trout

They: 2

Juliana Spahr

They did not want to make arguments about how they were special. They just wanted to be they together. It was simple. Nothing complicated.

It was an awkward time. An awkward time for them and for the word them. It was a time of overt and dramatically unsustainable resource use. It was a time of oil. And because it was a time of oil, it was a time of risk. It was a time of an altered environment, an environment altered by the oil economy. So it was a time of invasive species. A time of climate change. A time of an over fished and empty ocean. A time of the elimination of predators from ecosystems. A time of toxins in the water. A time of not enough fresh water. A time when it seemed all the parts of the world were being turned into an indestructible plastic. And because of this it was a time of bombing in all different parts of the world. A great deal of this bombing was done by their nation. And in order for there to be bombing there has be a we and a they, an us and a them. So it was already a time of troubled and pressured pronouns.

They felt they could not allow themselves to be an us. That they had to be a they. And when they thought rationally they felt that being they in this awkward time should have made them feel more safe. There was after all more of them. They should have felt more protected. They had not only another but also another in the third Sapphic point in the domestic space. And they knew also that they were fine, that life was fine, with the one on one or the face to face of the beloved and the lover. That other formation. It was fine, even if the world around them was awkward, both ways. So they had more than enough. They had excess.

But the opposite happened. Once they became attached to each other, their lives intertwined and the more they grew into each other they felt their attachment to each other in their twining limbs and in their fluttering seed parts as a risk. Because there were more of them than they were used to, there was more to loose. It was as if once they felt attachment, that same feeling of attachment opened them up to a whole new series of worries and they had to worry not only about themselves but also about those attachments and then about those to whom they were attached. Or it was that they were at risk of losing their attachments the moment they admitted they had attachments and this changed how they thought of things. The more attachments they had, the more that could possibly be lost in this unstable time, the more parts of them that might be in some falling building, the more parts of them that might be called upon to bomb other parts of them, the more risk that their third Sapphic point might be recognized as being against those values of oil, the values of singular attachments that so defined their nation at this time and even though this thought was clearly irrational and risked foolishness with its self grandeur in the way of all paranoia, they still thought it.