"Over Soon"

Vignette: "Over Soon," originally written August 15, 2023.

"Over Soon"
A figure with a flashlight running through a forest in the dark.

As I squeezed Myles' hand and walked through the main door of the reception hall, I told myself that it was important to burn every detail of the experience into my memory since I couldn't imagine being any happier than I was in that moment. The beaming smiles, the applause, rows of people cheering at us: I wasn't generally one to enjoy so much attention focussed on me, but right now — right now — it felt warranted, earned, and safe.

"Congratulations!" roared the friends and family who had been waiting as we entered the cavernous atrium immediately following our wedding. I could see my mother and father grinning from the largest table centred against the far wall of the building. A gay marriage hadn't produced the polling bump my father's advisors had planned for, but I did know that supporting us mattered more to him than a Senate election alone.

Myles barely noticed my blood relatives, and as I heard the most raucous, shrill voices amongst the cacophony I knew where he was looking: our chosen family in Brooklyn were there in mismatched, disjointed, and often ugly clothes of all different fabric, colours, and textiles — and sitting immediately beside the main table occupied by my parents. I'll confess, that was Myles' insistence. Dad worried about the optics, and Myles threatened to divorce me even before the wedding if I ever used that word around him.

He won that battle, handily.

"I really didn't think you would be able to manage it," boomed his brother, Charlie, as Myles politely squeezed my hand in a way that let me know we'd greet our closer friends before speaking with my parents' political circle.

"Manage what?" I asked.

Charlie threw his hands in the air dramatically, gesturing to the crowd around us. "I know they're on our side but my god — I'm waiting for someone to throw a bible on my plate."

Myles looked around with a panicked expression on his face, grabbing my shoulders on either side. "Wait, you let me walk out of the church without one?" he gasped in exaggerated fright.

As I rolled my eyes, our friends laughed, sputtered, and choked on champagne and wine. Myles dropped the frightened facade as Charlie chuckled and stared at the gathering.

"Still, though. It's a lot of suits. I wonder how many of them are still going to vote for this bullshit bill even after giving you shit-eating congrats at your own wedding."

"Oh, come on," I said with a sigh. "I know it's tense right now but really — this is a celebration. Can we relax for just a second before we run back into the trenches?"

Charlie looked at me and then gave me a half-smile. The expressions on our friends' faces made me wonder about what I'd said and whether or not I'd committed a leftist faux pas. After a further awkward pause, Myles frowned and then squeezed my hand again. "My beautiful husband has a point: what's the point of fighting if we can't also stop to enjoy the victories? We just got married, fuckers!"

As our gaggle cheered to that, someone slapped me across the back. "Son, I wanted to introduce you to the Governor."

I turned around to see my dad, double Proseccos across both hands, grinning ear to ear.

"We were saying hello to our friends first, dad."

I don't know if what I said registered or not, but my father looked across the room in confusion before zeroing in on Myles. "Where are your parents at, Myles?"

This time I was participating in the awkward discomfort of a thing-you-wish-you-hadn't-said. Charlie and Myles glanced at one another, then looked at me.

"They couldn't make it," I volunteered, trying to think of the most politically-expedient response that came to mind. I am my father's son, I suppose.

"They didn't want to make it," muttered Charlie, as Myles gently hissed between his teeth. None of us had met any of them; I just knew they existed, at some point, via the unhappy stories that Myles and Charlie have been willing to share.

Dad stared, confused, before he realised his fumble and took a tipsy step forward. "Ah, son. Screw them, then. I've always wanted another boy. Two boys!" Then he gestured at me and shrugged dismissively, slurring slightly. "This one got too spoiled as an only child. That's why I've always assumed Myles has money or something."

We all took a moment to register the joke before our spectrum of reactions erupted — me, horror; Myles and Charlie utterly losing their shit at the suggestion of coming from wealth; our other friends, who knew that I'd quietly and anonymously cleared out their gofundmes and other medical bills without ever admitting to it, joining in on the hilarity of me marrying my soulmate for his bank balance.


I know this makes me sound like a good person in the way that saccharine made New Coke taste palatable. But this is my reminiscence, and if I'm about to die I'll tell the story the way I want to.


We shook hands with a line of faces as the night wrapped up. I didn't know most of them — dad's assistant managed the majority of the invites, and the only people that mattered to Myles were the motley collection of his queer friends that I'd been introduced to once I started dating him.


"Why did you bring a fucking Republican here?" Charlie blurted out the first time we'd ever met each other: at a board game night four dates after my first-hookup-that-accidentally-became-more with Myles. I was uncomfortable and scared — and knowing I was going to a party with his trans brother and deeply leftist friends I felt a physical need to showcase myself as an ally. So I overcompensated, and turned up to the party with a bottle of $200 gin and enough resin badges to stand in as a PFLAG float.

The expensive gin didn't go far, nor did my institutional politics, but I walked out of that evening with a strange tickle at the edge of my life experience.

Like, for the first time in my life, I was starting to intrinsically realise that most people had an existence entirely outside of my own. I don't know what it says about my sheltered, Yale Law-sponsored, Upper West Side of Manhattan fuckery that it took until my mid-twenties to empathise with the difficult experiences of others, but as I heard in a mantra from one of my mother's yoga teachers once: we all climb the mountain at our own speed.

I'm not sure if I ever internalised his lessons about karma, but as I write down this little bit of contraband I certainly think I now know irony. One of the guards promised to get it to you — I think he didn't believe that I recognised his face, but I'll always remember how, after we'd been dating for a few months, you pointed out that I never made eye contact with hospitality staff. I was horrified, and certain that you were wrong, and you challenged me on naming just one article of clothing that the waiter at the trendy hipster bar was wearing. I couldn't — you knew I couldn't.

But now, I make a habit to take in the full measure of my jailers' faces, and I spend the brief minutes of neglect that they give me between their tortures listing in my head who will give me compensation first if I ever find myself in a position to enact revenge.


The reception peeled off and most of the stragglers took the hint and left. Charlie came up to us and gave Myles a hug. "I'm very happy for you."

"Thank you for coming," Myles said, screwing his face into the crook of his brother's neck.

"I'm sorry your parents don't accept you," I said awkwardly, immediately asking myself what the fuck was wrong with me as the word-vomit exited my lips. Myles and Charlie looked at me with the sort of disconnect as when you ask the Italian nonna for salt at the table, or refuse seconds after a Jewish dinner. I'm not proud to say I'm guilty of doing both of these already, and now I've added a lack of understanding for my ostracised queer husband and his trans brother to the mix.

"Aw — I love you, but you can never just be normal; jesus." Charlie laughed at my expense and walked off.

Their family didn't come because — where they're from — their mom and dad are the footsoldiers against Satan's battle over the righteous. Myles left home when he was a teenager and adopted his brother years later — his parents would have kicked the former out if Myles hadn't beat them to it by getting his own place. Then, he got custody of his younger brother once Charlie came out as trans; Charlie wasn't old enough to take care of himself on his own, and by then their parents assumed that both of their kids had been lost to the dark forces of the universe anyway.

"What a poor thing — I can't imagine a mother rejecting their child," mine had said after we — I — had convinced a deeply awkward and uncomfortable Charlie to come along for dinner with my family one evening. It was uneventful, but he took the first opportunity to leave the well-meaning but strange experience as soon as possible.

"I know you say she's a boy —"

"He," Myles and I said in unison — me, in outrage at the failure of demonstrative progressivism I'd grown up with; Myles in a world-weary disappointment as someone who'd made this correction many times before and was losing the energy to fight the fight every single time.

"Sorry — he — has such lovely eyes and skin. Are you sure he's made up... his whole mind about this 'gender' stuff? Hell — I've told your father about having lesbian thoughts in college. People change!" She even did air-quotes around gender.

Today, I watched them drag Charlie across the courtyard.

Nobody was paying enough attention to me, or they would have created a distraction to keep me from witnessing it. I've been told repeatedly how important it is for my "healing" that I let go of my life and memories from before. But though they'd shoved him into a dress, and haven't let him cut his hair in however long it's been since I've been kept here, I remember those lovely eyes and that lovely skin.


We hugged and kissed the last of dad's political cachet. Charlie and co asked if we wanted to go out clubbing — "They've finally reopened Nevermind; don't you want to see where Macauley Cuklin threw up?" — but I was triple parts tired, horny, and tiredly-horny from being around other people other than my now-husband.

Myles sensed my mood — he was always uncanny at doing that — and turned his brother down. "We're going to go consummate our marriage, to be honest."

Charlie rolled his eyes and turned to me. "Use lube. Big dicks run in our family."

Myles smirked. "His too, I figure." He made exaggerated waggly-eyes at the back of my dad's head as dad wobbled around in a less-than-discreet fashion.

Charlie feigned vomiting as our friends stumbled out the door. I smiled, thinking about how Karl Marx would have felt about a raucous marriage reception — replete with the politicians of his time drinking free champaign — but, then again, Ayn Rand died of cancer after getting treatment from the "socialists" she screeched about, so maybe hypocrisy doesn't have to be owned by conservatives alone.

"Is that so?" I asked Myles, pointedly ignoring his attempted provocation about my father with a wink.

"Which part?" he replied, innocently.

"Oh, about the big dick, obviously."

Myles scrunched his face in consideration, tossing his head to the side. "Well, wanting you to commiserate the marriage was definitely true." He cackled as he walked out of the reception hall.

"Hey! I wasn't done!"

He threw me a stupid, cheeky grin over his shoulder and waved.

"I wasn't done! My dick is big, right?"

"Son!" gasped my mother. Dad, cheeks flushed from more glasses of alcohol than was politically advisable, looked on the verge of telling me a related — and wholly inappropriate — anecdote about exactly this topic. I blushed bright red and ran after Myles just as he was stepping into one of dad's private cars.

"The epitome of working-class socialism partaking in this bourgeoise grandiosity?" I said, shoving him over across the back seat.

Myles stared at me with an incredulous expression. "There's no ethical consumption, blah blah, plus the A train isn't going express at this hour and I want you to fuck my brains out."

I threw a scared glance at the driver, who — whether from lack of hearing or professional tact — registered nothing of what my husband had just said. Myles regarded my face and for a split second, I lost him. He blanked, and as I stared into his eyes I could see his mind falling into a kind of disappointment and resignation that I had never experienced in the three years we'd dated. Not in me; in himself, for getting comfortable with this.

Then the mood flashed, and he grabbed my dick in my suit pants, and I forgot that there might have ever been a conflict for him to be at a wedding paid for on my dad's dime, and leave that wedding in my dad's car, with only his brother and small collection of their friends in attendance in the first place.


I know I've disappointed you many times over the years, but as I sit in this concrete, sterile room and think about my own disappointment, that moment comes back to me over and over.


Dad insisted on booking a hotel room for us. He said marriage meant fucking somewhere other than your usual place — joke's on you, dad, gay guys will do it anywhere we can get just enough privacy; as your driver probably let you know from us fooling around less than quietly in the back of the limo — so he booked us the Presidential Suite at the kind of Midtown hotel Myles never would have admitted to his friends that he'd stayed at.


"I love you," you said to me as you looked into my eyes and straddled my crotch.

"I do think about being the best kind of partner I can be — all the time."

"Yeah?" You leaned in to kiss me. I met your lips, and then pulled back to finish my point.

"We're just not at war anymore, though! Stonewall was decades ago."

You leaned up, looked at me, and sighed as if you were debating whether or not to ignore what I'd just said. "Not for Charlie. We can get married. But outside of New York — hell, in half of the country — we could get arrested if someone heard you call him my brother. And if this bill gets passed, he will lose his scholarship, and his civil servant job, and — fuck! They're scapegoating them, and if you don't see that they aren't going to stop there, I just don't —"

You stopped, took a deep breath and screwed your eyes shut with the expression you always made whenever you thought it was pointless to talk to me about something, then got off and rolled over onto the other side of the California king bed. In frustration, I threw myself in the opposite direction and turned away from you.

The hotel had left a TV on, or something — I remember half-listening to the news as I drifted off into an annoying, angry sleep full of spite towards your constant moral superiority.

"Breaking news — an update on the ongoing pandemic; efforts to quarantine the infection have failed in major cities in the US. We're waiting for briefings in New York and San Francisco —"


Hindsight and 20/20 and all that, but if I'd known that I'd never spend another night with you past that one, I'd like to think that I would've understood you differently than I did at the time.

But I didn't, and here we are.

Fingers crossed that you've got enough out of this to decode what you need to. I love you, and I will never forget the sight of your brother being dragged across the grass by hair far longer than he ever would have willingly kept it.

I'm sorry I let us down. Hopefully, you'll get the chance to rub it in my face sometime soon.



Note: I originally wrote this back in late 2023 but never published it anywhere because it's one of the more deeply personal and "me" bits of fiction writing I've created as well as being something that — I'd hoped — was too bleak and unnecessary to put into the universe. I hoped real life would turn out to be nicer than what my imagination had conjured up. Plus, anyone who knows me knows how much I deeply hate weddings.

Anyway, as we've seen lately, it hasn't turned out to be the case that the universe has gotten kinder. Now, I just hope I'm not setting the bar too low for the kind of cruelty that we are going to witness over the next few years.

Like a lot of my creative projects (though not usually what I've done for the vignettes), this story was originally an extremely vivid dream. It's often the case that I have tremendously cinematic, cognisant, and clear dreams — almost every night. It's a blessing creatively as much as it is a curse, though most of the time I very rarely remember more than a feeling and a vague series of impressions once I wake up. The ones that imprint themselves generally get worked into some sort of Thing.

What I wrote here was just the first half of that dream, and largely in the order that the scenes took place in my head. It jumped around from the "present" and through flashbacks of events months and years earlier, chronologically.

But there was more than what I wrote above — the dream continued the plot through the main character's incarceration as he was subjected to increasing levels of psychological and physiological torture by people who insisted that he was sick and needed to let go of the past in order to get better. Ostensibly this was under a public health directive as a flu went uncontrolled across the world, but the people accused of being carriers were always political dissidents, queer folks, artists, etc.

He was drugged and gaslit and repeatedly told that his recollections and feelings were perverse manipulations that he had to let go of; his steadfast refusal was inspired by Myles as he was certain that his husband wouldn't give in, either.

The final parts of the story involved the main character's father pulling the remaining bit of political favours he had to get his son out for a day trip; the main character was brought to a restaurant, so drugged up that he couldn't walk on his own, and met his parents — as well as Myles, who was there to introduce the main character to his new wife.

My dream ended shortly after this. The last scene was as the main character managed to find an opportunity to escape the place he was incarcerated inside of and was running towards a group of people who he hoped were his friends.

I chose, at the time, to end the story where I did because the first half of the plot my subconscious brain had invented felt dark enough already. I obviously still feel that way considering I chose to write this addendum instead of adding more of the story. But maybe I also didn't want to write more sadness into an already sad story.

However, I'm explaining the rest of the concept because as much as I might personally think of myself as the Myles in this, the dream took place through the first person perspective of the (still intentionally unnamed) main character, and I remember the emotional impact of walking into the cafe and being introduced to my husband's wife and feeling that sense of betrayal — against our relationship, but moreso his principles when it really mattered. I remember feeling hurt that someone I'd admired had appeared to cave for his own sake and safety.

Of course, this was all just a dream in the end.

But, I am worried that these are choices we're going to have to give thought to in real life much sooner than we're prepared to. Obviously, it's a worry that weighs on my mind since my brain conjured up an entire scenario to confront me with it.

Maybe that's the primary reason why I didn't want to publish this before — but have decided that it feels important to do so now. I've been both of these characters in real life; I can only hope that if, push comes to shove, the one that stands up for their principles even if it's not easy is the one that will come to the front.

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