When you're queer in a place where queerness means fear, love becomes a tombstone. You carry it in the cavity of your chest, dragging it around with you wherever you go, your insides filled up with cracked stone and crawling mold. The days pass, and you do your best to play pretend, to convince yourself that if they can't see it, then neither can you feel it.
But here's the catch: you're not just carrying your own— you are also responsible for all those who came before you. All the stories whispered in overcrowded hallways, laughed at in grimy bars, chastised at the dinner table, are piled into your lungs like skipping stones in a child's pocket. Your spine begins to curve, because we were never designed to carry misery with a straight back. We are made of brittle bones that crumble easily into stronger arms, of bleeding noses and lips that bruise when we kiss, of a painful need to be known, to be opened up and dug into like a starving man's final meal.
But around all of this, or perhaps because of it, there is an untamable, insatiable anger, growing like the universe expands, infinite and all-encompassing, spilling slowly into an unbearable sadness. Eventually, your body begins to reject the fear, learns that it is a foreign object— but there's nowhere for it to go where it will not be woven into a noose fitted perfectly for the width of your neck.
So the question then becomes: how do you learn to live in a borrowed soul? How are you meant to pack up every little mannerism, every fleeting, longing glance, every secret which slips out between the notches of your vertebrae?
For most of us— those of us with nowhere to run, or no shoes to take us—the answer is simple: you never do.
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