I proposed to my girlfriend and she said yes, and it was wonderful – everything everybody always says it will be. In one way it is a grand new step into a new part of my life. In another it is really not that much at all.

I have been living with her and her kids since July. The other night, somebody came by to appropriate my old television set and coffee maker – the last vestiges of my old place that I wasn’t using in her house and that I wasn’t able to palm off on a charitable organization or a local buyer. I’ve been ferrying kids to after-school activities, putting them to bed, cooking them dinner. I’ve been walking the dog and feeding the cats. We’re here for each other every day in every way that actually counts.

So yes, it feels like the rings and the flowers and the hooting and hollering are just an annoyance – another sad obligation, like standing in line at the DMV or turning in your Selective Service paperwork. Yeah, here I am, sure. Here’s me, following these rules.

Marriage has historically been about control, and a lot of people still want it to be about that. It was about controlling young women, controlling property, controlling heritage and inheritance. It’s now the goal of the worst political actors right now to make it about controlling personhood in the strictest sense: You straights over here get to be a family, you gays over there don’t get to be.

I was hearing this awful bullshit during the years It was supposed to Happen For Me. I had a girlfriend once who went on about the fact she wanted a princess cut diamond (it had to be a diamond). Like it mattered, like the whole thing would be ruined if that wasn’t a part of the whole road show. (We broke up. She’s married now. I sincerely hope she’s happy. I sincerely believe we would not have been.)

My twenties ended in a rowdy apartment in Colombia, with me jobless and among my gay father and his gay husband, with no money and no career and no relationship, and I was so happy. Most of my friends had already been married. I returned to the United States during that time twice, both times for weddings. The second time I stayed for money – and It kept Not Happening For Me. The years turned brown and fell off the branch. My health worsened. The grandparents I keep in contact with died. My brothers and most of my friends long ago married off. I was living with the sense that It would never Happen For Me.

It could have Happened For Me earlier. I’m convinced that if I’d committed to it, at least once before I could’ve been married – maybe twice. But I would not have been in that gay-ass apartment on the night I went from 29 to 30. I would be here now, working on kid #3, probably miserable, like my father was miserable when he made what I have come to realize was a logical choice at the time, even though it hurt everyone whose life ever touched his: To go in for the flowers and the cake and the married-filing-jointly, for the ability to legally sire children with his last name who maybe might be there to carry his ashes up the mountain when time caught up to him. (We did.)

Fit yourself into the fucking box, they said to him, and there wasn’t any recourse for him but to do it. Get in the fucking box, there’s a house and kids and birthday parties and graduations and family photos and trips to Disneyland here, there’s your mother’s joy at seeing her grandchildren play outside, there’s your grandmother sitting your little wife down with your first born son in a quiet room in the house you played in as a boy and leaving her a little pitcher of water because your grandmother remembers how thirsty it is to breastfeed sometimes. She’s Great-Grandma now, and she’ll give them your same bag of marbles to play with on the floor. It can Happen For You!

When the box is everything, then you leave everything behind when you leave it. When everybody else is in the box and you are outside it, even if you know it’s fucking bullshit, you feel lonely out in the cold. Some just get desperate and look for any way into it.

This is why I was careful to the point of timid, because it is everywhere, the fucking box, and it makes you distrust your own happiness. It’s why we waited, why I met the kids and lived in the house and became a part of the family before asking the question. It’s almost silly now, because the answer was no mystery. The promise has already been made.

Here’s what is important: That I got some folks together that we both care about and surprised her and sang a little song with the right wingman on the piano. We ate and drank. I think it is some bullfuck to expect a woman to do something the man would never do, so I did not kneel, and I won’t ask her to take my name, and I’ll wear an “engagement ring,” too. The fucking metal is not important. The fact I needed to make her feel special is.

I fucking hate weddings as I hate the devil, all Montagues and thee. But I love this woman, here at the end of all things. That is real.

I had to rattle off my family history about a dozen times when I went down to Cuba at the end of last year. The people there treated me like some kind of unicorn. As it turns out, having a mother from Isla de Pinos (which they call “de la Juventud” today, because Castro I guess) is another mark of distinction. I didn’t quite pick up what it means, but it meant something because everybody who introduced me to everybody else brought it up.

“His mother was from the island!” they said a couple times. I figured the part-Chinese and part-American parts of me would be the draw, and they were, but everybody marveled over la isla, too. Even when you’re on an island, there’s another island.

Every interaction between a Cuban and an American is fraught, but there was another layer to it with me, the unspoken thought among the folks I met and came to know there: This one actually knows how lucky he is.

It was jarring having to come back and write about Nancy Drew and Méliès and fucking Donald Duck, while we’ve got our own dictator proudly prancing about, bragging about how there’s apparently nothing he can’t get away with. Writing about movies or developing video games in my spare time increasingly feels like tap-dancing on the deck of the Titanic.

This is where I’m supposed to say that art is important, or where I’m supposed to justify what I do. I haven’t got it in me, I’m afraid. Things are terrible right now, all over, and I’m increasingly losing hope that anybody knows what to do about it, or is capable of doing it. Since the days of W., when I came of age and realized how dumb and mean-spirited the majoritarians in my country are, I’ve privately thought that the only way we can slide back from it is on the other end of true cataclysm. More and more, it looks like that’s just were we’re heading, and that the hands on the wheel won’t loosen their grip to let the rest of us steer toward something, anything else. Some even seem to want it. My grandfather, an escapee from China and from Cuba, a survivor of Castro’s gulags, taught me from a young age that I do not.

One of the first days we were over there in Cuba, we took a trip over to Manaca Iznaga, which was a sugar plantation of old, one with a great watchtower still standing there. It’s seven or eight stories up, and all the peoples of the world were gathered there having a go of the thing, scaling it and looking out over the land. It was put there to keep an eye on the slaves toiling in the fields.

It’s an evil place, if there are such things. And people just walk obliviously along now, and buy shirts and tchotchkies there, and enjoy the view. I did, too: A reed of an old woman approached me and guessed I was from Germany. I laughed and felt bad about it, and I told her where I really am from, and once again I told someone why I know Spanish. You got out, said the look on her face. And I bought the shirt off of her for $12 because I couldn’t say no to her.

They’ll do the same here, whatever may happen. Whatever people are expelled or disappeared or erased will just be nameless ones who aren’t around to talk about it. And you or me or somebody else who was around for it will see somebody who got out and wonder what it must be like.

I’ll keep on living, of course. I’ll do as I’m doing and look for ways I can help. I have so many amazing things to live for, just starting with the woman I’ve chosen to be with and the family we have together. But sometimes it helps to articulate that it’s hard and that it looks dark.