I.
When I pick my partner up from her job, the rain drips a little bit harder, and the windshield feels like with any heavy, heaved breath, the entire glass might just burst.
I listen to Bernie Sanders talking about eating the rich and find myself nodding along to his speech as my girlfriend appears from behind a trash can just outside of the library and waves.
I turn it off.
I don’t want to annoy her.
“You don’t annoy me,” she says.
“I know,” I say.
Most of the time, I don’t.
II.
My partner cranks on the knob to turn the music up in the car whenever we go for a drive together. My sensitive ears catching every vibration in her voice beneath the words from the speakers. Her hands flare, small satellites sending out signals to the passing tree lawns.
Right before she stops, she smiles.
She thinks I don’t like it when the music’s up loud, and the windows fog from the humidity of her heart that acted as a sign of nothing to see here, and the roars of drums being twisted behind a heavy bass that pushed the car forward.
She’s wrong.
III.
My partner – which is the language I’m working on – tells me over Puerto Rican trap music about what it was like growing up on the island. She laughs before warning me not to drive when we are there.
“They’re all assholes,” she says.
We barrel through the wind and the rain.
I tell my partner stories from when I grew up in the bad part of town.
“The bad part of town?” She asks over a house beat.
The bad part of town is the paint department at Home Depot. The bad part of town is parents dragging their children into bars during the daylight and days off and trading coins for pinballs machines in exchange for silence and fear.
There’s a lot of what if’s and remembering when in the bad part of town.
IV.
An awful lot of white people have no problem telling me how they feel about anything and everything.
That’s how I know my whiteness shines.
Whether it’s someone’s thoughts on wearing a mask, taxation, or Jesus Christ, solely based on my skin color, everyone finds me agreeable in some way.
V.
The music’s loud when we pull into the driveway of a home that we are trying to rent. My partner looks fluorescent in the sunlight with a leopard print coat, hair with a life of its own, and calf-high boots.
The truck that sits parked and waiting for us has a Trump 2020 sticker on the bumper, and the elasticity that connects me to my partner is stretched – pulled back and under the thumb, ready to fling us forward without want or warning.
I worry.
“I served with a man from Puerto Rico,” the old man in oversized jeans pulled up to clavicle coughs to my partner.
And it hurts.
And it’s not my hurt.
My partner sighs.
“That’s nice.”
Most of the time, it isn’t.
VI.
My partner thinks I stare at her while the music is drowning out the humming of streetlamps because I wish she’d be different. She thinks I hold no admiration for the small acts of rebellion in her voice as she serenades my misunderstanding ears with words I pluck and choose at the meanings of trying to understand a language she could never teach me.
She’s free.
And I’d drive the car to the moon and back if she let me keep watching.
Mathew Serback is an oven-cooked bacon wizard. At any wave of his wand, electric ovens across the country may open their heavy doors and whisper, ‘Yes, daddy?’ But Mathew doesn’t like to be called daddy. He is believed to be the cause of all grease fires since 1987. ‘The First Great American Novel: Where Parallel Lines Meet (A Story of Non-Sequiturs)’ will be available through Atmosphere Press in January 2021 and beyond.