Engagement, Civic and Otherwise

November 5, 2024

We sit on the bench in downtown Davis where we had our first kiss, the cold November air pulling me close to you. I cross my legs over your own and curl up against your chest.

When I left the house earlier that evening, the polls showed Trump in the lead.

“Don’t worry,” I kept telling my roommate. “Hardly any of the votes have been tallied. It will swing back around.”

Now, sitting on our bench, everything feels heavy. I meet your eyes — a quivering child. Tell me I am safe.

“He can’t win, can he?”  I ask.

You take a deep breath.

“I think you underestimate how much people hate women.”

And I intuit the part you don’t say out loud: And she’s a Black woman.

Around us, daylight disperses into the seeping pool of night. We sit clutching each other in the darkness.

I think backward, to 2016, to his first run, to the teenager who still believed in our democracy. Still believed in American safety, stability — even superiority. Back then, I didn’t see Donald Trump as a real threat — just a satirical joke gone wrong.

When he actually ascended to the presidency, I was flabbergasted, certainly. But I ultimately shrugged my shoulders. He would only be president for four years.

The day after the election, several far-left girls came to my high school crying. I turned to a friend, my voice low: “Don’t you think they are being a little dramatic?” I asked.

So said the voice of privilege. Because as white, straight, and Christian: it was never me who was in danger.

But in 2024, after Trump declared the lost 2020 election fraudulent, after the insurrection on January 6th, after a recent campaign based on racism and thinly veiled threats of dictatorship, the air feels decidedly different.

No less significant is you, wrapping yourself around me on our bench. A brown man, an immigrant, with whom I am deeply in love. And suddenly, the bubble pops, and it all feels more personal and terrifying than ever before. Are we grasping at the last few quiet moments before the world begins to burn?

We pray together in the darkness, for our country, for ourselves, for whatever is to come.

Afterward, you look me deep in the eyes and murmur, “It is well.”

February 21, 2025

I look at you across the table of the coffee shop, and wonder for the 100th time if I am ready to get married. I fear the possibility that we are making a mistake.

We sit on the patio — your laptop before you, my notebook before me. For several weeks, I have been writing a chronicle of our present times. “The Downfall of American Civilization,” I named it, hoping the title would prove to be tongue in cheek. Maybe someday, we would say, “That was close. But thank God…”

More and more, I feel the tight hand of the news grasping around my throat. My journal is born from the need to do something, to dissent, even if no one but myself knows. My other activism consists of calling California representatives. Making certain to ring at off hours so I’ll get the answering machine, I read scripts provided by 5calls.org, rambling lamely when I try to form an original thought. I demand that the ICE raids stop, that federal overreach be curtailed, that government corruption be investigated.

But none of it feels like it matters — not the calls and not the No Kings Rally at the capital we attended the weekend before. My parents, life-long conservatives prior to Trump’s rise, drove the hour to Sacramento, toting American flags and signs. And later that day, my mother posted a picture of you and my German born-father at the protest with the caption: “This is who immigrants look like.”

Of course, my father, white, European, is not who they are after. Nor are they after you, yet. When I confess that I am becoming increasingly frightened, my mother reassures me of this. “It’s Hispanics and trans people they are coming for,” she says.

As if that offers any comfort.

I keep on flashing back to an encounter I had weeks before, attending a poetry night hosted at my church. The poems shared, raw and angry, poured forth together as a prayer: for the immigrant, for the LGTBQ person, for every marginalized community.

Afterward, I stood talking to a friend, and her words, almost casual, nearly knocked me down. “Because of Bolu, have you started thinking about an exit plan?”

I stared at her, stunned, and admitted I hadn’t.

She nodded, as if acknowledging my confusion. “You might want to. The time to get out is usually a lot sooner than you think.”

Now, sneaking glances at you as you animate, my pen writhes:

How do you know when to run? Because there is still a good chance that this won’t end in disaster — that people will stand up and fight back. Many already are.

As I write, my uncle, a jeweler, is making our ring. And though you haven’t proposed, we have decided to have a year-long engagement. But if I had to drop everything and marry you right now, would I?

I take your hand, and the words fly out of my mouth in a fluid certainty:

“Promise me, that if things start to get worse — if it really looks like they are going to allow him to be a dictator, that we’ll run away and get married. Even if we have to start over. Even if our families can’t come.”

You meet my eyes and squeeze my hand. Three pulsating throbs.

“Promise me,” I whisper.

You promise.

May 4, 2025

We are sitting by the Old Sacramento waterfront, and I am annoyed because I know you are going to propose tomorrow in a beautiful garden. But I am fickle, and all I want is for you to propose right now, when it is just the two of us, sitting by the river.

You won’t, of course. You stick to plans — and you have crafted, and tried to conceal, this special plan carefully.

I flip you off with my ring finger.

“I bet you have it in your pocket!” I say, trying to rummage through your left one.

With a twinkle in your eye, you turn to me. “It’s not in that one, but…”

You gesture toward the other.

My heart stops. And then you turn the pocket out… empty. Laughing as I fume.

 “I bet it’s in your backpack,” I assert. “Though now I don’t even want you to propose — you ruined the moment.” I continue unzipping the backpack anyway.

“It’s not in that pocket,” you say. “It’s…”

 I roll my eyes, waiting for the second fake out, preemptively mad.

But you open the second pocket, and it’s not empty.

Suddenly, you are on one knee, a ruby ring in your hand. It sparkles like the river behind us, rushing onward and away.

February 25, 2026

Days after our engagement, I felt deep in my heart that the frequency of my calls to California state representatives were about to dwindle at the exact moment they needed to increase. I wrote:

Personal joys and tragedies inevitably triumph over political ones. This is one of the greatest causes of political apathy: self-involvement. The political only becomes immediate when it becomes personal.

During the last nine months, I have coordinated furniture rentals and caterers as our country has disintegrated. I bought my wedding dress as Christians canonized Charlie Kirk. Read the Epstein files as I finalized our wedding food. Discussed flowers after the murders in Minneapolis.

During all this time, encompassed by “personal joy and tragedies,” I haven’t done enough. I sometimes feel I don’t have the words, or the space, or the strength to do or say anything meaningful.

The problems are too large, too systemic. All of a sudden, I am seventeen again, shrugging my shoulders, shutting my eyes. Aren’t they all being a little dramatic?

And then our president posts the head of a black man on a monkey body.

You are sitting beside me, and I look at you. My love for you peels my lids apart. 

The political only becomes immediate when it becomes personal.