Right before showtime, she ran into the greenroom to tell me they’d arrived. Her smile, a jump rope stretched from one side of the room to the other, her breath leaping up and down in a giddy celebration: They’re here, they’re here, they’re actually here! The two of us like a team in a huddle right before the most important game of our queer lives, when a group walked in with a flyer for a protest, asking me to announce the details on the mic. It was a protest organized urgently to stop fracking in the state. Yes, of course, I said, tucking the flyer into a pocket with my set list. Then I saw the jump rope of my girlfriend’s smile drop.

What’s wrong? I asked. Honey, fracking is why my dad has a job, she said. What? I can’t not announce the protest, I told her. I know, she said. It would be a crime against my conscience. She said, I know, heart big as the Titanic sinking to the bottom of the sea.

When I stepped on stage, her father was the first person I spotted. He was impossible to miss. A lumberjack in a forest of asymmetrical haircuts that looked even more asymmetrical next to her parents’ straight backs, straight as telephone poles, and me—desperate for lines that could reach them.

Resting the flyer for the protest at my feet so I could announce it near the end, I told myself, If you are going to be anything in the world tonight, you better be lightning. You better find something in you honest enough to strike them.

For seventy-five minutes I spoke about nothing but love. How everything but I love you is small talk. How their daughter was the only person in the world sweet enough to always call me honey. How the first time we shared a bed she laid down with her arms tight at her side like a mummy, so terrified she was to love something and lose it again.

When the show was near its end, I looked down at the flyer and back at them. I’d say the moment lasted a lifetime, but no one lives that long. I could see the protest organizers in the audience waiting. I could see their faith in my politics and what they were sure was about to march from my lips, while I remembered the one tear that raced down my girlfriend’s face, one tear with guts enough to hope, the look in her eye when she ran into the greenroom, belting, They’re here! They’re here!

I walked off the stage without saying a word against drilling the heart out of the earth. I walked up to the greenroom a hypocrite, a failed activist with my face in my hands on the couch, when her father burst through the door, his head nearly axing a hole through the ceiling, tears, like a giant’s tears, covering his face. I’m seventy-six years old, he said, and I just tonight figured out what love is.