Page 34 of Crosswind

I look at the canal and hold his hand and wait.

CHAPTER NINE

JAN

It starts with a comment. I don't go looking for it. I have made a deliberate decision not to read the comment sections — Patrick's Instagram, his YouTube, any of it. This was a practical decision, made rationally, on the basis that I cannot control what people say and the reading of it provides no useful information and costs something I am not willing to spend. I made this decision and I have kept it.

Except that Tomas sends it to me. He doesn't mean harm by it, he sends it with a question mark, checking in, which is Tomas's version of are you okay, and I read it before I understand that I'm reading it.

honestly feel bad for whoever this Jan guy is. Patrick's going to figure out he's bi and go back to a woman who can actually give him a normal life. these things never last.

I put my phone down.

I look at the canal.

I pick the phone back up and type I'm fine to Tomas and put it face-down on the kitchen table and go to make coffee that I don't particularly want and stand at the window and look at the water and think: no. I don't think that. I know Patrick. I know who he is. I trust him. That comment is from a stranger who knows nothing and I have decided not to read comments and I should not have read that comment and it means nothing.

I make the coffee. I drink it. I go to work.

The comment means nothing.

Three days later Patrick shows me his phone at the kitchen table. A DM from another creator — someone with a bigger following, a lifestyle channel, asking if Patrick wants to collaborate on a video about queer visibility in unexpected spaces. Friendly, genuine, the warmth of someone who means well.

I read it twice. I put the phone down on the table. "It's your decision," I say.

"I know. I'm asking what you think." He is watching me carefully — the full attention, reading something in my face I am not offering.

"I think you should do whatever feels right for you." I pick up my coffee.

He looks at me for a moment. His expression doesn't change but something behind it does. "Jan."

"I genuinely don't have a strong opinion," I say. I look at my cup. Which is true. Mostly.

He thinks about it for a day and then declines, texts me: said no, not ready for that yet, and I read it and type back okay and sit with my phone and notice something I don't have a clean name for. Something that has been building for days. Small things accumulating the way small things do until they are no longer small.

The comment.

Finn at the bar.

The DM.

The two hundred thousand people who watched a three-minute video and formed opinions about a person they have never met and filed him under various narratives, some of them about me specifically, some of them about what Patrick could have had instead.

I sit with my phone and I think about Patrick's life. The scale of it — the channel, the audience, the public presence that exists entirely separately from the Patrick who makes tea in my kitchen and complains about his hair and falls asleep with his face in my neck. Two hundred thousand people have a version of Patrick that is not entirely mine. That version of Patrick has opinions attached to it. Expectations. A history that includes Maya and a future that, according to the internet, should probably include a woman.

This is the fact I have been not-examining for weeks with increasing effort:

Patrick could have children without explanation. Patrick could introduce a partner to his parents and never have to read their faces for the difference between acceptance performed and acceptance felt. Patrick could move through airports and family dinners and work events without being the thing someone notices, the thing someone has an opinion about, the thing that requires a conversation nobody asked to have. Patrick could have the life the world already has a template for.

I am not jealous of women. I have never been jealous of women.

I am jealous of ease.

Patrick chose this, chose me, chose this version of his life, deliberately and I trust that. I do. But choosing something difficult once is not the same as choosing it every day for twenty years, at every family gathering, every time a stranger in a comment section decides what his life should look like, every time the question of children becomes real and the answer requires lawyers and waiting lists and conversations we have not yet had.

I have been living that difficulty my whole adult life. I know its weight. What I don't know is whether Patrick knows it yet, properly, in the body, the way you know something not from understanding it but from carrying it, and I am not willing to be the thing that teaches him.

I have been left before. Not often, because I have not let people close enough to leave, but the few times I did… I watched men choose the easier thing. Not bad men. Men who liked me genuinely and then, at the point where it became real, looked at the accumulated weight of it and chose something lighter.