shadow. Deranged and selfish men making choices for generations they will never know. She talks of a future and I can’t talk about September. Of November. December.

I’m fine now. Home after spending the day with family I chose before I knew family was a thing you could choose. Can I be fine now? We’ll all be fine now, because we got to be. I want to believe the hard part is over, the rest well-deserved and won and the ease of an afternoon nap well in reach.

Future unwritten, and which forbid to be contrived, I bring an end to this dispatch. It’s gonna be a hot one, so wear your sunscreen and hydrate, stay in the shade, check on your neighbors, and those the most vulnerable. Feed someone. Offer rest. Celebrate the promise that we can be better.