A little bit of clarity.

Please permit me a brief detour.

In some respects, we are all dying from the moment that we are born. But in another, more real respect, some of us are more actively dying than the rest of us, perilously close to the edge of the precipice, capable of tipping over at any moment.

There is someone I love very much who has been in that second category for most of my adult life. For the past eighteen years, they have danced along the cliff’s edge, repeatedly threatening to tip over without ever quite falling into the abyss. Because of that — because of the persistent drumbeat of fear, because of the numerous near misses — I think a part of me thought that I was prepared for the worst, the sad inevitable eventuality that comes for us all. That I had, to quote Roman Roy, “pre-grieved.”

But.

Last Monday night, after I had gone to sleep, I was awoken by the kind of phone call that no one ever wants to get. The kind of phone call that means you spend the next day unable to eat, that means you board a plane to Buffalo and spend a week in a hospital waiting and waiting and waiting for news. I am, I want to be clear here, very fortunate: as bad as things are, they could be so much worse; what we have now is a frustrating holding pattern rather than a rapid decline. This person whom I love so dearly still has a chance, and I am grateful for that. But I am also so much more aware of their mortality than I ever have been before — despite all the near misses, despite all the bad news, nothing has ever been quite as dire, as terrifying, as this.

So I am writing to you from what feels like a liminal space. An ICU hospital room in a city I used to call home but no longer have any family in, a hotel across the street from the hospital where I have spent the past week. There’s familiarity here, sort of — my high school is, weirdly, just a few blocks away from the hospital, and I ate at my favorite sandwich shop a few times in the past week — and yet I do not feel present, or grounded, or real. Buffalo is shabbier than it was in the late 1990s when I last called it home, a ghost of the ghost of its glory days, and I, too, feel like a ghost of a ghost of myself, as though someone replaced me with an overexposed photograph taken at an unflattering angle. I’m flying back to New York today to refuel for what continues to be a marathon, not a sprint, and yet even there I cannot imagine being anything other than a shell of myself.

And I don’t know if any of this is connected to the topic of this email, or if I’m just writing about it because it is so big, so heavy, so much the full scope of my life right now that to not write about it seems insane. But what I can say is that from this liminal space, from this world outside the world, there is, at least, a moment of clarity. A voice that says, very simply, that to love and be loved and be happy are the most precious and most important things.

I spent a lot of time caring what other people thought of my happiness — if they would judge me for pursuing a queer relationship, if they would judge me for finding happiness with a cishet man — but now, in this most honest of selves and spaces, I know only that I simply do not care anymore. Not in the brash, defensive way I “didn’t care” at earlier points, but in a more tired, more resigned way. I have no fight in me right now. I simply want to be held, to feel safe, and I don’t care about the gender, the sexuality, of whatever person there is who may be able to provide me with that sense of safety.

We are all dying from the moment we are born. Some of us are dying more rapidly, more actively than others, but all of us are dying every moment that we are alive. I know what that means now, far more deeply than I ever really wanted to. And it’s left me determined to grab ahold of the people who give me joy and stop questioning what other folks might think.