Illusions of grandeur oftentimes fill my head, flitting with images of things that could never come to pass. It's in the moments before I settle my head into the comfortable groove of my pillow, or the split-second between my mouth and my fork as I imagine the synapses at the front of my scalp bursting with fireworks with the taste, or even when I flick my blinker in my car to switch lanes and picture that I'm speeding through traffic like a professional. Like I could weave in between everything that tried to pass by me, seeing it in my rearview mirror and deciding that, no, I don't want that, thanks. But, that is just that: illusions.

Imagine the ability to decide that. To simply deny. To tell God that, no, I am not required to think of that.

I forgot to mention one other time when images would run rampant, like oxen trampling the grasslands into submission. It's those moments in your own bathroom. The full quiet that surrounds you as you set your ass (or lack of ass) on the seat that adorned the white ceramic, when your brain pricks at thoughts that flood your own mental highway and sorts them out.

There's an unloading of two kinds in bathrooms, at toilets. No matter where you are, no matter how you are, no matter when it is, the restroom is where your body shivers with settling. The boulders of your soul shifting inside your caricature to fit your whole. I can't tell anyone how many times that, at a too-loud party, I'd step into the residential piss place where a couple might have been making out just minutes ago, just to feel the too-loud bass thrum through the too-thin walls. Despite the noise, I could feel my skull expanding to fill the space, to let the music drum its fingers in between my hair and bone. And in it, there was peace. There was understanding between me and the knitting of the universe.

Through the haze of any substances I may or may not have consumed, I finally slip my fingers inside the knots of my thoughts and pull them apart.

Earlier today, I was visiting my parents. That's probably why I was here, among strangers. Visits with the parents always bring out the worst, you know? Even if they don't do anything, there's just a trickle down of emotions, beginning with "oh, this isn't so bad," to the subsequent "maybe things are different" or "maybe they're tricking me" or "what if it was always like this and I'm the crazy one," and finally completing the collapsing pyramid of wine glasses with thoughts like, "I can never get past this" and "fuck this, I should just blow town and do me for me" and "I miss this so much but I know too much now" and "how long can this go on" and "FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU" and "I hope you both get better." So, yeah, maybe I'm sifting through the crowd because I was visiting my parents, and they brought up funerals.

"I just know the only one I can trust to bury me properly is Jay here," Mom said to Dad, lightly touching my shoulder, as if it were a joke. Dad just nodded, not continuing with any other thoughts. There was a quiet acknowledgment that we all agreed he wasn't lasting longer than Mom. Men always die before their wives, it's just because they're dumber, simply put.

"Just cremate me, please," Dad finally allows, "I don't want to be stuck in the ground." Hearing this at 22, with $61 in my bank account, I felt that familiar panic associated with death. The tendrils of it slither up my spine, slipping inside my earlobes and poring through the wrinkles of my insides while they caress the back of my eyeballs with long fingernails, and whisper with a cracked voice. It says, "your parents are not staying forever and you can't do a single fucking thing about it because it'll be your back that their legacy lays on." I have no idea how they spoke about it so casually, especially without life insurance to their name. Maybe it's because it will genuinely be my responsibility to care for them. They wouldn't have shit to worry about, so why worry? It's not their banks getting broken. It's awful to think, yes, because it really shouldn't be your parents' cost of death that makes me anxious about it, it should be their absence, their missing-ness, the space that opens up in the universe that I will try my best to fill with stars, only to find that all of them are already going supernova. A death that's happened so long ago but is just simply unaware of itself.

I didn't reply to them. I let the conversation past in such awkward stillness that I wondered if they could hear my ligaments scraping along each other as I uncomfortably shift in my seat. I let them fall into that pit of silence, as if they were already dead, just corpses sitting in seats next to me. And now.

Here I am. I hug myself as I shut the bathroom door behind me, my hands clutching at my elbows. It's incredibly difficult to keep my hands calm. And I see my sanctuary.

A toilet. The seat cracked above the styrofoam innards, apt to pinch my ass as soon as I sat on it. So, dutifully, I pull my pants down, my fingertips numb with--fuck it--the five cocktails, one large rum and coke, a toke on a joint that was definitely not passed to me first, and I plop my happy ass on there, waiting for any sort of flood from inside to make itself seen. I don't think I had it in me. I know I didn't, actually. As I described earlier, I wanted the bass to massage the thoughts away.

That's the true fantasy of a bathroom. Here, as I said, this is the knot unraveling along the base of the toilet. I exhale through my teeth, throwing my hand back and staring at the ceiling above me, like I was receiving a shot from God. The knot was spreading from my lips, down through my intestines, a perfect string that had no bundles along its length. No, I was wrong.

Toilets like this are where the folds of the universe show itself. And, I realize, thinking through the folds, that the ultimate, the ultimate ultimate ULTIMATE fantasy is to sit here...and think of nothing. To have no knots. No bundles. No nooses tightening around your arms, legs, neck, pulling you and ripping your tendons as all the things like death, filing taxes, 9-to-5s, all these annoying parties make claim to your flesh. Maybe I can get there.

Maybe I can close my eyes right now. Yes, like this. Hearing the world live outside of me, without me, letting me sit here on the shitter, with my chin pointed to the sky past the ceiling. If you're religious, maybe you'll be able to feel the soft fingers of God sliding up your chin with love, to say It's okay. If not, then it's okay to do it to yourself.

Here, speaking to the ceramic angel, you are your own best fantasy. Able to finally walk across this Earth, unburdened, unhindered, un-whatever you'd describe it as. Deserving to just not do anything. To truly relieve yourself of all that is wrong in your head and otherwise.

The baby shower is abuzz with conversation. “What will they name him?” I wonder, I wonder. “Are they ready for the baby?” I don’t know, I don’t know. “Hm, I sure hope that it doesn’t look like the daddy.” Huh, I wonder.

“Is it because he’s black?”

“No, it’s because he’s not the prettiest thing to look at.”

“Ah,” you reply, “I gotcha.”

Your uncles are striding around the yard, strewn with balloons, an arrangement of blue. They are drinking, beers that smell vaguely like metal, and they are very open about what they think.

“The little man is going to be a go-getter, the ladies won’t be able to get off him.”

That’s a baby, you think, but man. He sure will get those women, just like a man is supposed to. Otherwise, what kind of a father are you, letting your son be raised as someone respectful? Absurd, fucking lunacy. I can’t believe you would even suggest anything like that.

Fucking idiot, that’s what you are.

You look at these uncles, and you will grin. Man, you love how funny he is. So nice. So kind. Especially that time that he attacked the father of the said-baby because he was ahead in life. Who the fuck wants someone of a different race to get ahead of them? This is America, land of the free, not land of the racially-privileged. Why should shows about them get attention when shows about you, the heterosexual, the Caucasian, get swept under the rug, like they’re the standard? Like they’re the average? Privilege, damn it, these blacks and gays are so privileged.

So obviously, I must call them the N-word. No, I’m not stupid enough to actually say it in public, because you got to pick and choose your places to say the things that some people don’t like. It’s just a word, I don’t know why they put so much power on it, when they could just not care. Not like they have been fighting oppression that has been heralded by that very word for hundreds of years, because if you just separate the word and the meaning and assign your own meaning, then it’s okay. After all, white people can be the N-word too. My friend told me one time that this was incorrect, because whites have never been oppressed in America where the use of a single slur that was chanted and used to taunt as men in white hoods hunted them down and lynched them in public as they were cheered on for doing the work of God, but what the fuck does he know?

And just as obvious, they must be a faggot, especially if they haven’t slipped their hands deep into the panties of a girl who may have not been ready but man oh man, man oh fucking man, you gotta try that pussy to become a man. No matter how old you are, you aren’t shit until you fuck at least one chick. A man, a man, a man oh man, that’s what we’re raising. We got to be enough to make a man out of him.

Your family haven’t seen you in a while. You got a girlfriend? Nah. You don’t got a boyfriend, do you? Nah. Okay, good.

Okay.

Good.

A man is raised to be the man. The man is the one who controls, who is strong, who doesn’t flinch, who protects his family. The one who controls, the one who is strong, the one who doesn’t flinch, the one who protects his family, that’s who the man is going to be. Fuck the women who have taken hits when the father was charging towards them because he just wanted to have “some fun” and his wife said no. Fuck the men who feel scared when a woman approaches him when he doesn’t want her to, because he’s a man, he can’t get raped. He liked it, why would a man object to free sex? Besides, everyone knows that if you cum, then you enjoyed it, so you really shouldn’t be complaining. Fuck the men who fuck men, because that’s not a man. So, which one is the woman in the relationship? Well, obviously that’s how it works, right? One’s the woman while one plays the man? Fuck the weak, because that’s not a man.

Men show no weakness, they don’t cry, they don’t feel sensitive, they don’t see how all these little facets of people acting towards them and classifying them and labelling them and isolating them all at the exact same time. That’s the stupidest damn thing that anyone has ever said, that a man is allowed to be sad, that a man is allowed to be the little spoon, that a man is allowed to be single and happy.

“He’s going to be just like his Dad.”

“Nah, haven’t you heard? It’s called a ‘Momma’s Boy’ for a reason.”

“Oh, right. Right.”

“Besides, we don’t want another one of those.”

“Yeah, true. Oh, he’s coming over here, act friendly.”

I wonder why people haven’t already made a list of how to raise a man properly. Strange, how whenever anyone sees a male baby, all they want to comment on is how big and strong he’ll be, when he might not be that at all. It couldn’t be that society, as a whole, have crafted such an in-depth notion of what should be expected that we, as individuals, impress these expectations on children? These ideas couldn’t be ingrained into nearly every single media outlet as the norm, the broody man who likes to yell and the man who is fit beyond belief, so that anyone who differs against that have no sense of self-confidence?

Nah, that’s not it. We would never set such a burden on our children that them telling us that they’re gay or transgender or that they don’t want to have sex at all would be held as a problem, as an achievement if they succeed in telling you, because why would coming out be so hard? We love them.

Just not as much if they’re not what we wanted them to be. We just won’t bring it up.

But, again. We won’t tell them, because look at that, they’re coming over here. Act friendly.

“We’re going to spoil this child rotten.”

“I wonder if they’re going to raise him right.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”

“Why?”

“Because we’ll be there to help. Takes a village to raise a kid, didn’t you know?”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

In the South, family is blood, and blood is family. Friends are optional, friends will never be that, because friends can be toxic. Family can’t be toxic. So that Dad that comes home and takes his daughter to a backroom for an hour or two, that’s just a man being a man. He’ll get maybe a couple years in prison while she deals with the trauma for the rest of her life. The white boy who just shot up that school two towns over? Yeah, he’s a terrorist, but he’s also American, so………ten years in prison sound good? That Muslim girl who was valedictorian of her university because she worked hard? She got it because she has slightly colored skin, fucking race privilege is real as hell, man. That boy who has brought other boys over and left his room afterwards with hickeys down his neck? It’s just a phase, he just hasn’t found the right pussy yet. Those families trying to get across the border because, in their hometown, they can literally be hunted down and shot to death by a cartel? Don’t let them over, because they don’t belong here. Sentence them to misery while you live in privilege that you don’t even recognize because you’ve never found your race to be a problem in life, a hinderance that gets you denied for jobs just because your name doesn’t sound white enough. That mother who is trying to get an abortion before she raises this child in an environment where it’ll likely be malnourished and impoverished? Make her have the kid, she should’ve kept her whore legs closed anyways. Send it to adoption. And those kids that are already in adoption? They’ll age out and be sent to the streets because those people wanting adoption over abortion so bad are too busy yelling about how much abortions are against God’s will, so they’ll continue a life of loneliness perpetuated by a group who don’t know the struggles they think they have a say in.

Yeah, I think this Southern hospitality is gonna be good for the baby. We’ll be enough to make a man, a fucking good one too. No matter the black daddy or his sexuality, we’ll make a man out of him.

It’s what a family is good for.

#lgbt #south #racism #homophobia #criticalnarrative #discrimination

I’d held him to myself for four months. Four months of a double life where some could see parts of me while I forced another side down, down down down, until even I was starting to get confused about who I was. Four months. Imagine it, that’s literally half the time a baby needs to be developed. Four. Fucking. Months.

The process, or whatever you would define "coming out" as, started two weeks ago. Two and a half, maybe. It was one of the nights where I couldn’t feel myself. Feel myself sounds dirty, which is kind of gross, but I have held the facade of being almost purely asexual for so long that maybe I was actually starting to believe it, despite having done so much stuff with him. Although this is anonymous, although you don’t know, although there is so much that could be way worse, his name, his identity, has to stay mine. Because no one really tells you that, once you come out, once you make yourself known as “gay” and not devoid of sexual feelings, these things that were once yours start to become the world’s. A product of a consequence, a small victory of not having a secret. So if I’m going to remain sane, the only reasonable thing I can do is keep pieces of it for myself and myself only.

Wow, that entire sequence right there was a tangent. Here’s another one, a small one, though, I promise I’ll keep it brief, but tangents are what started this. Off-hand topics, uncalled-for responses, bits and pieces of the mask I painted onto my face just slowly chipping off until I couldn’t take it anymore. I need you to understand that, to know that, if I had held it for much longer, I might never have revealed it all. A double life, one of straight-but-hinted-gay-and-asexual me and gay-oh-so-gay-and-going-out-late-at-night-to-see-a-man-and-kiss-a-man-and-oh-did-I-mention-he's-gay? me, like some sort of pretty socially fucked superhero. Except, you know, my own deception was my worst villain.

It started with a story. A tangent of my own private writings, a confession on the cheap Dell laptop's screen. Sometimes, when you just write for yourself, you see the little bits of plastic you threw in your own pond, hoping they'd sink to the bottom, just casually float back up, muddier but somehow cleaner than before. This is what happens when I'm depressed, when I can't feel myself (see, told you tangents are a real thing in my life). I write. And sometimes, you get too close to comfort, even for yourself. Here's a bit of it, and the motif of the story was glasses and how they let you see, but when you lie, these glasses become cracked, smudged, until you can't even see two inches in front of your face. Hell, is your nose even there? You don't really know. Not to detract from this writing itself, but to believe it, to see the amount of thoughts bubbling up in my head, you have to see it. See it in the way that I couldn't for so long.

Now, I sit in classrooms. I text friends. Or at least, I think they’re my friends. I accidentally keep secrets, because who wants to know about that, but what if they found out? Would they hate you? Would they drop you just like you dropped your glasses into the ocean, letting them wash away so that you were nearly blind for two days straight? And what if you tell them? Will they hate you then? Will they hate the initial lie? So.

You hold it in. You let the tears build up to the brim of your lenses, misty with your heaving breath, and you just play the part. You act clueless, although you know exactly what’s happening. You act innocent, although you know the things you’ve done. You lie and hold to it, you play the part, you get in the game, you shape up your personality and your life until everyone sees you as T.J., the boy who’s clueless, who’s smart, who’s dumb, who lacks any common sense, who has to break a little bit of himself each time he reinforces the web, who is just so tired of holding it in that he lets it leak through and everyone reacts with surprise, and you know it’d be even worse. So you keep going. You keep mortaring new bricks. You keep getting new pairs of glasses. You keep seeing these things, these lines, these threads of possibility.

And you wish that you’d never gotten any glasses at all.

Look at him. T.J., the boy who was literally dammed up in his own head. That's me. That's the person I am, I let the water rise and rise, but the reason I came out at all because of him. Not T.J., that's me, "him" as in the secret I get to keep from you. My own little piece of the world. But those last two paragraphs is part of what started it.

I asked my friend Samantha if she would something for me and tell me if she hated me. To confess, to alleviate some of my guilt that really shouldn't have felt like guilt. She didn't hate me. She said she loved me and that if I needed to talk, she "is always there for" me. I cried. A lot. Not uncommon for me, but still, figured it should be mentioned. And then, after a while, she asked a question, because she knew I wasn't going to let it out without someone telling me it was okay too.

"T.J.," she texted, "Is there something you want to tell me?"

I stared at my phone for a while. A good five, six minutes. My keyboard was open on the chat, the six keys just glowing, like they knew what was meant to be said. Prophesied, predicted. Just type it, I told myself, Just tell her and it will be over.

"I'm gay."

There's moments like this, pieces of your life that feel like there should be a grand score in the background or a lack of one, just a noise-blinded scene. You wait, and you don't know what to expect, but somehow, you're certain about something.

"Okay."

I sort of paused my heart here, can't tell you how I did it. It was the same feeling I got when I was with him, when I stepped into his car at 3 am, just to drive, just to see what Greensboro held for us. And she says what needs to be said. A simple word. So simple.

"And?"

And.

This is what I was talking about, the certainty. The knowledge that you just know, and I knew what I knew. This was enough. This was enough. There's no conflict. There's no disturbing plot twist. Just the simple acceptance of who I am. That's who Samantha represented, what she represented.

Acceptance.

So before I start texting so much, before the tangent comes back, before I get lost in my own hidden glee, I made myself write something down in my Google Keep, a quick flick of my home screen onto the application.

I typed down, "This is not an uphill battle as long as you have someone on your side."

I studied it, the curves in the S's, the word "not." I listen to her dings as she tells me it'll all be okay, that no one is going to hate me and that I knew that she was right. This didn't mean I wasn't scared as hell, I absolutely still was.

Pressure, though, isn't immediately let off in things like this.

Four months, I had held him to myself. And now some of the steam has hissed out of me. And you know what?

Smaller victories mean winning the war at the end of it all. "You won this battle but you haven't won the war" is literally one of the most bullshittiest things I've ever heard. One battle is enough, enough to hold you through.

And I'm glad this battle was enough for me to finally shine through.

#lgbt #comingout #gay #nonfiction