New York City was in a drought for the first time in twenty-two years. The notification popped up on our phones while we were in a rideshare on our way back to south Brooklyn. She and I had made a deal that if the driver went around the Flatbush side of the park, we'd stop at the cantina that just opened but if he went the Park Slope way, we'd go home to our separate apartments. I was checking the map over the driver's shoulder as she said, "Am I wrong? Am I just wrong?"

We were talking about the recent election, how the whole country shifted right. She worked in design for some city agency focused on restorative justice. I once asked her to explain her job to me without the use of buzzwords. She was quiet for a long time. "I imagine things."

"Okay."

I worked in a self-contained classroom of emotionally disturbed five-year-olds. I was impressed by their instinct to harm each other. My least favorite part was restraining them. They gave us extensive training on how to pin their little arms to their chest just right. If I was alone with a kid, I'd never restrain them. I thought of myself as a sort of matador. I'd wave a pack of Oreos in front of them and lure them into a large closet that had been remodeled with primary-colored padded walls. I'd only gotten a concussion once. A little boy named Davey who was shockingly muscular.

"You're not wrong," I said. I tried to reach back into the recesses of my politics degree at a red state university to find something to give her. "Conservatives have a different vision of the world. That humans are evil at baseline and constantly in competition so you might as well win. Progressives like to imagine there is some equilibrium we can get to where, if everyone has the right amount, it'll be wonderful and peaceful."

"What about people who want peace but think we have to burn it all down to get there?"

I wanted to say more but she interrupted— "He's going the Flatbush way."

The cantina was brand new. It had bright white lights like it was trying to communicate an air of superiority to the dimly lit restaurant across from it. When I got my quesadilla, it had a piece of wax paper on the inside instead of the outside.

"I don't think all people are evil," she said. The edges of her lips were bright blue from her frozen rum drink. "The whole point of my work is for people to find each other on this gentle, compassionate plane instead of jail."

"You're a forest dweller," I said, inspecting the inside of my quesadilla for more wax paper. "Essentially, the world we live in descends from desert dwelling religions—Christianity, Islam, Judaism. In the desert, there are limited resources, and you have to fight for water, or you die. Forest dwelling religions like, I don't know, Buddhism, are peaceful. There's enough water and fruits for everyone so we don't need to be so violent to survive."

She was looking at me and sucking her blue drink tightly through a straw. I loved when anyone paid rapt attention to me, so I kept talking.

"Now, you can't find one place in the world where you don't need violence to survive because even if you're not being violent someone else like the state is doing it for you so we're replicating the conditions of drought and desert that started all this."

Her mouth was open, a bit of blue dribbled out of her lower lip onto her hardshell taco. "My mind is blown."

"Thank you." I grabbed the margarita with the heels of my hands.

"Have you ever been in love?"

"I don't know."

"Then you haven't." Her boyfriend (non-monogamous) was freakishly beautiful and raised by gay men so he operated on a cheat code of existence. He was gentle and able to giggle with people different from him.

"I don't mean this as a criticism," she said, "but you see everything with these sharp edges like there are all these rules. I'm not sure that's how human life works."

I was still deciding if I wanted to fuck her. She'd been dropping hints that she wanted to have more experience with women. I figured I could be such a woman. Earlier, we had kissed in the basement of a club where people were dancing in this flailing way, free of inhibition. It made the kiss feel natural, inevitable even. I didn't know if the fact that I hadn't found anyone who loved me as much as her boyfriend loved her would disqualify me somehow.

"Should we get more drinks somewhere?"

I knew that she was asking if she could come back to my apartment. She had already told me that her boyfriend was at theirs with another woman, who was wonderful she made sure to add. Something about this peaceful way she saw the world made me claustrophobic. I pictured her on my bed. I wasn't sure if I could motivate myself to be assertive with her gentle, open body.

"I have a work thing early tomorrow."

Her face slackened.

On the curb, we waited for another car. Just as she was getting into it, I said I'd rather walk. I passed below the three-story brick buildings lining the park. It was a cold dry November; the streets were mostly empty. Three teenagers hopped a low fence into the park, the smell of weed in their wake. A woman carried a sleeping child in from the car. I thought about afternoon pick up at the school where I worked. The parents knew to speak in low voices to keep the kids calm but even with their quiet exclamations of Hey buddy, they couldn't help but embrace their babies tightly, absorbing them into their arms, violence and all.

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