confessions of a gay girl ii

a pride month special

I don’t want to feel it, but it flutters like a caged bird in my chest.

The curve of her mouth. The backs of her knees. I tell her, softly, that her shoe is untied.

When she smiles, I could get sucked into the gap between her teeth and live in the hollow between her tongue and the roof of her mouth.

And then she asks me, conspiratorially, which boy I like, and I choose not to feel the pang of disappointment.

So, I pick one. The first name that I remember from this morning's attendance. It tastes like pennies and soot in my mouth. A lot of people think he’s cute, so I should too. Her face changes. Lightens. She is talking again, but I am adrift. A storm rolls in and I am swimming, swimming, then treading water, then slipping under.

---

“His eyes follow you wherever you walk,” He says.

He pads back and forth a few steps, eyes locked on the crucifix, as if to prove his point. One by one, we are led up to the altar and marched from one side to the other, our eyes lifted to the man frozen on the cross. I feel indescribably small under his gaze as I traipse across the wooden floor, those unfamiliar eyes glued to me.

“Tell me,” he says as we sit, “what happens if you don’t pray?”

“He forgets about you,” whispers the boy to my right.

“No, no, never,” says the man. “He is always watching over you.”

My eyes drift back to his face. Always seems like an awfully long time. I am exhausted of my own reflection.

“He sees all. He sees your sins. He sees your good deeds.”

I wonder if he sees the boy two rows in front of me who is pinching the girl next to him, ignoring her complaints. If he sees the teacher who rolls her eyes at the girl when she turns to her, lower lip trembling, and tells her to “stop being dramatic.”

“And if you stray from his teachings, if you give in to too much sin, do you know what happens?” He asks.

We shake our heads. He levels us with a stern gaze, as if we, at seven, should know what he knows. I imagine he settles behind the altar every night and dials heaven’s number with scathing critiques about us.

“It would be like taking a gun,” He says, making the shape with his fingers, “and shooting yourself right in the foot.”

I tremble the whole way home.

---

I realize something is wrong with me when the Feeling doesn’t go away. A hot, sick, feral thing curling in my stomach, bubbling through my chest and throat, only relieved when I bare my teeth and scare him away.

And I wrap myself in lies, nestled under layers of a boyfriend an hour away, a kiss I can’t quite recall all the details of, maybe another time, words like hot and want and mine dripping off my teeth in oily slicks. I do not tell them that the future I see with any man is one that feels bleak and cold and sharp with fear, one that I’ll spend shirking physical intimacy, one that I only think of when I am forced to.

But the novelty of independence chips away at my aching heart. So I hold hands and pretend not to squirm. I kiss and feel only shame. I tear down carefully cultivated moments and let the wreckage smoke and burn and unfurl into something awful, something that not even the least self-respecting person could salvage.

Words are weapons, but only in the way they are delivered. For years, I inhale the words of misguided people who balance love and sin on the same scale. Who label women subservient and lay claim to their truths as easily as they do their bodies, as if they are one and the same. And I lay at an altar of my own shame and hatred and watch, disembodied, as I crumble.

---

I could not tell you the day that the altar fell.

I wish I could say I smashed it with vengeance in my heart, but that is not my nature. What the years spent in stuffy churches taught me was not ignorance or blame or hatred. It was love, tender and soft. Acceptance.

Forgiveness.

For the girl that lied. In her, there was only fear for who she was, because she had been told it was wrong. I did not shame her. I picked her up and brushed her hair and let her feelings take up space and told her that I thought she was alright just the way she was.

The shame went the way it was built: slowly. With care.

---

She is spun from fresh blueberries and honeyed September weekend afternoons and fables from a country across the sea. Her laugh is distant thunder, heavy and warm, the kind of sound that sends birds to the skies and makes the air tremble.

I do not know if there is a god. I do not know what happens after our pearly bones settle into the ground, muffling the world as it turns without our heartbeats. But I do know that the god I learned to fear would never craft a woman like this – certain and stubborn, her flesh and tongue her armor, her eyes burning, wholly unafraid of the red-faced cowards that play cowboy and down cheap beer and wear backbones made of putty. When she laughs at them, she could swallow the sky. The clouds and the stars and the sun, all burning within her.

And yet, when she speaks of softer things, of quieter moments, she is the ocean against warm sand. I have never known such contradiction, but she is a tapestry of complications.

I do not know if there is a god. But I do know that there are women. And perhaps the holiness that I had always been searching for in dusty books and empty words had instead been in an outstretched palm, in curls against a bare shoulder, in the tangle of our fingers.

And so I sink into the curve of her neck and, for the first time in years, I whisper a prayer that is only one word.

Her name.