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Imagination Not Included

 When the music turns on, I can see a scene in my mind’s eye. A woman maybe in her 20’s, wearing a halter dress with a sweetheart neckline. She holds the sides of the dress and smiles as she looks at an unknown someone, lips painted with a dark red. When she extends her hand, the scene changes and she is dancing with that unseen person. 

It’s an old-fashioned scene, from the 50’s or 60’s. She dances with the person that I can’t remember even in the midst of my own daydream. They spin around each other and smile.

It is with a man, because that is how we are taught to dream. Man marries woman and produces the next generation, leading the way for his queer sons and daughters and Those Who Do Not Wish To Identify to wonder at the system which allows for their continued prosecution. I do not love a man; I do not wish to ever know one at the mandated depth. Yet, our society makes it so imagination does not include those who dare to have it.

The scene changes, leaving the girl to spin around the man. Her dress twirls in a bright wave of purple under the lights as she twirls, a band playing on the stage above them. I can't help but wonder what kind of auditorium contains a stage besides the ones that exist in romantic comedies or music videos. There is a 30-year gap between the scene I imagine and the music that plays alongside it, and it strikes me as odd that no one questions this kind of logic when it comes to musical fantasies. The girl is a woman, and yet the people she almost hits with her dress are meant to be younger. 

A blue spotlight turns to flash on the camera, and the auditorium empties out. That same woman is sitting backwards on a chair in the room, empty aside from a few attendants clearing out chairs in stacks taller than themselves. She has been abandoned by the one that she considered loving, and then she stands up to sing. The lipstick is still intact with her makeup, even as tears stream down her cheeks in emotion. The words speak of a heartbreak that comes with a freeing sense of honesty, because the development leads to freedom that is written in the stars.

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