Category Archive

I stayed at the Mary and Elizabeth home until the day my residents walked across the rented stage set up in the middle of campus, and graduated. They were headed towards lives and freedoms they could never have been prepared for, living in concrete cottages where their food arrived in saran wrapped aluminum trays and anything with chemicals or sharp edges was kept locked up. Within a year, I would attend baby showers for almost every single one of them, and they would give birth to babies who would one day be raised by young underpaid employees not unlike myself who would lock up their hairspray and try but fail to prepare them for the world ahead.

But on that day in their caps and gowns they looked so full of possibility, and I loved them as though I had raised them myself. In a way I had, if only from the ages of 17 to 18. Although my residents had begged me to stay until they graduated, they ignored me at the actual event. In their short lives they had learned to tolerate everything but kindness, and in the year I worked there the times that I went out of the way to show them I cared were some of the only times I wasn’t treated with respect.

But later that night as I walked out of the cottage for the last time one of my favorite residents, Ratida, threw herself down onto the path in front of me and refused to move. She was a short, angry looking girl whom everyone referred to as “little Buddha” because of her tight round stomach. She had refused to speak to me my first 4 months of working there. She was testing me, watching for trustworthiness, and one day I must have finally passed because another resident threatened me and Ratida was there in a second, sticking out her fierce little Buddha belly and demanding that the other girl leave me alone. I told her thank you, but I was an adult and I could take care of myself, but we both new those were lies.

All day she refused to say goodbye to me, but now she was spread out on the concrete at my feet and I crouched down and told her I was sorry but I had to go.

“Why?” she demanded, her voice sharp and confident.

“It’s just time for me to go, I’m moving to Peru for a while.”

“Take me with you! Put me in your suitcase! I’d fit!”

“I wish I could,” I told her, and in a way I did.

“I know why you’re really leaving. It’s because of Shawnetta, isn’t it?”

“Of course not, it’s just time.”

But she wasn’t wrong. I eventually calmed her down and got her back in the cottage, and left.

I did carry a picture of my girls in my suitcase though, and called them a handful of times from payphones in Peru. The conversations grew shorter, and then eventually stopped. They had moved on by then, and begun making choices they didn’t want me to know about. I suppose I had as well.

I flew to Peru with one of my former coworkers, Candace, who David and Margaret fired the week they got the letter from my lawyer and realized they couldn’t fire me. I’d regretted that her affiliation with me had cost her her job, so on one of our post-shift sangria nights I’d invited her to come to Peru. I hadn’t expected her to say yes. I am not sure what she was running from, unless it was just the embarrassment of taking a low paying job that was no where near the political science field she’d majored it in and then losing it because of a scandal she wasn’t even involved in. I did, however, know what I was running from. Shawnetta. Well, that and the idea that even though my encounter with my psychotic lesbian boss left the word lesbian tasting sharp and bitter in my mouth, I was beginning to realize it still might be the best fit.

Ostensibly, I was traveling to Peru to learn Spanish because the first signs of the recession were already starting to emerge and bilingual mental health professionals were just about the only ones getting hired. The reality was far more cliché. I was hoping to find myself, or lose myself, or both. And hopefully have some kind of international fling that would convince me I could love somebody other than Mariah, and be loved by somebody other than Shawnetta. Preferably, I could even find both in the same person. That, and I was hoping to figure out what I was going to do about the fact that I was due in the fall to begin grad school at a seminary, an unfortunate result of turning in only one graduate application before I spent the rest of the year memorizing sexual harassment policies and demanding that my employer respect them.

Had I given any thought to the international climate, I might have chosen someplace other than Peru to begin the coming out process, like the Netherlands, or Canada maybe.

As it were, Peru was not exactly filled with obvious signs of a blossoming sexual diversity movement. Nor were my months there filled with formative flings. I tried and failed at learning Spanish, and eventually even my optimistic teachers gave up on me and I stopped attending classes all together. We lived in Cuzco and on weekends traveled to places like the Amazon Jungle. It was all very stunning and I was still very sad. For the first few months Candace and I made a solid effort at soaking up the local culture, saturating our time with museums, tours of the Incan ruins, and trips to local villages which consisted of a single row of shanties squished between two sheer mountain cliffs where the locals welcomed us with meals of freshly killed cuy. Eventually we tired of this and spent most of our days holed up in our Cuzco apartment, ordering take out from a Chinese restaurant up the street which tasted surprisingly like home and watching all four seasons of the L Word on staticy burned disks that we purchased for a dollar at the local black market. If Candace wondered about my choice of entertainment given the fact that last she had heard, I was still maintaining that I was straight, she didn’t ask. In fact, when I came out to her a year later, she seemed genuinely surprised. I have always been grateful to her for this.

I did not, as it turns out, have multiple international flings to confirm or deny my fledgling new sexual identity. I did not, in fact, have any. I did come close on one occasion though.

Towards the end of our trip we tired of Cuzco’s breathless altitude and managed to find a flight to Arequipa in a rare lull between transportation strikes. Arequipa was lines of clear, light poetry to Cuzco’s dense and rocky exposition. Cuzco is a tangle of steep stone roads winding into mountain crevices where shacks back up against Incan ruins, and even the number of sides each stone is carved into holds some historical significance. Arequipa is a city built on a grid in a flat valley with clear views and a wide sky. Its buildings are cut from sillar, a brilliant white volcanic rock harvested from El Misti’s various eruptions over the centuries. El Misti itself is visible from just about every location in the city, a sleepy, snow tipped reminder of life’s beauty and capriciousness. At night Arequipa’s lights catch on the building’s white walls, lending it the illusion of a city dipped in bleach, then dusted with glitter.

About a hundred miles from Arequipa is the Culca Canyon. Unknown to most of us North Americans who consider the Grand Canyon to be the definitive work in canyons, Culca Canyon is more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.

Candace and I decided this was an opportunity we could not miss, so we booked a “group Colca Canyon exploration” at a local travel agency and boarded a public bus for a lurching, three hour journey to the mouth of the canyon

It was there that I had my first and only encounter with a lesbian in Peru, unless you count the L word. Our tour guide Ana-lucia, was an exact balance of muscular and petite, and her head was shaved.

A shaved head on a woman will usually still draw some curious glances in the US, but in Peru it is another thing entirely. Peruvian women wear their long hair in thick, dark braids and coils, and I do not think that in the three months I lived there a saw another woman with hair cut much above her waist. Ana Lucia was accompanied by a tall, slender man in a button up shirt and shiny black dress shoes. She greeted us wordlessly and then gestured to the man “This is my friend Paulo, he’s coming with us.”

It was, it turned out, not exactly a group excursion. Ana-lucia and Paulo led Candace and I on a grueling eight hour trek down the sheer cliff of the canyon. While the rocks that kept sliding out from under our feet made quick flights down the canyon’s wall and rested easily on the floor down below, our route was not nearly so direct. We picked our way down narrow switchbacks for several hours, Ana-Lucia and Paulo speaking to each other in Spanish far too quickly for our newly acquired Spanish skills to keep up; Candace and I huffing and wondering why we had not more closely considered taking the version of the tour that traveled by train. When we finally reached the bottom, Ana-Lucia pointed at the far side of the canyon wall and indicated that our camp was most of the way up the other side. “What?” we protested, “you want us to go back up?”, but they were already gliding easily up the trail, Ana-Lucia’s muscular legs, Paulo’s dusty dress shoes. It was not long before Candace dissolved into hysteria, grasping her stomach and insisting she had food poisoning, or some kind of organ failure. This went on for some time until she collapsed on the trail just a few miles from the camp, all dusty tears and defeat. Ana-Lucia was muscular and strong even in her unsympathetic distaste for Candace’s defeat, urging her continue so we could make it to the camp in time to visit the hot springs before dinner. But Candace could not be budged, confident of her impending demise, and Paulo finally ran ahead to fetch a mule to carry her. Candace rode the mule for the rest of our three day journey, renting it at a steep fee that made me respect the Peruvian’s keen business sense, carting Americans up and down slick canyon walls until they broke and paid extra for a mule. Admirable in its ingenuity, when you think about it.

Candace later realized she was not dying or poisoned, but instead had sore stomach muscles from breathing too hard while climbing up steps of some Incan ruins we had visited earlier that week. But that night when we arrived at the camp she was still convinced she suffered a serious condition, and went straight to bed as soon as we arrived at the camp.

The camp was an unexpected place, a series of small wooden bungalows tucked into the sheer wall of the canyon, visible only once you were close enough to smell the donkeys and the fire. We were greeted by a tiny Peruvian woman named Loretta, who looked to be in her mid 80’s. She chided us for our late arrival and pointed to a path at the far end of the camp where I could clean off in the hot springs. My body ached and I changed quickly into my suite and made my way down the slippery path cut into the wall of the canyon.

Steam rose from the hot spring which pooled in a rocky, natural approximation of a hot top. Now that I was no longer focusing on not falling down the canyon, I could finally take in its beauty. The setting sun painted the canyon walls a deep shade of lavender as they dropped relentlessly to the sleepy Rio Colca nearly 10,000 feet below.

I was just beginning to settle into the canyon’s dusky silence when a figure appeared at the edge of the steam.

It was Ana-lucia, clad only in a towel and sports bra. She lowered herself into the hot tub without speaking or even looking in my direction. We sat that way in silence for some time, and then she moved closer. This was it, my big chance for an international fling; an exotic sexual exploration hovering on the edge of the world’s deepest canyon. “It’s a beautiful, is it not?” she said, her accent rich and musical. I nodded, terrified, and backed away slowly. “I’d better go check on Candace,” I told her haltingly,  “I’ll see you at dinner.”

And so the moment passed. The sun set, rose again, and Ana-Lucia did not speak to me directly again for the rest of the trip. But in the morning we ate breakfast on a balcony perched on the edge of the canyon wall, and Loretta, the seemingly ageless keeper of the camp who could have been anywhere between 60 and 100, served us banana pancakes.

Never one to crave banana’s or even pancakes, since arriving in Peru three months before I had an insatiable desire for banana pancakes. Unfortunately, the idea of breakfast was as foreign to Peruvians as we were, and I had been hard pressed to convince my host family to serve me coffee for breakfast, let alone anything more substantial. Eventually when Candace and I persisted in our requests for some sort of nourishment in the morning they stirred Malta, a cream-of-wheat type cereal they served their infant, into our coffee. So banana pancakes, served by a sage in a tiny camp on the edge of the Colca Canyon, were the closest thing to a miracle I could imagine at the time. I took this as a sign that I would figure things out anyway, even without my big international fling to answer once and for all the question of my sexuality. Perhaps the subtle call I’d felt as Ana-lucia edged closer across the canyon’s vast, expansive silence and the response that had risen unbidden from my own body were answer enough. Well that, and the banana pancakes.

* This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people or places is entirely coincidental. Sort of. Ok, not really. The truth is I couldn’t make something like this up if I tried.*

Essentially, he said I had no case because I had no damages. Not monetary ones anyway, and in lawsuits those are the only ones that count.

“You might have some if you go see a therapist,” my lawyer suggested, “Then you would have bills. Damages.”

But despite the fact that I was applying for grad programs to become a therapist, I had no intention of following through on his suggestion. There were, after all, things about myself that I was not prepared to face. Having only narrowly escaped detection of my sexual orientation by my first therapist, Andy, I could not be sure that another therapist would be so easily distracted. Andy was a first year grad student at the same Christian university I attended, and he didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary when I told him I was coming to therapy because I hadn’t ever had a relationship before and needed to learn to like guys more. Or if he did, then at least he didn’t challenge me on it. He asked me once, after months of therapy, if I even wanted to be in a relationship with a guy. I nodded. Of course I did. What else would I want? Then he asked me about my weekend.

And so, I had no desire to try my luck in therapy again. There are things about yourself that you can both know and not know at exactly the same time. I was beginning to suspect that I was gay, but at the same time I wasn’t ready to tip the balance of my knowledge in either direction just yet. And the women in my family do not do things one single moment before they are ready. I spent that entire year insisting to myself and anybody else who wondered that I wasn’t gay. Then one day it just started to feel like I was lying and I have always been a terrible liar, so I stopped insisting.

But sitting there in that lawyer’s office, I wasn’t sure yet which way it would go. And he went on to tell me that if I moved forward with the sexual harassment case I would have to take the stand and be subjected to an intense investigation of my sexual history.

This was not something I had any desire to be subjected to. Rationally, I had never so much as had a boyfriend, and what were the odds that they would actually be able to track down the one girl I ever loved but never so much as verbalized affection for let alone been intimate with? Now very high, I’m sure. Yet somehow also irrelevant. By that point I believed more in my employer’s omnipotent ability to fuck up my life than I did in God. So I dropped the case and did what most twenty some-things do when they are fresh out of college and have acquired more problems than possibilities. I moved to South America. But in the months before I did that, just to be on the safe side, I spread a rumor that I was moving across town. I even went so far as to ask the few people in my company’s administration I was still allowed to talk to if I could borrow some moving boxes, since the Mary and Elizabeth Home for Girls always had piles of old boxes from all the items that were donated for the residents but were sold in the campus store instead. They told me there were boxes were in the dumpsters out back and I could go dig them out if I wanted. When I actually did move, I went and got boxes from McDonalds instead, packing up my stuff in some of their empty fry boxes. Somehow it felt like the cleaner of the two options. Never a fan of grease or especially of McDonalds ethical policies, I was still pretty sure that between my employer and McDonalds, the fast food chain had the moral high ground.

This may all sound somewhat paranoid, and in all likelihood it probably was. But once, back before my supervisor Shawnetta  had began writing me love letters saying she wanted to tear me in half so she could keep some of me for herself and delivering flowers to my office through our teenage residents; before I knew she had a history of accusing female employees of sexually abusing the residents if they rejected her romantic advances, she had been to my house. So she knew where I lived and I wasn’t taking any chances. The first week after I reported Shawnetta ’s sexual harassment, I found dead birds on our cottage doorstep three days in a row. When I brought this to the attention of our cottage’s case manager she informed me that it’s common for birds to crash into windows and die. I know that, I told her insistently, but what natural cause could account for such a sudden increase in bird suicidality? I suspected foul play, and each morning that week I swept the fresh bird carcass into our cottage dustpan and carted it to her office so she could fully experience the gravity of the situation. I don’t think she everyworked up much concern over the birds or their possible symbolism, but she did begin to give me a wider birth after that.

Still, feigning a move might have been a bit of an overreaction, especially in light of the fact that I was about to let the situation actually drive me out of the country. But I wasn’t just looking our for myself anymore- there was Charlie to think about. Charlie had been the dreadlocked and foul smelling answer to my broken heart. One day just before we ceased speaking to each other, Mariah and I were lying on the front lawn of my suburban cul-de-sac searching for some neutral topic to discuss when we spotted a twelve-pound tangle of matted, off-white fur walking down the street

“Ew,” Mariah said, “what is that? A dog?”

“Gross… I can’t even tell. It kind of looks like a miniature sheep.”

But then it walked over and curled up on my stomach. We were won over by its bold optimism, though not by its smell or good looks. We were timid, cautious creatures ourselves, so terrified of the emotions we felt around each other that we would now only meet outdoors, where the bright light and the vastness of the sky somehow made us feel smaller; our feelings less significant. There was something enviable about the dog’s guts. Its confidence that we would not reject its advances, as we had consistently rejected each other’s.

I told Mariah that it looked like her, and like most of our recent exchanges, my comment was an ambivalent cross between a compliment and a jab. But it was also true. They both had shaggy, dirty-blond curls that dominated their appearance and hid pleading, hungry eyes.

“You should keep him, you know,” Mariah said that night before she left.

“I can’t take care of a dog. Besides, I thought you were morally opposed to pets.”

“I’m not opposed to pets, I’m opposed to paying thousands of dollars for them and then buying them tutus and studded collars. This is different, you found him. Well, he found you.”

That night my roommate Megan and her boyfriend drove me to the local SPCA so I could leave the dog there because I worked twelve hour shifts and was in no position to adopt an animal. But I couldn’t do it, so I bought some dog food and a red leash and collar set, and brought him home.  He hid under my bed all night, and would snap at my hand whenever I tried to pull him out, as though to say he had found a good thing and he would be damned if he was going to let it go.

That day was the last time Mariah and I tried to pretend the end of our unacknowledged romance could transition seamlessly into a friendship without us ever having to discuss what had happened. In her absence, the dog became my transitional object. After a few days passed and he was convinced I wasn’t going to put him back on the streets, he came out from under the bed and started following me everywhere. It was exactly the kind of affection I’d been looking for.

I didn’t see Mariah again that year, but she did call once the next day to see if I had kept him, and to tell me that his name was Charlie.

“I haven’t named him yet” I replied.

“No, I’m telling you. His name is Charlie.”

“You can’t just call and tell me what to name him. He’s my dog.”

“I’m not telling you what to name him, I’m telling you his name. It’s Charlie”

“Charlie sounds like an old man, or Charlie Brown. And Charlie Brown is always depressed. Besides, Megan and I were thinking of naming him Pickles.”

“Fine, name him whatever you want. But I’m not wrong.”

After I hung up, I looked at the dog. His gray beard. His stained, watery eyes. I don’t remember actually making the decision to name him, but I called him Charlie after that.

And so in my final months working at the Mary and Elizabeth Home I protected Charlie as though keeping him safe would somehow bring back everything I felt slipping away. My first love. My career. My identity. My faith. I vowed that at the very least my dog would not wind up like the birds, dead on my doorstep. Silenced.

At first glance, it was not the kind of place you would expect to encounter litigiousness. Or violence. A single circular path wound its way past six small cottages. At the entrance to campus there was a cross laden sign which read “Welcome to the Mary and Elizabeth home for girls,” and at the farthest end of campus there was a colonial style building that had been the focal point of the estate before the property became an orphanage in the late 1800’s. It was a residential treatment center for teenage girls now, still an orphanage of sorts, although most of its 66 residents had living parents. It was early afternoon, and the girls were still in school or at least pretending to still be in school and keeping well out of sight, so it was a rare quiet moment on campus. Someone who hadn’t been there before might mistake the quiet for peacefulness, but in my four months working there I had had more encounters with the law than in the rest of my life combined. I had given a statement to the police after getting hit with a chair when a fight broke out between the Bloods and Crips at the cafeteria salad bar. I had decided whether or not to press charges for attempted murder after a resident pour Ajax in my coffee one morning when I accidentally stepped on her dirty laundry. I had been threatened with a kitchen knife, found a resident trying to hang herself with the string from her sweatshirt hood, and ridden in an ambulance to a hospital where I watched the doctors pump 68 Tylenol out of the stomach of a 14 year old. And now I had a lawyer to defend myself against my own boss, and was on my way to my 5^th meeting that week with the program’s director. I was not fooled by the trees or the picturesque buildings, and I was certainly not fooled by the silence.

I walked into the room to find the Executive Director, Charles Ricks, and the Program Director, Dr. Cole already seated.

“Have a seat,” Mr. Ricks, gestured, feigning hospitality.

I pulled a small digital recorder out of my purse.

“My lawyer advised me to record this conversation, since he couldn’t be here today.”

“No.” Mr. Ricks replied, “I don’t think I’m comfortable with that.”

“No?” I asked. This was not the response I had rehearsed. I was losing composure already. “Then… I guess I better leave and we can do this another time.” I moved to stand up, but Mr. Ricks motioned for me to stop. “I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said, leaning forward. “We’ve only brought you here to tell you that Ms. Acquanetta Benia has filed a counter suite,” and he pulled a stack of papers out of his briefcase to demonstrate this fact, although he carefully hit them from my view.

“A counter suite? I haven’t even filed a suite. I’m not suing her. I’m not suing the company. I have a lawyer to protect me from meetings like this every other day.”

They looked at me expectantly, so I sat back down, already blinking back tears. “Fine, what exactly am I being accused of.”

Mr. Ricks leafed through his papers. “It says here that you have been making sexual advances on her and sending unclear signals. That one night last week you called her office several times and then brought dinner over to her and Marina in their office.”

My resolved returned in a rush of adrenaline, and I could feel my face flushing. “Unclear signals? Sexual advances? Marina called my cottage and asked what we were cooking. She’s my supervisor,” I said, spitting out that last word, “so I answered her question. I told her we were making hamburgers, and she asked if we could bring them two.”

Dr. Cole looked as though he were trying not to laugh, but Mr. Ricks was still looking at me intently. “Did you speak to your supervisors on the phone again that night?” he asked suspiciously.

“Yes, Shawnetta  called back a few minutes later and said she would like some cheese for her hamburger.”

Dr. Cole was now clearly stifling a laugh. “What kind of cheese?”
He asked.

“American” I replied, grateful I was not the only one in the room sensing the lunacy of this exchange.

Mr. Ricks continued. “Well then how about showing up at their office? You know the two of you have been instructed not to interact. Can you explain that?”

I was fully flushed now, gripping the sides of my chair. “They are my supervisors.” I repeated. “They asked for dinner. Alina agreed to take it to them, but of course…” I trailed off, watching for this information to sink in before continuing. When they were both looking at me to gauge how much I knew, I went on, gaining speed and confidence. “Since she’s the resident Shawnetta  was accused of having an inappropriate sexual relationship with three years ago, I really thought I should go with her.

Dr. Cole, sat back, a look of pride quickly crossing his face, as if he hadn’t quite expected this from me but was also not entirely surprised. Mr. Ricks cleared his throat. Looked down at his papers and then back up at me. “You know,” he said slowly, “I don’t see why we couldn’t work this all out. I don’t really see a need to take this any further.”

“I thought so,” I said, rising again.

Last weekend my appendix very nearly turned me into a vegetarian. Friday night I picked my partner C up from the airport and we drove to Inn and Out for dinner. Within minutes of finishing my meal, I discovered two angry, unbudging fists of pain right in the center of my abdomen. Instantly I was reminded of the SVU episode I watched just before picking her up, which prominently featured a man in a wheelchair who had been paralyzed by a hamburger. That’s right, a hamburger. One minute he was eating a burger at a family picnic, and the next he was on his death bed with e-coli or bochilism or some equally horrible food-related problem. The rest of the episode was dominated by shadowy scenes in a meat packing house overrun with rats and feces. Convincing, to say the least. The domino’s inside my head were off and rolling, and soon I was remembering an e-mail my coworker sent several months ago that described the slow and painful death experienced by a friend or acquaintance of a distant relative, also executed by hamburger. Why had I so quickly forgotten my SVU-inspired resolve and eaten the fated hamburger? Why, for that matter, had I not stuck with the vegetarian pledge I’d taken at the tender age of seven? I soon remembered that it was probably because at the time I’d had a prior commitment to avoiding beans of all shapes and sizes, for textural rather than moral reasons. Also, I avoided any and all white creamy substances, including ranch, mayo, sour cream, and cream cheese. Beans, meat, and creamy substances were staples in my mother’s cooking and once I stopped eating meat my normally thing frame became somewhat bony and alarming. So my parents started force-feeding me thick, lukewarm cans of Ensure each night as penance. Needless to say, the vegetarian phase did not last long. But as the pain in my stomach grew more and more demanding, I still found myself lamenting my young lack of resolve.

Although inwardly somewhat paranoid and neurotic, I tend to be outwardly stoic. So I mentioned casually to C that the Inn and out hadn’t agreed with me and settled in for a night of catching up on the long list of tv shows neither has time to watch during the week.

—

By 3 am I am vomiting, passing out, the whole deal, and C is pissed. Over the past seven hours I repeatedly ignored her suggestions that we head to the emergency room and she now groggily reminds me that stoic is just another synonym for stupid. C loves the ER. I mean, loves it. In our first three months of dating, I had to take her twice for falling down the same set of stairs. For her, its partly bad luck, but probably mostly also growing up with a nurse for a mother who prescribed aspirin for everything. What with her mother’s long shifts and high exposure to trauma, none of C’s childhood injuries even registered on her mother’s raider. I quickly learned that if I didn’t attend to C’s injuries, they would rapidly escalate into an ER visit. Now, I usually take a pre-emptive strike and suggest a visit to the ER whenever she tells me of an ailment. “Well,” she’ll say reluctantly but with an extra bounce in her step, “it’s not quite that bad yet…”

I, on the other hand, abhor doctors, hospitals, emergency rooms… the whole bit. I’ve only been hospitalized once before for an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug the week of my sister’s wedding. They let me out in time for the wedding but it didn’t do me much good because I don’t remember anything about it except that I was still swelled up like a balloon so my bridesmaid dress didn’t fit and my head looked like a misshapen full moon in all the wedding photos. So really, how great can the ER doctors be? Besides, I was convinced that if I did agree to go to the emergency room I would get diagnosed with gas or indigestion or something like that and die of embarrassment instead.

At 3:30 am C got silently but somewhat aggressively out of bed, picked up her I Phone, and tossed it at me: “It’s dialing the Kaiser advise nurse,” she said, “maybe you’ll listen to her.” I listened dutifully to a message that said something along the lines of “You’ve called the talk network, where you’ll find something for everyone. Press one for great conversation. Press two for something more. Please me advised that all fees apply.” Was I delusional? I didn’t think so. I hung up and dialed again. Same message. “Honey?” I said to C, who was covering her head with a pillow, “I don’t think that’s the right number.” “Stop trying to get out of it and talk to the damn nurse!” she grumbled. Eventually I convinced her to get the right number and reached a drowsy nurse who casually advised me to leave for the hospital immediately. I reached the end of my resolve and off we went.

The Kaiser emergency room is nothing like you might expect from the ER scenes in the movies. We were the only ones there, and I had a hospital bed within five minutes. This, unfortunately, did us little good because I also got assigned to Dr. Don’t Give a Damn. He was a handsome, darkly tanned man with long wavy hair who closely resembled a cheap portrait of Jesus. I explained my symptoms to him and he poked around my stomach, provoking the two angry fists of pain who had taken up residence in my abdomen to scream in protest. Unfortunately I did not. He asked me if it hurt, but apparently he had taken my lack of screaming as a no because he was already on his way out of the room. “I’ll order you some meds” he said over his shoulder. And with that he was gone, less than two minutes after he had first arrived.

“I told you!” I wailed to C, “He thinks I have a stomach ache, he’s going to prescribe some pepto bismo or something. I HATE THE ER!!!” She was fully awake now and noticeably less irritable, so she offered soothing noises until a nurse walked in. The nurse was a short Pilipino woman who teetered into the room on platform shoes with a big sigh. She looked at me, looked at C, and then said: “Not your nurse. Just swing nurse who fill in while people on break. It’s horrible.” She looked at us expectantly so I made my best sympathetic face. “I’m sorry to hear that.” She nodded, “I hate it. Always taking over other nurse cases.” I was not sure what to make of her open distaste for having to be my nurse, so I just waited in silence until she finally produced a needle. “Doctor ordered medicine that only come in butt shot.” It took me some time to absorb this news. “Butt shot?” She nodded, “take off pants, roll over.” Reluctantly I complied. She must have been warming up to me after all because she suddenly grew jovial: “Not to worry, this my specialty. I do excellent butt shot.” “Oh,” I replied, a high, thin sound that attempted to show appreciation for her specialty. She took it as encouragement and continued: “don’t worry, won’t feel pain. Really good at this.” Bam, she made her entry. I congratulated her, as I had in fact not felt a thing. Maybe she really did have a calling. But she was not nearly as pleased with herself as I was, shaking her head back and forth emphatically. “No good. You skinny but meaty. Should have gone with bigger needle.” She shook her head again in apparent wonder: “Yes, skinny but meaty.” I tried to think of an appropriate response but none came to mind.

She then began pounding the site of the injection in a way that quickly made me forget about my stomach pain. This “nice massage” as she called it went on for several minutes, with her pausing every few seconds to shake her head and repeat under her breath: “so skinny but meaty,” as if she was holding me personally responsible for ruining her perfect record with butt shots. This moment quickly surpassed being a balloon-faced bridesmaid and my fear of being diagnosed with indigestion as top reasons to avoid the ER.

Over the next six hours I encountered plenty more nurses, as Nurse Skinny but Meaty followed through on her assurance that I “wasn’t really her patient” and quickly disappeared after my injection. The next nurse was there only long enough to tell me that I had been treated for nausea and should be feeling better soon, but before I could explain that I didn’t have any nausea she was already gone. Next came a voluptuous young Hispanic nurse with cascading curls who looked exactly like Callie on Gray’s Anatomy. I began to perk up, since Callie is one of my top reasons to watch television, especially since she started dating women, and a look a like here in my very own hospital room could only be a good sign. But soon enough Nurse Callie-look-alike explained that the previous nurse had traded me to her because her caseload was too full in a tone that let me know she was none too pleased with this arrangement. I nodded, feeling more than slightly rejected. Still, nurse Callie-look-alike was warm and kind for the few minutes she graced us with her presence, and brightly offered to bring C a fresh cup of coffee before disappearing, never to return.

Next came a young nurse with a thick Jamaican accent. C tried to explain to her that my pain wasn’t getting any better and we needed to see the doctor again. “And who are you?” the nurse said pointedly. “Her partner.” “Partner?” “Yes. We’re together, a couple.” “Wow! You know I have a friend who has the gay, and he wanted to get married, and I just think it’s wrong that people get so up in arms…” She went on, but C and I were busy trying not to laugh. We have a dear friend whose mother refers to her lesbianism as “they gay,” like it is some horrible disease her daughter contracted and she is still waiting for the cure to be discovered. Normally, we adore hearing anyone use the term, but when the nurse used the remainder of her time with us to finish the story about her friend with “the gay” and then she too disappeared, I began to grow frustrated that my sexuality was more interesting to her than the condition I was seeking treatment for.

I saw Dr. Don’t Give a Damn only once more. He passed by my doorway six hours after I had arrived and said the word  “better?” as though it were a complete question. “No,” I answered, but he had already breezed away again before my reply even made its way to his wavy locked head.

Eventually the night shift left and I was assigned a new doctor. By this time the sun was well into the sky and our patience had evaporated. He made several sympathetic noises when I explained my symptoms and said that he had heard Inn & Out hadn’t agreed to me. “Listen” C said, rising from her nest in the corner of my room, “Danielle and I have been together for some time now, and here’s the thing. She doesn’t complain about pain. Ever. So this is not just a stomachache. Something is really wrong, and we need to get it taken care of because we have been here all night and we’d really like to not have to come back.”

Amazingly, he listened. And within in minutes I was assigned the task of drinking two fowl bottles of thick, creamy vanilla flavored chemicals that would color my insides and ruin vanilla milkshakes for me forever. Another hour passed in silence and then I was greeted by a doctor who’s name tag clearly read “surgical team.” “Surgery?” I asked, and he nodded perkily “yep.” “But last I heard I was about to be discharged with a stomachache.” “Well, now its looks like you’re going to have an emergency appendectomy. I just need to call in my boss to confirm it.” He seemed immensely pleased with his diagnosis. His boss, an overwhelmingly kind East Indian man who was the attending surgeon, must have been pleased with it too because the next thing I knew I was being wheeled towards the operating room.

It took some convincing to get the admitting nurse to put C down as my nearest relative so she could receive updates and visit after the surgery. She eyed C skeptically. “Well, do you have any documentation to prove your relationship?” she demanded. “Of course we do.” C snapped. “Well can I see it?” “Sure you can, right after we take care of this little emergency surgery we’ll drive home and get you a copy. How’s that?” “You don’t have it with you?” “No, did you bring any documentation of your relationship to work with you today? Did the patient next door bring their’s with them?” The nurse sighed. “Alright, what’s your name and phone number?”

In the operating room yet another nurse confiscated my glasses, and without them the room looked suspiciously like a space ship. It was bright and metallic and an indistinguishable blinding disk hovered over my face. “Don’t go towards any bright lights,” C had teased tearfully as they whisked me away, but what choice did I have? I was strapped to a table under the brightest UFO I had ever seen. Besides the light, the only thing I could make out was the faint outline of a blond doctor behind me. There were at least a dozen doctors and nurses in the room but none had spoken directly to me. Instead, Dr. Blondy was busy complaining that there was a heart surgery going on next door and she would much rather be working on it. It made me feel strangely comforted, as though the world was exactly as it should be. Gray’s Anatomy was turning out to be a perfect replica of a real hospital. Drama, unruly egos, and now operating room bickering about the best surgical assignments. Still, it seemed somewhat inconsiderate, and I thought about saying something like: “Hey Dr. Blondy, I get that my appendix isn’t all that exciting for you, but could you at least wait until I’m knocked out to complain about having to operate on me?”

Instead I found myself beginning to panic. You teach people how to cope with stress for a living, I told myself sternly. Surely you can handle a minor surgery. And even if nobody in the operating room knew my name let alone my profession, at least I would know that I wasn’t the therapist who lost her shit on the operating table. So instead I worked my way through the exercises I teach my clients. Take slow deep breathes. Tense and release each muscle group. Visualize something calming.

When I woke up from the surgery, these handy techniques were not the least bit helpful. I was thirsty. So thirsty my lips, tongue, and throat were stuck together in one parched, deserty mass. The recovery room nurses were the worst by far. The others had just been good for a laugh. But these were nasty heartless bitches. I asked for water and they refused me. I asked for ice-chips and they refused that too. I asked them when I could have some water and they said eight hours. Eight fucking hours? Therapist or not, that’s when I lost it. I was convinced I was dying. Here I survived appendicitis and I was going to die of a stuck together airway. Hysterical and hiccupping, I croaked out a request for C. The nurses glanced up from behind their desk and shrugged, “We can’t have your friend in here.” “She’s not my friend!” I screamed, but no sound came out. Or maybe it did. Because the next thing I knew, C was there, taking my hand.

In the end I traded my appendix for a week off of work and school, and an extra week with C. When you’ve been living apart for almost a year, that’s a pretty good trade. When they released me from the hospital we packed up the car and C drove me up to Sacramento. My organs were still pretty angry about the surgery and trying to figure out where they belonged with the extra room in my abdomen. So we had to tie a towel around them to keep them from jiggling around too much, and whenever we hit a bump, C reached out to help me hold them still. I sympathized with them. There have been a lot of changes lately. A lot of newness and some losses too. But I guess if we can just hang on to our guts and to each other, it’s not a bad start.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve left my mark on this blog, this now-dusty-’ol-blog.  I don’t know if anyone still reads this thing, but I hope so.  I hope so for the fact that things haven’t changed.  Anything written 2 years ago (even 20) still holds true.  Our stories are still valid, but they have evolved with time.  I hope to share some of my story, simply for the cathartic purpose of getting it out.  So, if you’ve got a few minutes, a warm mug of tea, and some handy Kleenex, then join me.

For starters, I’m not sure I “qualify” to be an author on this blog any longer.  I would now be the “graduated-student-from-the-Christian-University-down-the-street.”  It was a joyous moment, and one of the most freeing experiences I’ve ever had.  My partner was at the ceremony, and I have a picture of me in my commencement garb kissing him on the cheek.  I can’t even express how different I felt, even the day after graduation – I can now LIVE MY LIFE!  It’s been a little over a year, I’m fully settled into my career and adult life, and my memory of living in such an oppressive environment is quickly fading.  My experience of having to deal with the consequences of being gay are far from fading.

I would cite the main reason for the prolonged absence from the blog (and most people in my life aside from my partner) as crushing, debilitating pain – spiritual, emotional, and at times physical pain.  Years ago, I would read about the higher incidences of depression amongst lgbt and say, “Duh!  It’s so damn hard having such political pressure/religious bigotry, etc. in your life.”  Well, I think the biggest source of this depression comes from the family.  At least for me it has been.  And it’s not the kind of depression Lexapro can help.  I’ll try and keep my story simple:

The cascade of loss began with my brother.  We’ve never been close, but he is my only brother and has two children to whom I was very close.  My mother (taking it upon herself) told him I was gay and soon to be married.  His response, both immediate and enduring, was that I was not to be around him or his family, much like the way he would not expose his children to the life of a drug user.  2 beautiful nephews, 1 brother, 1 sister-in-law: gone, cut and dry.  My mother proceeded to inform my Aunt, a religious zealot.  When I called her to talk it out, she had nothing but bile to spew through the phone.  For example, she informed me that when I was on the brink of death from contracting a horrible disease and begging to change my ways, she would consider hugging me again – and that she looked forward to the day.  1 Aunt, Uncle, and a small kingdom of cousins and cousins’ children: gone.  These were hard losses, but ones I was actually quite prepared for.  I had mentally been gearing up for these losses for quite some time, expecting that the hard-line Fundamentalism of the majority of my relatives absolutely did not allow for a gay.  I was right.

What I wasn’t prepared for (naive as I am) was the loss of my mother.  You can read posts from the past of me singing praise about my mother – her openness, support, and love.  Little did I know then that she was Judas, sent to betray me.  I might sound overly dramatic, but when is one ever ready to accept that their mother is capable of such a betrayal?  She still has her grandchildren, sister, nieces and nephews – family.  But, see, I was played.  I had the opportunity of talking to all of these people first taken from me.  And my mother had the opportunity of acting that she didn’t know I was gay.  That she had been deceived for years.  That she, in fact, hadn’t been the one telling me to bide my time and that what the family “doesn’t know won’t hurt them.”  At the time, I did not see the grand play for what it was.  I was too busy cleaning up the messes left in the wake of my mother’s chaos.  And I kept her close.  However, things changed as I started to distance myself a bit and live my life with my partner-turned-spouse.  As I communicated less, she turned violent – angry, yelling phone calls and nasty e-mails.  Little by little I learned who she really was, and the pain she was capable of inflicting.  There was more, but it is not fit for this forum.  Suffice to say that I don’t keep in touch with her any longer.  1 mother, who will never match the image of Protector I once held: gone.

There are many more sub-dramas within this play, including the loss of several dear, dear friends.  But, really, the dramas do not matter; what I’ve said above more or less captures the last year.  As I write, in the context of this Christian/gay blog, I wonder where my spirit went (or rather, what happened to it).  I can’t name a day or time when I said that I wasn’t a Christian anymore, or that God wasn’t close, or that I had lost faith.  But now, sitting awake at 2AM, I know that I have.  Maybe this is my biggest loss, and I can’t foresee how I will rebuild the palace in my soul that once housed the greatest Being I knew.  This was a grand palace, let me tell you!  And it spurred me on – to goodness, to charity.  Now I can see the rubble, and I can still feel the many small earthquakes that brought it down, but I can’t fathom where to go from here.  I literally cringe when I hear “Christian,” and I can’t imagine being associated with that word any longer, or ever again.  Where does that leave me?

When a person loses a lot of money in assets, they are able to claim capital losses, eliminating taxes on any gains in years to come.  I feel as though I have enough capital losses to last me until the day I die.  Every now and again, when I slow down from the craziness, I wonder what keeps me going.  I think I know the answer.  There are so many people with collapsed castles, mansions in heaps of stones, maybe an adobe home washed away.  I know I’m not alone, and that there are answers yet to be found; there are questions I don’t even know yet to ask.  This gives me some amount of peace, and hope that I will one day have an inner self that I recognize.

Lately every time I open my mouth I find myself surprised. Surprised by the volume and conviction and tone and passion with which I have been saying things. This is not the voice of that same person who used to carefully weigh each word to make sure it pleased all of her listeners. This, rather, is the voice of someone who has learned that she has something important to say, and that not everyone (or even most people really) are going to agree with it, but she is going to have to say it anyway. Because it is true, and truth is beautiful.

Today my dear friend M and I drove to a Christian college not so far from here and shared our stories in a Human Sexuality class. Had you known us in college, this would probably be a shocking statement. We were not the kind of people you would expect to go around talking about our sexuality, or much of anything controversial for that matter, in front of crowds of people. But it seems that is exactly the kind of people we have become, and I cannot tell you how liberating it felt. Afterwords we were so full of the power of our own voices that we wanted to burst into classrooms all across campus and announce that we were there to talk about being gay, and share with them our winding journeys of how we came to peace and then even thankfulness for that. Then, we wanted to drive right on back to our undergraduate campus and start shouting our stories from their podiums too! That’s how empowering it was, just to stand before a crowd of students not unlike those we sat silently next to during all those years of Christian education, and tell them that we are gay and we love God and women and life and yes even ourselves, most of the time anyway. Our elation wasn’t so much about the student’s reactions, which were entirely a mixed bag with some peeking out from their own well guarded closets to thank us shyly, other smiling warmly, and some smirking and refusing to look at us as they brushed past us at the end of class. Nobody stopped us to say their life was radically changed by what we had to say, but I think that’s fine because our elation was not about what they heard but rather about what we were able to speak. With conviction and grace and even a good bit of humor we stood up there and said this is who we are, and how we have come to be here, and we are not ashamed. And even more, we are grateful.

It had been raining all day, but as we were driving back home and celebrating our voices the clouds lifted and this incredibly soft but brilliant light broke through the clouds and reached down towards the ocean beside us. And maybe it was because we were feeling sentimental and maybe even a little tender towards our faith and all the bumps it has taken these past few years, but I swear we both noticed at the exact same time that it was almost as though God was painting those broad,  brilliant strokes of light across the sky in celebration with us and our triumphant speaking of our truths.

I want to raise the bar again. When we were first coming out, we learned to lower our standards and take what we could get. We tried to look grateful when you said “I disagree, but I still love you.” Hell, most of the time we even were grateful. But right now I don’t give a damn whether or not you agree with me, or with us, or with any of this. Because what I want to know is, the next time you hear somebody saying that I am somehow less because of who I love, will you speak up for me? What I want to know is, if I raise my glass in a toast to her will you celebrate with me? If I march for our chance to have the same legal rights that you do, will you march next to me? If I grow weary of this fight and need a place to mourn all that it has cost, will you cry with me? If your church says there is no place for us in heaven will you stand up for me? I want to raise the bar again. I don’t want to know your theoretical beliefs about my sexual orientation. I want to know that when you look at me, you see a human being and not a theological debate. If we throw another party in celebration of our love it’s not enough for me that you show up and look dutiful. I want you to dance. And if you can’t dance with us, or laugh with us, or speak up for us… if I haven’t ever seen you smile when you look at us together, then I don’t want you there. Do you hear me? Are you listening? I don’t want you there. Because your silence may not be costing you anything, but it is costing us everything.

I was seventeen when the Holy Spirit called me to the high mission of saving Liz. This was not something that I took lightly. She was the first atheist our little Christian high school had ever seen as far as I knew, and rumors followed her like gnats on horse shit.  The most common one was that she’d been kicked out of her Catholic all-girls boarding school for making out with the other girls on her rugby team behind the bleachers. I didn’t care. I knew my mission and I was not backing down. She was Sicilian with olive skin, short hair, and even shorter plaid skirts. On Wednesdays we always had to wear our hideous blue plaid uniform skirts to chapel because it wasn’t right for girls to worship god in pants. Liz always came with hers hemmed up to the soft curve of her butt cheeks so they would send her home to change and she wouldn’t have to go to chapel.

It was around that time that the sight of her started making my heart jump around inside my white polo uniform shirt and my stomach tie up in strange unfamiliar knots, and that is how I knew that I had been called… guided by the holy spirit to the mission of ensuring Liz’s salvation. I left my old circle of friends who ran a “Lambs of God” Bible study during lunch on Thursdays, and ventured out into the world of Liz. She taught me how to sing Your Body Is a Wonderland back before hardly anyone had even heard of John Mayer, and also all about the advantages of driving under the influence of marijuana compared to alcohol. She never convinced me to try either, because my school had done a fine job of teaching me that there was only one quicker way to lose your salvation than drinking and doing drugs and that was sex, but I believed what she told me about driving under the influence for a long time after that. I believed just about everything she told me that year.

I started spending nights at her house, to advance the cause of Christ of course, and she started fixing my hair for me and spraying me with her perfume before we went out. God, I loved how she smelled. At night, she couldn’t fall asleep unless I told her a story, so I’d stay up watching for her breathing to grow slow and heavy as I told her some variation of the story of us.  Her bedroom was lined in Absolute adds and mine was filled with Bible verses and I could not imagine a more perfect union. She was raw and dark and angry and she didn’t believe anything they taught us in Bible class, so instead we sat in the back row and I tickled the soft skin of her arm because it was her favorite. And also because I believed that if she couldn’t hear the love of God, then the next best thing was for me to show it to her. Or at least that’s how I justified it to myself anyway. One day our Bible teacher made us stop because she said it wasn’t right for two women to touch like that, and I didn’t understand but I also didn’t argue because I wouldn’t start arguing with Bible teachers for at least five more years after that.

Our physics teacher was from Zimbabwe and didn’t speak much English yet, so every day we would tell him we had some sort of meeting or appointment and he would let us leave class early. We’d sneak into the girl’s bathroom and sit on the floor under a painting of the Fruits of the Spirit and talk until the bell rang. One day she told me that she felt like she was walking around with a huge hole in her heart, and I wanted to tell her that sometimes, I felt that way too. But I didn’t because I knew that good Christians were always supposed to have it all together. Besides, they had taught me how to respond to this very thing in Bible class, so I parroted back the answer they had given me and told her that it was a God-shaped hole, and only He could fill it. Secretly, though, I think I believed that I could too.

I never did learn anything about physics that year, except that every action has an equal but opposite reaction. A little while after that, they started teaching us that Catholic families like Liz’s weren’t really Christians and wouldn’t go to heaven and that’s when I stopped listening. I didn’t know a lot about theology back then, but I already knew enough to know better than that.

By then, my Spirit-led mission was really getting complicated because I couldn’t remember exactly what I was trying to save Liz from anymore. That was also about the time that the fighting started between us. This went on for months until our English teacher, who was also the school’s 100% unlicensed, untrained “counselor,” decided to intervene. He locked us in his tiny office and left us there, telling us he wouldn’t let us out until we worked it out. I don’t remember much of what we said except that I was crying and she was not, and that at the end she told me: “This isn’t going to work. I can’t give you want you want from me, because in two months when I graduate I am going to leave this place and I am not ever going to look back, and you aren’t ready for that yet. Do you understand me?”

I nodded that I did but really I didn’t, because I couldn’t figure out what it was she thought I wanted from her. I decided she must have meant that I wanted her to love Jesus, and I didn’t realize until much later that she had probably understood long before I did that what I really wanted from her didn’t have anything to do with Jesus.

I saw her only once after graduation. She’d gone to Wellesley and I’d gone on to yet another private Christian school, but I drove the three hours home as soon as I heard that she was back home. Wellesley had kicked her out for trying to slit her wrists one day after class, and although this didn’t scare me, the way it made me feel to see her again certainly did. We met for coffee and made small talk while we both tried to pretend that we weren’t terrified. She called once more after that, to say that she was doing better and had been trying to help out a friend who was sad, and that it had reminded her of me. I knew enough by then to be grateful that that was the way she remembered my misguided high school mission.

The next time I tried to call her the number had been disconnected and a few weeks later our English teacher told me that Liz had joined the marines and was driving Humvees in Iraq. I think he loved her too, though I am pretty sure neither of us realized it at the time. That was at least four years ago so I don’t think she could still be deployed out there, but a few months ago I saw a movie about a woman soldier who had her hand blown off while driving a Humvee in Iraq and it made me cry anyway. I’ve come out since then, and finally learned to tell the difference between falling in love with a woman and being called by Jesus to convert someone. I don’t really even believe in the later anymore, or at least not the part about converting someone to believe the same things I do. But I still wear the same kind of perfume that Liz used to share with me back in high school, and every time someone tells me that they like the way it smells, I tell them thank you and I remember that before it was mine, it was hers.

I had the family over tonight- not the family who birthed me and then wounded me so deeply and with whom I am once again trying to give birth to something new- but rather the family I met here just over two years ago. I sent my wayward words out in the world and they answered and became something tangible and stable and beautiful for me to bump up against as I found my way into myself. It was beautiful to see them all, and to celebrate the engagement of two members of our group and the many beautiful lives and relationships that have emerged among the rest. But still somehow as I am left in my empty house after their departure I find tears in my eyes. These are not tears of joy, although there have been plenty of those too these past few years. It may seem like a ludicrous thing to say at 25 but lately I have been feeling so very old. So old, in fact, that I was deeply surprised when I got carded at the grocery store today, although I know they card anyone who looks under 35. It’s just that it seems to me the past two years have aged me so deeply I cannot seem to fathom that the rest of the world might not notice. It seems that we were children when we met, just embarking on an adventure in a world where we had never believed we could fully live. We were giddy and terrified and hopeful and probably drinking a little more than we should have. We had parties long into the night filled with laughter and ranting and at the center of it all there were the war stories from our first forays into love, our schools who would kick us out in the name of Jesus if the were given just one opportunity to see us for who we truly were, and worst of all from parents who sometimes wanted never to see us again if they couldn’t hide any longer from who we had become. It is these things that aged us. There was laughter tonight, but there was also sadness. Almost, even, a hardness. There is only so much of other people’s distaste, judgment, and misunderstanding of you that you can take before you begin to get angry. Mostly though, lately, I am just tired. And counting down the months until I can put behind me this chapter of my life where I have to constantly look over my shoulder. Where I constantly have to worry that if I tell too many people the truth about myself, I will no longer be welcome in my own school. That has been worse even then the most difficult times with my parents, or the best friends I have lost, or the fact that when we think about what city we want to move to next we always have to pause and consider what our chances would be of being injured or even killed there because we are together.

Looking around the faces in the room tonight, we did not have any wrinkles or gray hairs (or at least not many) to show for the past few years, but I think that you could hear it in our voices. Sadness, yes. Bitterness? Perhaps a little. But also wisdom. We have traveled weary roads and we have learned to survive. Not just to survive, but to live and breathe to speak up and out and over their noise and their silencing. We have found love and friendships and success in its many forms. And we have dug down deep within ourselves and found that we will keep fighting to make a place for ourselves in this world and insisting that our voices are heard so that there are spaces and voices for all the others who will come after us. We have reached out our hands to an ever growing network of people who have walked roads much like our own and said to them: come, walk with us… you are not alone, and there is space for you too. And for that very reason I would not change one single moment of it. I mean this. In class this week a teacher asked us what we were grateful for this year as Thanksgiving approaches and I said I was grateful for my friends who have become my family in these most difficult of years. But what I would have said, if I could have said everything, was that I am deeply grateful to be a lesbian, because it has connected me the most beautiful group of people in the world who have truly become my family even when my own family could not stand by me. Even as we all begin to drift our own ways and find our own corners of the world in which to settle and begin our families, I will never forget these years that we shared. And most of all, I am grateful because being gay has opened my eyes to countless other LGBT individuals from Christian backgrounds who have stories much like my own to tell. I cannot believe that I am lucky enough to have a story to share with them and a life to share with them and that I get to make maybe just a little bit of difference in their journeys. I wouldn’t trade that. Not even for all the love and simplicity that I have lost.

Highway 46 cuts across central California like the line between redwood rocky cliff revolution and concrete. I was born in the southernmost desert of this state, but my soul has always floated north. On the road that divides them, there is wide open space… and produce. Somehow, the in-between space has always made made me feel like I have to hold my breath.

Yesterday, we were driving back from a week up in Monterey, and the whole time we drove down Highway 1 along the coast of Big Sur I was able to live exactly in that present moment. It was the first time in a long time that I didn’t feel haunted by the past, or consumed with anxiety over our future. It could have been the cliffs with their rivers cascading into crashing ocean waves, or it could have been the fact that I had never been there before so there were no memories there to push their way in. But once we hit highway 46 and the waves faded away the past came crashing back, because northern California did not always represent this life and this love. It used to be about another one.

The last time I drove through there, I was on my way back from visiting this girl in San Fransisco, where we stayed during gay pride week in an 8×8 square hostel room that was more of a closet than a room. She was straight back then and so was I. Funny, how we stayed in a closet during gay pride week, bought matching pink sweatshirts, hugged tightly on the streets, and were offended when people assumed we were together. The irony of all of this was lost on us until much, much later.

We were Christian, and we were straight and that was the end of the story.

I don’t think this image cracked for her until much, much later. But it started to crack for me on the drive back home. As I passed row after row of almond trees and corn fields, I kept coming back to the memory of how that little room hadn’t been able to contain the static electricity that seemed to flow between us. While the city bustled around us preparing for the morning’s parade, we  lay there just barely touching, talking much too quickly about boys we had dated or almost dated as if that would erase what was happening between us. We fought the next morning, although I can’t remember over what. I think that somehow seemed easier than saying goodbye, or facing what was coming next. But I do remember making up over the phone, talking for hours while I made my winding way back down the state. And I remember her saying something about how we had only fought because we loved each other too much. This might have been the greatest moment of clarity we had that entire year.

We talked the whole way down until I lost reception on highway 46, and that entire time I could not shake the feeling that everything I knew was suddenly floating away from me. It would be at least another year before I could articulate what had happened, and several more before she could, but my body knew even then. My hands started shaking, and it was as though I was losing contact with the earth and everything I had ever known. The next thing I knew I was pulling over in front of a produce stand and buying a bag of sweet red cherries, still warm from the sun. Their earthiness somehow pulled me back in again, at least for a little while, and I tore hungrily through them as though the hard, slippery  pits at their center might contain some firm bit of truth that I could hold onto.

The next image I have is of cherry pits spilled everywhere in my car. Did I swerve to avoid hitting something? Was I nearly in an accident? I don’t remember, but I think so. I still have bruises anyway, from the months that followed.

I found those pits hidden in the crevices of my car for years to come, and they always reminded me of that sensation of falling off the edge of something terrifying in those last moments before the closet broke and could no longer contain me.

I am out now, and so is she, and we are both partnered to two beautiful women who we are in love with. We are all friends who double date and go out for drinks and dinner and sometimes poetry or music like grown up, well adjusted couples might. But sometimes when I’m around her I still feel like that old self, trapped in that little San Fransisco closet suspended somewhere between self discovery and absolute terror.

Driving down that stretch of road yesterday, I was overcome with the sudden urge to buy a bag of cherries. I think somehow I needed to pay tribute to that terrifying sensation I so intently ignored several years ago which had been trying to tell me that I was in love with a woman, and that it could maybe even be ok. I think I wanted to hold those slippery cherry pits and not spill them. To share their rich, sweet flesh with my lover and marvel at how far I have come from that scared, closeted self I was three years ago when my hands were trembling and I was first starting to forget how to breathe.

But the cherry stand wasn’t there anymore, or at least, it wasn’t where I remembered it being. So I stopped instead at this little roadside farmhouse with plywood for walls and a family who sat out front and sold me a basket full of peaches, apricots and nectarines. The fruit had holes where the birds had tasted it first and given it their seal of approval, and in broken English the farmer proudly told me that this was because their fruit was pesticide free. I couldn’t argue with that, so I told them that was exactly how I liked it and then carried a basket back to my partner who was waiting in the car and handed her a nectarine, holes and all, because they are her favorite.

We drove on, and half an hour later after I spotted a sign for a cherry stand, exited the freeway, and pulled up in front of it only to discover that it has closed just three minutes ago. I was disappointed at first, but as I thought some more it seemed somehow appropriate. As if the universe was telling me that that chapter of my life had already closed, and I could finally lay it to rest because I had made it though alright and so much more is unfolding on the road before me. I am not that girl anymore, that one who could not even hold the truth of herself let alone imagine sharing it with anyone else. And so I got back in the car and drove on. My lover pulled out two ripe apricots and we brushed the dirt from their sticky orange flesh and bit into them. They were sweet, firm and delicious, and they tasted like the truth I’d been searching for all those years ago.

For the handful of you who have stuck with us through our long, long writing dry spell, I am hopefull that the dry spell is about to end. I haven’t written much in the last year for many reasons, but mostly because I began to realize just how blurred the lines are between anonymous internet blogging land and the “powers that be” at my school. With this realization I began to edit and filter what I said here more and more, and consequently, began to write less and less. Because the point of this small internet space, afterall, was honesty, authenticity, and truth, wasn’t it? So here, of all places, I will not lie or edit myself.

But all of that is to say that pretty soon now, I won’t be lying or editing myself anymore, or at least not because I am afraid of being kicked out of my graduate program. I am have made the long ( and unexpectedly difficult) decision to transfer to a new school, and find a new beginning in a place where all of me will be welcomed. Or at least allowed to exist openly.

I am still wrestling with what it means to kiss goodbye two years of hard, excruciating gradute work and begin again at the beginning in exchange for the freedom to be authentic. It is a hard trade. It is also, I’d like to think, a worthwhile one. As I look back over the past two years I feel I have aged immensely. The girl who began writing here during her first months of graduate school in her earliest, most tentative phases of coming out is long gone.

They say your body regenerates itself entirely every seven or eight years. I wonder sometimes if trauma expedites that process, because I feel as though I am sitting here, writing from within a different skin than when I first began. My body has literally atrophied over the past few years, and I appear to be swimming in the clothes I wore when I first started school two years ago. I wonder if it has been the stress, or simply the fact that trying so hard to go unnoticed has caused me to somehow take up less space.

Although my body may have shrunk, my world has grown so much larger. It is filled now with people who know, accept and embrace all of me, my sexuality included. My family has grown to include so many people I would never have had the privledge and the honor of knowing if not for coming to this seminary and beginning this small blog. For that reason, I would never go back and undo that choices I made that have led me to this palce. I am not sorry I came, but I am also not sorry to be leaving. In the balance between these two places, I sit, preparing for what the future might bring. Or perhaps, more accurately, for what I might bring to my future, and to the future of my community.

My partner always says that we cannot sit back waiting, but must rather “speak into being” the things that we desire. And I believee that somehow, that is exactly what I did here. I so desperately needed a community, and a place where I could learn to accept myself… unable yet to speak, I anonymously typed it into being. And it has been so breathtakingly beautiful.

But now, we are in the beginning phases of speaking something new into being. I believe that myself, my partner, and my community will change this world. I believe that you will too, if that is what you desire. Because we are through with hiding, and we are through with accepting the status quo. Most of all, because we are alone no longer, and it is much, much harder to keep us silent that way.

Stay tuned for more.