We sat there for a moment before turning back to the laptop. “I can’t fucking believe this,” she moaned, watching Trump take to the stage in New York City. As I stared at the red, white, and blue balloons falling, my mind drifted through the sun-baked mountains where I imagined Nana Ana roaming with her husband along the narrow switchbacks, past the faucet in the rock face, the miraculous aquifer that had restored his sight, past the raging river with its white cataracts that plunged along with my dog-eared copy of Kristeva’s book into the yawning mouth of hell, where perhaps we will all disappear like those hapless cavers one day. Where subjects become objects. Where truth becomes myth.

I lay back with Ana and she nestled her head into my shoulder. She closed her eyes, and I studied the peeling paint on the ceiling as her laptop cycled through the dark recesses of her iTunes playlist — Eiffel 65, Shaggy, sound effects from plays. We lay like that until I thought she had fallen asleep. And then, just before I drifted off, she whispered, “She was right.”

I took a deep breath in, rising back towards consciousness, and mumbled, “What?”

“The fascists. She’d said maybe not in her lifetime, but in ours.”

At night Osama and I slept with our heads touching. He breathed through his open mouth, which sometimes produced a faint whistling sound. Once, as I was drifting off, his teeth suddenly clacked together involuntarily. In that instant I could hear and feel his skull through my own, which made me suddenly aware of my bones, my skeleton lying beside his skeleton. This little clack made me think of the Biblical gnashing of teeth, which I always found a rather amusing phrase. I tried to picture a human actually gnashing their teeth. What was this? Like dogs? Like Osama clacking his teeth while mouth-breathing in his sleep? Sometimes, when we slept, one of us would suddenly jolt. It would often happen just as we were drifting off. I did it quite a bit, and if Osama was still awake he’d laugh a little. He told me this reflex was an evolutionary layover from when we were mammals living in trees. If we fell asleep on a limb and began to fall backwards, our body’s instinct was to jolt us back in the direction we were facing. That said, he liked to imagine these sudden jolts were, in fact, our lives starting afresh. Or perhaps our souls being swapped.

And in a sense I had started life afresh. His friends were gradually becoming my friends. We spent our nights drinking in pubs or at their apartments. I even joined their after-work football team. We played on a pitch near King’s Cross — artificial turf hemmed in by tall metal fences topped with floodlights. One night on the bus ride home, he ribbed me about tucking my jeans into my socks. “You really have to queer everything, don’t you?” I continued tucking them in for another week or so, to prove a point. I didn’t want to lose myself in a couple. Lose I. Become a unit. Normative. Dulled. Dead. Did I think this little act of fashion subversion would save me?