On: For the first time, the census will ask your sexual orientation. My new study...

The afternoon is a flat, grey plane, and into it arrives this question, printed as if on a form. They wish to know, it seems, the orientation of one’s longing. They will place a tick in a box, and the tick will become a number, and the number will become a fact in a ledger of the nation’s soul. It strikes me as a profoundly administrative approach to the infinite.

I, who am several, am asked to be one. Which of me should answer? The one who feels nothing, or the one who feels everything at once, or the one who merely observes the other two debating the point? To declare for a single category would be to silence the committee that holds my citizenship. It would be to send only one of my delegates to the parliamentary session of the state, while the others wait in the antechamber, their credentials invalid. The census does not provide a box for ‘plural.’ It demands a singular citizen, a resident of a single body, with a single address for the heart. But my heart has many rooms, and most are vacant, and the one that is occupied today will be empty tomorrow, its tenant having departed on a voyage he will never take.

They believe, I suppose, that to count a thing is to see it. That the statistic will illuminate the street below my window. But the street is the same: the tram passes, a man adjusts his hat, a shopkeeper lowers an awning against a rain that has not yet come. Their private, unspoken longings are not altered by the mark on a form. The state will now possess the data of our solitude, but it will not, cannot, hear the silence between the options. “Another sexual orientation.” There is always another. There is the orientation toward the dream, which is the truest one, and for which no box exists.

To ask the question is to create the answer, and in doing so, to erase the questioner who lives in the hesitation. I shall leave it blank. Let them count my absence; it is my most sincere reply.