If home isn’t the place I grew up, and surely not the place I am now, where is my soul supposed to live? My childhood bedroom is scant now, last August I stripped its walls bare and left it like a lover, posters and paper scraps given to new walls I thought might be kinder. She’s still there, though, in that room, sealed away with the past when I killed her to make room in my skin for who I’d rather be. Venerable and naïve, I see how kind she’s been to the walls that hate her. Tonight I’ll step out of my dorm and into that cool stillness, sit down beside her.
I’ll tell her to keep drawing and keep writing, keep being weird, because to exist unashamedly is the only defense we have.
She knows her dad loves her no matter what. I’ll tell her to start believing it.
I won’t tell her the girl with the harsh eyes and the braids doesn’t love her how she wants, she knows that, too.
She’s an expert in shame. She’s fifteen and her God has already rejected her, so she worships the guilt instead, accepts its claws and its tearing as true, her exposed innards as righteous.
This is what it is to be a lesbian and not know it yet, to see with unfocused eyes that something about you is fundamentally different. The muscles on the faces of strangers and peers changing when you pass, how trees sway to tell us there is wind.
She rides the bus home after school and picks herself apart in an effort to understand why.
incision beginning just below the jaw, stop when you reach your pelvis, gently part flesh and stare in the bathroom mirror and search and search and search and never find shit, stitch the wound carelessly up and two weeks later rip it back open because someone has called her weird again and she wants so badly to know why, what makes her so different from everyone else? She’s sixteen now and every insecurity has reared its ugly head, risen to the surface of her skin, she’s covered in its red spots and the routine doesn’t help, now her parents have caught on that something’s different. She loves life so much that she thanks it when it rips her open.
And maybe I should take her by those gentle shoulders and tell her not to let it. Would I spare myself the pain if I could? Silly question. I know I wouldn’t. My mom says it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I ask my dad why God lets us suffer if He loves us. He tells me our lives here on Earth, in their contrast of the divine, show us how good heaven really is. He says in a perfect world there would be no word for freedom because everyone would be free.
I’ll tell her she won’t be free until she kills the her inside of her who’s what he wants for the sake of being wanted. I’ll tell her unconditional love is not a fantasy. I’ll tell her we don’t live in heaven and we’re better off because of it, there’s a word for freedom here. I have a thick pink line running from chin to groin that will never go away—I’ll show her how I can run two fingers over it without wincing. I’ll tell her to not apologize for making it, because my friends and my lover have the same one.
And I’ll tell her this:
You’ll turn eighteen, go to a gay bar in Nashville and cry like a baby after the Drag Queen touches your hand. Not just because she is beautiful but because she is up on that stage, because the people next to you also think she is beautiful.
God, it feels so good to kiss a girl in a crowd, to finally not have to hide, not have to look over our shoulders like we’re committing a crime.
The people around you will one day look like you, like warm sunlight on your skin after a seventeen year winter, we exist, we exist, we exist…
