Uncle Matt

An Excerpt from QUEERPLATONIC: A LOVE STORY

LEX:

Let me tell you about the time I found out that I’m not related to my uncle.

My parents, both retired, live about an hour outside of the city, so I see them every second Sunday of the month. They’re super chill people; dinner’s usually low-key, and it happens at whatever time I show up. We swap book recommendations, and they ask me if I’ve heard from my brother, which I haven’t, because he’s a reclusive New Yorker and perfectly happy that way. Sometimes we watch Bake-Off.

I never bothered to come out to them as demisexual. They’d probably be fine with it, but it’s so damn difficult to explain demisexuality in the terms of their generation that I just didn’t waste the energy… until two weeks ago.

Dad and I were sitting in the living room, and he was explaining in deeply hyperfixated detail about why and how Kurt Vonnegut could have been (but thankfully wasn’t) the end of authorship as we know it, His phone rang, and he looked down at it and said “Sorry, I’m going to take this.”

Not “I need to take this,” but “I’m going to take this.” Dad’s always very specific in the way that he talks. He says that words matter, that deliberately chosen phrases matter.

You can imagine what an absolute hellscape it was growing up in that house, but anyway.

I didn’t need to ask who the call was from. There are only two people that Dad takes calls from when he’s with me; it’s either Mom or Uncle Matt.

My brother doesn’t call. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.

Dad didn’t get up to leave the room or to take space for the call, he just put the phone up to his ear and said “Heeeeeey,” in the very specifically joyful way that let me know it was Uncle Matt on the other end. Dad’s got this one special grin and this instant enthusiasm that telegraphs when he’s talking to one of his favorite people in the whole world, and when he’s about as eager as any human being could be to catch him up on whatever weird alternate universe theory he’s been listening to podcasts about this time.

Listening to Dad talk to Uncle Matt has always made me wish I had a closer relationship with my own brother, but, you know. What can you do?

Dad and Uncle Matt have apparently been inseparable all their lives; attached at the hip since childhood. We have black and white photos on the counter of the two of them in snowsuits, playing out in the streets of Jericho with their three other brothers. Matt calls every Tuesday night, but he also calls whenever else he feels like, and half the time he and his wife Lacey are visiting when I call my parents’ house.

Lacey’s Matt’s second wife; his first wife, Jenny, left him in 2005, and I didn’t get to come home from college that summer because Dad gave my bedroom to Uncle Matt for a few months while he figured out how to get back on his feet.

When Uncle Matt married Lacey, they moved out to New Jersey for three years, and I have NEVER seen my Dad so lonely. Mom was at her wit’s end trying to motivate him to just be excited about things. It’s hard to be excited when you know you won’t get to share it with that one specific person who’d appreciate it most.

I get it.

The only time my Dad ever directly told me “I love you” was after he got off the phone with Uncle Matt one night. They’d both been drinking, and Dad had this faraway “I miss my person” look in his eyes that I could have played The Postal Service in the background of and it would have fit just fine.

I don’t want to give the impression here that Dad and Mom weren’t happy together. Their marriage was - well still is - almost stupidly perfect. They wake up together and they go to sleep together. They vibrate on the same wavelength. They share friends, jokes, smiles. They share a whole life, and they love it.

You can guess how weird it is for them being so hopelessly in love with each other and then having a daughter who so rarely gets interested in anybody. But, you know, that’s how it is sometimes.

It’s just that Dad and Uncle Matt have always been each other’s people. Even Mom gets it. Even Lacey gets it! Everybody gets it; it’s not a problem, it’s not an issue, it’s nothing to whisper or gossip about. It’s just always been like that.

So, anyway, I was still sitting on the couch scrolling through my texts twenty minutes later when Dad and Matt got off the phone, and he went, “Your Uncle and I are going skiing in March. He rented a place in Snowmass for a week, and we thought maybe you’d want to go.”

This was big for me, because this was the first time that I, the offspring, was invited to attend one of Dad and Matt’s yearly ski get-togethers. Mom has gone a few times, but she usually just leaves it to the boys, so I wasn’t even sure if I SHOULD accept, or if that would be breaking into some sort of sacred brotherly bonding time that wasn’t meant for my eyes or presence.

“And bring Sam,” Dad suggested. “Does Sam ski? Bring her anyway; we’ll teach her.”

“Why?” I asked.

What I meant was “why are you inviting me on your brothers-only adventure?” but I guess Dad heard my question differently.

“Because Sam’s your person,” he said, shrugging. “Right?”

And I had to sit with that for a second because that’s true and she is, but it’s not something that Dad and I had ever actually talked about before, probably because we’ve never needed to. He just got it. He never questioned it; neither did Mom.

“What about Logan?” I asked. “I mean, he’s my brother, shouldn’t we invite-?”

“This is a besties trip,” Dad told me. “That’s the word for it, right? Besties? That’s what you say?”

And of course, that was when I found out that my Mom had been standing in the doorway for however long, because she suddenly chimed in with, “Fred, I don’t think you’ve ever told her.”

Dad just stared at me out of two big eyes like “Oh shit, what? Oh.”

And that’s how I found out that Dad and Uncle Matt met in kindergarten; that they don’t have the same parents and that they aren’t actually biologically related at all, but that Matt is actually Dad’s ride-or-die forever platonic soulmate, NOT his brother.

“Just like Sam,” he told me, and I’ve actually never felt so seen by him before.

So, yeah, Dad’s got Uncle Matt to grow old with, and that’s just the way it is in our house. He’s with my Mom, and in a very real way he’s also with Uncle Matt, and that’s a family. That’s our family, and it just makes total sense to all of us.

“Dad” I asked him later that night, “have you ever heard the term ‘queerplatonic partner?’”

And then I told him. I told him everything about who I really am, and he listened, because to us, words and labels and terminology matter, and so does deliberate choice.

I choose Sam the way that Dad chooses Matt. Deliberately, intentionally, purposefully.

It’s that simple to us. It’s just family. It’s just the realest thing we’ve ever known.

***

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