making it out of here

February 2023

You are ten years old and holding hands with a girl behind the bike sheds, and this is fine until it isn’t. You are still ten years old when she kisses you for the first time, because she needs to practice and you need to breathe, and you kiss her back with as much fervour as a ten-year-old really knows how to cope with. She breaks away and calls you disgusting — you deal with this because you have to. Because things like this are shameful from the beginning, and you deserve the guilt more than anyone. She keeps kissing you. Keeps breaking away — until it’s been two years and you’re twelve years old, and your lips are bruised but so is your eyebrow from when she punched you in the face. She makes a point of reminding you how wrong this is, every time, shoves you so hard against the rotten shed panels that it concusses you, and at only twelve years old you have learned to associate pain with freedom. You think: I will be brave in the face of this. One day I will make it out of here. It is the single strongest thought you’ll ever have.

You love her. That might be the worst part. You love her and you keep loving her, even when she kisses that boy with the blue trainers at lunch time, and even more when she cracks your jaw against a desk and calls you a word you haven’t heard before. You love her, and you tell her, and it’s the worst mistake you’ve ever made because of how fiercely she loves you back. So much, so hard all at once, that you don’t even tell your teacher why there’s a funny cut on your chin when he asks about it. He could hurt you too, if he found out: about the kissing. Or the love. And you would deserve it — everybody knows this. It says so in the scriptures. You learn the words god-fearing from the Bible that your school gives you for your thirteenth birthday, and for the first time you start to wonder why something so beautiful as religion is supposed to instil fear in anyone at all.

You also learn the words homosexuality. And sin.

You are ready to die at the hands of the girl that you love because you want to touch her palms, and her lips, and this means that your life is over anyway. You’re thirteen years old: you know these things. You know how to use an apostrophe, and how to fix the chain on your dad’s broken bike, and you know that a girl who likes another girl is a dead girl unless she does not speak about it. This is the issue, maybe. The shackles around you are chained so tightly that you cannot understand the difference between ache and affection. Isn’t hit also touch?

You do not tell your church, because they might try to change you. You try to tell the pretty girl but she won’t listen, will only wrap her lovely hands around your neck until you cannot talk anymore. And she will keep kissing you, because you ask for it. She will keep touching your face when nobody is looking, because she needs these moments to stay alive — she wants to be loved so badly that her fingers shake with it when she thinks you cannot see. She tells you that the boy with the blue trainers is her boyfriend now, and you start to cry, so she punches you so hard in the ribs that you momentarily cannot think. You deserve this. You cannot want her in the way that you do. The world is sharp and jet black, and impossible, and this is not so different from before: you are not beautiful, but you could be. The next time she hits you, you welcome it, because what is a home if not the first place you learn to run from?

You are fourteen years old when you first decide to leave this place: you must remind yourself of that bygone promise. To be brave. To make it out of here. You tell the girl and she laughs in your face, reminds you that people like us are never ever going to be allowed to get out of towns like this. The words stun you more than her violence ever did, because she has never referred to this feeling as ‘us’ before. There are tears in her eyes when she smacks you around the head this time. She will not look you in the eyes again until your last day.

She is the only person who comes to say goodbye, is the thing. It feels like a funeral. She holds you so tightly that it feels like she is going to hurt you again — except she doesn’t. Only cries. In this moment, finally, you understand: she is just as scared as you are. There was never a way out for her.

You are only fourteen, but so is she. You are not sin, you’re children. She aches, just as you do, for a safe place to land. You lean into her, as far as you’ve ever dared, and for the first time she does not pull away from you. No fury. No fists. You watch as the anger drains from her countenance, seeping down into the ground around you, drop by drop. Redemption.

She was never a bad person — just a terrified one. There is no fear like the fear of God.

You’re going to make it out of here too. I swear it.

These will be the last words you ever say to her. This will be the last time you ever see her face. 

For the rest of your life, you will flinch when someone tries to wholeheartedly love you, and this will be her fault.

You will forgive her anyway.

It will be the bravest thing you’ve ever done.