{I’m Sorry}: A Letter from the Reform Quarter: January 22, 2034

January 22, 2034

My Dearest Scott,

I’m sorry it’s been so long since my last letter. I imagine you may have been worried.

I’m writing to you from Sector 17 in the Reform Quarter of Jew Orleans. That’s right! I finally made it!

I have to say, I’m happy to be here. I miss you desperately. I miss our encampment in Fagadelphia. But trust me when I say anywhere is better than where I’ve been.

It’s hard to believe it’s been three years since that “routine” visit to the Carson Center for Public Housing. I’ll never claim to understand why the Carsonians chose to reset my Minority Priority from Gay to Jew. Why I had to leave you.

I learned on my trip down here that only a few people have ever spent as long at the Penceylvania Sexual Correction Center as I did. It’s a mixed blessing that they finally accepted that my Conversion wouldn’t take. You can pack a lot of pain into three years, and I wasn’t always strong.

I hope you understand why I was forced to communicate with you through Officer You-Know-Who while I was in the PSCC. And I hope you can forgive me for what I did in order ensure that he would carry our messages. I assume you may have been forced to do the same. There is no judgment here. Except maybe for him. Worst bottom ever.

Nothing was ideal. But it paid off. Given my hard-earned Unredeemable Status, the boards will at least let me write to you directly. I guess being a lost cause means they’re not going to waste the ink on redacting my letters.

You have to tell me everything that’s been going on in Fagadelphia. Denny and Brian and Jamal and all the rest.

They don’t publish Breitbarts in Jew Orleans. Some sort of punishment for our “controlling the media” for so long or something. Outside information is hard to come by. My processing agent called it the “Debbie Wasserman-Re-Schultz of our treachery.”

What is it with these people and their puns? One of the guys I met at the PSCC told me he heard they were building camps out in the Pacific for all the Poz guys. They’re calling it “HIVwaii.” I shit you not. Some days, I wonder if that’s the cruelest part of this whole joke they call New America. Death by wordplay.

I arrived on the back of the most recent storm, Hurricane Freedom XXI. The mega-levees are holding, but Jew Orleans is still under two feet of water. The problem is our sewer system. Apparently, it hasn’t drained properly since the President issued his latest Normalization Standards, which forced all the Hasids to shave their beards and payos six months ago.

IndyPenceDence Day is coming up in a few days. I think that’s when I miss you most.

I remember that first year after The Peaceful Transition, how I was assigned a place next to you in the crowded plaza during Observance, the way you helped me up after the Patrol Agents administered my mandatory beating, walking arm and arm along the razorwire fence next to the Delaware that night, watching the fireworks reflecting off water as dark as the years to come.

I had a lot of time to think in the PSCC.

About whether holding on to my sense of self was worth all the torture. About whether we’re worse off now than we were during the three years before Ivanka poisoned her father and married President Pence. About whether finding you balances out the rest.

About whether there’s hope for any of us.

And how to put our love to use.

Yours,

Zach