Niko + Changchang

When you were holding me and kittykissing my face and telling me everything was going to be okay at the Frankfurt train station, the truth is, I didn’t lose 2,000 euros, I spent them on a little antique ring I’d bought at a jewelry store in Sachsenhausen which I lost in the fucking bathroom.  I didn’t give a shit about losing your money, I really didn't, I wanted to marry you precisely because neither of us believed in it at all and I knew (I don't know how, but I JUST KNOW), that if we got married, I would have calmed down and tried for the first time to build a life together with you.  I know I wasn't ready to settle down when we started dating, but I also knew even then that you were the woman I wanted to spend my life with once I became ready.  And that knowledge (both that you were my life goal and also that I was emotionally and sexually unfit to settle down in the prime of my life with you) became a source of anxiety, confusion, and even dread.  So, yeah, I misused marriage the way non-queer people do all the fucking time, the way non-queer people use their kids.  But I did that because I love(d) you.  Even in my vast landscape of emotional imperfections, I knew that you were the love of my life, even if I was too fucked up to make it work.  Maybe, getting hitched would have failed us miserably as everything else had.  Maybe, getting hitched would have done nothing, except complicate our lives and slow down our break up.  Maybe, marriage would have sped up my existential crisis.  Maybe, I didn't trust my resolve to stay faithful to you and I thought that marriage was similar to trapping a Daddy longlegs inside one of those old mason jars:  so tiny, graceful, and trapped, trying to run away from its own confinement.