Niko + Changchang

The Time of Heart Break

It's cynical and ironic that the only time you ever broke my heart was at the exact moment when our mutual understanding of mechanical time was flawless for once.  We were standing in front of the Astronomical Clock in Staré Město Pražské on an overcast, drizzly day, both Asian-girl skinny and Eurotrashy hot, 23-years old maybe, when you told me out of the blue that you didn’t believe gay people needed to get married in order to define their own happiness or force society to legally acknowledge their love.  The crazy thing is, I felt the exact same way until you said that, because I realized you were tacitly telling me that you didn’t want to marry me.  I felt the exact same way you did, until you unleashed the same hackneyed critique (of structural heteronormativity, of the rhetoric of Victorian coupling, and of the marriage industrial complex) on me that I’d unleashed on you countless times.  I suddenly realized that I wanted to marry you, because only someone who understood the way I felt about that heinous, procreative, cishet, anglonormative institution, only someone who felt exactly the way I did about the codification of coupling, only someone like me who hated the straight yardstick of sexual identity and gender thrust into my face all the time so I'll be tempted to compare my life accomplishments to those of straight women in straight marriages operating on cultural inertia or skyburb achievement points or facial reconstructive surgery as we never have (as we never could, being non-straight and middle class), only someone like me that hated even the idea of something related to something biblical, could understand how powerful our love must be for both of us to transgress our own intellectual critiques of marriage and then pledge our cosmic vows of love for each other in a world that wants to ignore us and sell us to each other and pretend that our humanity is both implied and non-existent.  You really had to love someone radically to be willing to burn everything down that you believed in, even the city you were born in, just to be with her and love her slowly.  And we did that, at least until Nutella died.