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It was a dark and rainy autumn night in South Bend, Indiana. Mayor Pete Buttigieg was running for president. Campaigning had taken him all across the country, but he was finally spending a rare night at home in his own bed, and with his husband Chasten at his side, no less. Even so, he found he couldn’t sleep. Normally when he suffered from insomnia he would lay still and silently recite Ulysses to himself in Norwegian while practicing the circular breathing he had taught himself when learning to play the didgeridoo.
But tonight was different. Around midnight, Pete jumped out of bed. He was dressed in a crisp white dress shirt and blue tie, which is what he always slept (and showered) in. He looked down at Chasten's face and realized that he didn’t care if he disturbed him anymore.
Pete found a notebook under the thirty books on wastewater treatment next to his bed. He ripped out a page and scrawled a note.
Dear Chasten,
When you wake up, I will not be here. We have had a good run, but I have found someone else who understands me better than you do. Thank you for fundraising, becoming a social media star, giving up your career for me, redefining what a modern political spouse can be, and buying me pants that fit, but now I have to follow my heart.
P.
As Pete left his house for the last time, his dog Truman looked at him with mournful eyes. His other dog Buddy was eating out of the garbage can.
Pete drove to the newly opened South Bend campaign office. During the short drive, the rain lightened up just enough that the moon began to shine through the clouds. Pete found himself running up to the door in the drizzle, unable to suppress his excitement. He smashed through the glass with his fist and crawled in through the shards, somehow keeping the blood from dripping on his pajama dress shirt.
Inside, in a pool of moonlight, was the love that he knew was his true one.
The whiteboard.
They had only met a few hours before, but it already felt like lifetimes ago. The staff had wheeled it in for a professorial video shoot about Medicare For All Who Want It. As soon as he had laid eyes on it, his hands had grown cold and clammy, his face flushing with a red pleasure. Its rectangular shape, cold glossy surface, and hard corners had stirred emotions in him he didn't know were possible to have. Pete had suppressed a gasp when a campaign staffer casually uncapped a marker and drew a map of America on it, eliciting squeaks as a visual manifestation of data was applied to its blank virgin surface.
Those same drawings were still on the whiteboard. “Has anyone ever told you," he whispered, "how beautiful the tall red data point of your bar graph, representing out-of-control American healthcare costs relative to other nations', is in the moonlight?”
The whiteboard stayed frozen in inanimate shock.
Pete grabbed a marker and, with shaking fingers, uncapped it.
“Health care costs are going up,” he whispered, tenderly retracing the red arrows, “and life expectancy is going down.” The whiteboard, unsecured, tilted slightly at his light but expert touch. Pete reached out a hand and steadied it to keep it from falling forward into his arms.
“Do you want to be knocked up?” Pete asked seductively. He used his knuckles to knock at an empty square in the graph, at the intersection of “access to affordable healthcare for all” and “Medicare for All Who Want It.” Now the whiteboard swung backward. He smirked at his own expertise. Expressing physical affection had never come more naturally to him.
“Come here,” he commanded, and he suddenly spun the whiteboard around until it was facing the other direction. If the whiteboard had had a respiratory system, or indeed any human characteristics at all, he knew it would be breathing heavily.
As he sniffed the marker and got a cheap high, his heart soared imagining all that they would all share together. Explanatory graphs. Lecture notes. Tic-tac-toe games between their future adopted children.
Elizabeth Warren may boast plans. Beto O'Rourke may boast tables. But he, Pete Buttigieg, boasted a whiteboard.
“This is my vow to you,” Pete breathed, taking up another color of marker. He wrote in all-caps at the top of the board. “I TRUST YOU!”
At last, he had found peace. The only messy thing in life now would be his handwriting.
Epilogue
The whiteboard would eventually make history, providing an admirably flat surface for the Lincoln Bible to rest on at the 2021 inauguration. However, accusations of stiffness and flip-flopping dogged the First Whiteboard’s East Wing.
In 2024, Chasten Buttigieg primaried his ex-husband and won, becoming the youngest president in American history.