READ THE WRITING ON MY WALL

On New-Year’s day, I made a quick, momentous decision. I announced, on Facebook, that Izabela and I were engaged. I had had my Facebook profile only five days, and by New Year’s day, it already boasted thirty friends. Each time I came across a new friend request—a former professor, a friend I’d lost touch with, I felt a whoosh of exhilaration. Here I was, all the way in Poland, and I was in touch with more amazing California people than ever. Now I too was imbibing the magic of Facebook.
Equally exhilarating was the conversation Izabela and I had had the previous midnight. It all started with the wish she made exactly one year ago. “In 2009,” she said right after the midnight toast, “I want to get a job so I can propose to you.” Since then, the job had appeared, but what about the rest of the wish? I reminded her of it and she laughed. “Do I still need to propose?” she said. “We’re together already.”
“Of course you do.” I knew what she meant. We had already achieved a bond that included layers neither of us could have imagined one sparkly New Year’s Eve ago. Aside from dance, most of our time had been spent one on one. A year ago even being together seemed impossible. Meanwhile, we had traveled together, moved across the world together—built a life together from nothing and on our own strength. An engagement would be sweet and special, but it would mainly be an affirmation of the connection we already had—an engagement for engagement’s sake. Not only wouldn’t we be getting married any time soon, given the expense of a wedding, but in Poland, it wasn’t really an option. Still, to a Christian girl from Oklahoma like me, having your beloved actually propose is a big deal.
“Okay,” she said. “After moving to Poland, and spending a lot of time with me, would you still consider the possibility of some day marrying me?”
“I would be delighted,” I said in mock surprise, throwing my arms around her.

On New-Year’s day, preoccupied by late Christmas presents, doing things around the house, and making long distance calls, we didn’t give the engagement another thought. It was only when we sat down in Izabela’s study and opened up Facebook that it popped back into my head. “What should I post for all these people?” I asked Izabela as we admired the postings all our new friends had on their walls. “I know!” I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. “We should tell them we’re engaged!” This was perfect. It was a holiday, everyone else was posting messages about all the fun they were having, so why not? Now we were a legitimate, serious couple. Within hours, however, I realized that posting this firework on Facebook might have some fallout I hadn’t anticipated.
It turned out that I managed to hurt and shock two of my best friends. One asked why I hadn’t mentioned it to her earlier when we talked, and whether she needed to start planning a trip to Iowa or Vermont—some state where gay marriage is legal. The other said that she would have liked to be told before I made a public announcement. Of course, I couldn’t blame them; in fact, I felt like a bad friend. Still, I didn’t see any reason for alarm. “It’s no big deal,” I kept telling them. “We’re not getting married any time soon.”
“But why did you feel the need to announce it on Facebook?” one of my friends asked. “An engagement is a big deal.”
The announcement was starting to niggle at me. I was telling everybody what it didn’t mean, that we weren’t getting married tomorrow, but then what did it mean? If it was really, as I kept saying, no big deal, why did I, we, feel the need to make a production of it? I started by asking myself what the engagement meant to us. It meant that we were a couple to be taken seriously, a couple who planned on staying together. If we had been in the states, especially California, announcing our engagement to reinforce our seriousness might not have felt necessary. But here in Poland, it isn’t only that gay marriage is illegal—gayness is made invisible.
In the highly cultured, Tri-City area where we live, there are no gay establishments. Social interactions, especially those involving dance, are actively heterosexual. I’m not saying that everyone in Poland is homophobic—far from it. As Izabela once said, we could kiss in front of the mall in the center of town and nothing would happen. Since then, in fact, we did. Some straight people don’t even notice Poland’s homophobia. “Why were you afraid to come out to me?” a new friend asked. “Of course I wouldn’t have cared—nobody cares here anymore.” But Poland is still heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, and homophobia is encouraged. This means you have to be careful whom you come out to.
If I were a straight woman, I could tell everyone I came here to get married and they would talk about how brave I was to come here for love, how romantic our story is. At first though, Izabela and I told almost no one, outside our university friends, that we were a couple. Telling a plumber could mean that you end up with a bathtub that leaks worse than before. Telling a beautician could cause her hand to accidentally slip, piercing your ear too low. A homophobic assistant might spill tea in your laptop, or lead you a little too near a moving car in a parking lot. We figured it was better to be safe than be stubborn about stating our relationship.
In the end though, not speaking up got tricky too. “Why did you come to Poland?” my students, my assistants, and strangers on the street would ask. I said any number of things… that I had come here to teach abroad, that I was getting married, that I couldn’t get a job because the American economy was so bad. This worked fine in some cases, especially when people thought Izabela was my perspective mother-in-law, which made us laugh. But some responses were more sinister. One assistant I hired resented accepting even our grocery list from Izabela, seeming to think her not part of my family, but my housekeeper. Another assistant decided that Izabela had brought me here in order to help with the bills, since university professors here aren’t so well paid, and we live in a ritzy area. She also suggested that maybe Izabela was a lesbian predator who had brought me, a poor girl with a disability, to Poland under false pretenses. I hated hearing Izabela vilified in various ways. Both women asked prying questions about how much money I gave Izabela per month for household expenses, whether she had a husband, and whether she considered me her pseudo daughter.
Sometimes, Izabela has introduced me as her przyjaciolka, a Polish word that can indicate either a best friend or a girlfriend. This word is common in the gay community here, and is safe because it’s ambiguous. On the flip side, it can be misinterpreted, particularly in our case, especially because of the difference in our ages. Besides, ambiguity is not our first choice. As for me, I’m proud to identify as Izabela’s girlfriend, and proud of the reason I am here.
Beforehand, we didn’t anticipate the affect of omitting or skirting around such a crucial piece of information, but it crept up on us. Not only were there awkward questions, but our relationships with most people felt strangely dishonest. It was isolating, saddening to feel that people didn’t understand the commitment that had caused me to move to a brand new place, that shaped our new life. By the time New Year’s rolled around, we were ready for the whole world to hear us loud and clear, and we hoped narzeczona, the Polish word for fiancé, would do it.
“But do you really think people there will get it?” my best friend asked, “even if you tell them you’re engaged?” I told her I didn’t know. What I do know is that the word “engaged” on my wall makes us feel stronger, more secure in relation to the world. We aren’t broadcasting our news to everyone— my students still think Izabela has a mysterious son somewhere whom I’m supposed to marry, and Izabela didn’t correct the hospital nurse who thought she was my mom. Still, the word narzeczona, when we can use it, and in either language, will stop people in their tracks--get them to look a little harder—make them read the writing on the wall.