Bright Dykes, Big City

There was a beautiful quasi-preppy gaymo sitting across from me on the train this morning, and everyone kept standing right in between us, so I couldn’t get a picture (ahem, creeper urges) but spent a lot of time studying her shoes. They were those sort of fuzzy-suede loafer/moccasin things like what my dapper coworker wears on rainy days when he’s pretending he lives in London. You know, essentially she was one of Those Strangers, brief but charged. I couldn’t focus on my book, I kept wanting to look up, all the other busy-train sounds got muffled and slow and I wished I knew what her ear phones were playing. She had this dirty-blonde tousled fauxhawk with close-shaved sides that looked so soft my fingertips itched, knew almost what it would be to glide through it. Her cheeks were bright and she must have smelled like smoke, or exactly the opposite, clean sheets. Maybe soap. When I got off at my stop, I didn’t even know which way to go. The train rushed away so fast and I’ll be damned if she’s not still on it, the watery sun in her hair when it crosses the bridge.

If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible. If the right to shelter, food, and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible. (Judith Butler) (Source: autostraddle.com)