I didn’t want our love to be political. It wasn’t radical or revolutionary—it was just ours. I refused to write our relationship as an allegory for oppression, for colonization. But we didn’t exist in a vacuum. We were not magically in love, off in a fantasy world. Rather, we were the perfect allegory for the colonizer and the colonized. Eventually, I wrote a poem called “White Man’s Love,” a nod to Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” (which was actually about the United States and the Philippines), in which I wrote, tongue-in-cheek, I just happened to be brown, and he just happened to be white.