time, truth, and hearts
april 2024
To preface: the working title for this was ‘being gay sucks’. Which, yeah. The title as it currently stands is a lyric stolen from ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’, by The Killers.
Anyway. Here’s an autobiographical five-act tragedy about being gay and how (as aforementioned) IT SUCKS!!!!
Act 1
(You are ten.)
Hallway lighting. Wet paint.
You are in a classroom with a girl. It is a silent classroom and the lights are off. You are not supposed to be here. You are not supposed to be here.
You are in a classroom with a girl and you’re ten years old. There is paint on your face and she dabs at it with a wet paper towel and you are too young yet to think of flinching from her touch. Her irises are blue-grey and they glint in the hallway light.
She is holding your hand. Her fingers are warm.
The paint is red, and she smiles as she wipes at it, and she is so close to you that you can feel her breaths whispering across the skin of your cheek.
Her fingers are warm. The towel is cold. She’s beautiful: this is important. She’s prettier than you know how to see right now, and not just half-lit. When you remember this moment the paint will look like blood. This is not the truth. Not yet.
Your legs are swinging and there is a girl kneeling beside you with her starburst smile and her eyebrows are knitted in concentration as she swipes at your temple, and the paint is only paint. Only red.
Are you becoming what you’ve always hated? Was it always going to be like this?
The room is dark and her hand is warm. You knock your forehead into hers, thud-thud, like a heartbeat, like a prayer, and she smiles up at you and you realise at the age which you can still count on your fingers that she is the sun. And the sky. And the stars. And you want to say this to her but you can’t, because the feelings in your ten-year-old chest are brighter than you can attest to out loud, and you think of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit and of the way her fingers are like beams of light against your face, and if God is not good then at least he exists, and your proof is kneeling in front of you washing paint from your cheek, and the colours are streaming in stained-glass rivulets down your neck—
Hey. Hey. Hana.
Her hand is at your throat. It is not violence, but it could be. Her hand is at your throat and your pulse leaps against her fingertips (heartbeat, prayer) and you don’t understand yet the way that she is looking at you. Her hand is at your throat (and she could kill you, and you would let her) and she’s saying your name, solemn and quiet and terrified, so careful with the syllables that you almost stop noticing the way her eyes shine royal in the hallway light.
Yeah?
It’s all you know. You are innocent in this. She is all you know.
I wish you were a boy.
(You learn in class the next day that there are twelve ribs in the human chest. You spend break time trying to count them, skating down your torso with the numbers you learned years ago, and yet— only ten. You can only find ten.
You picture yourself a skeleton, some fossil dragged up like the ones in the movies, ribless and rotten and out of time. You dread to think of the archaeologist who finds you: finds you an anomaly. Finds you inhuman.
Ten fingers to count with and ten years to your age and ten ribs in your chest. Rewind. Feel the tape as it scratches along your collar. Feel the seconds as they tick backwards, resetting the sun, unpinning the sky. Think, because you are conditioned to, oh no. Watch the dread as it settles hot into the palms of your hands.
Think punishment. Think guilt. Think sin.
Think of yesterday in the classroom. You remember. You remember. You must.
Set the scene: this is what you are being taught. Ribs in a chest and settings in a story. Start with the weather: soothe into it. Feel the darkness of the classroom beneath the skin of your throat. Start with the weather: the clouds are dark. Dark enough that, at eighteen, you would compare them to wood smoke, brick dust, lint-guilt-ichor—
You are ten. You compare them to the bottom of a very deep pool. It is all you know.)
You’re in a classroom with a girl and you love her. You don’t know that yet, but when you look back on the moment, she’s lit white-gold and her eyes are glowing cerulean and you haven’t even learned that word, but you will. You will. Her hands are on your face and the pads of her fingers are warm against your cheek. There’s paint water muddying the collar of your shirt. It doesn’t matter. The paint doesn’t matter. The hands do.
Think of the scene. You’re in an empty classroom and this alone is rogue enough, it’s lunch time, you’re not allowed to be here. You’re not allowed to be here. You want to lean into her touch so far that it knocks you from the table but you don’t get why.
Remember that you are ten. Remember that your chest thrums ember-warm with the ache of something dangerous, something wholly unfamiliar, and you will spend a lifetime trying to remember the way her thumb rested soft against the line of your cheekbone. This is a sin you will not confess to. This is the kind of sin which gets you killed.
Blink. Pause. Blink. Her eyelashes are so long, and so pretty, and when you reach out to touch her face you will tell yourself that it is because there’s paint on her brow but you’re lying. Take a breath. She’s like art. Do you know what that is yet? Do you know what it means to look directly at the sun?
I wish you were a boy.
The words are going to kill you, but not yet. Not yet. Not yet.
Act 2
(You are fourteen.)
Birthday lighting. Lemonade.
It’s your fourteenth birthday, and you’re about three hours away from coming out to your mum in a boarding school car park, and you’re sat across from your best friend as she paints your nails with such a delicate hand that you start picturing a life at her fingertips.
You’re talking about dating, about how funny it would be if you two were girlfriends in another universe, and all of a sudden you’re asking her if she thinks you would be good together in this universe.
You’re in love with her. Obviously.
“I could love you,” she responds, like it’s nothing, and you think, could.
Rearrange the letters in your head. The best you can come up with is you collide, and, yeah. Okay. Okay.
You could lie. You could live.
You hate that your brain does this. You got it from your dad.
Cell, lucid, devil, cloud, cold, lovely, decoy, olive, yield, voice, duel. Could.
Could, could, could.
I could love you.
Fucking anagrams.
Draw back into the present. The sound of your breathing. The sound of hers.
“I could,” she whispers, more to herself than you. She’s ready, she’s aiming, she’s going to kill you.
So you say, “okay.” Which it isn’t.
So she says, “okay?”, which means, you’ve lost this war.
“Yeah,” you hear, except it’s your voice, your lie, “sure, you know. No pressure.”
She laughs a little, this sound like molten glass, and you feel your life split very terribly into before and after.
“God, I’m so glad you get it.”
Shit.
Act 3
(You are fifteen.)
Party lighting. Alcohol.
You’re drunk, not abysmally so, but your focal point has gone a little blurry so you’re fairly sure that the girl you’re looking at right now is watching you make a very dodgy set of cross eyes in her general direction.
Like it matters. She’s staring at your mouth.
Because you’re a poet, and because you’re hopeless, you think mouth instead of lips, because you’re a vessel and she’s the muse, because she’s about to kiss you, your mouth, your teeth, and you know how this goes.
You’re fifteen. Locked in a conservative boarding school where the word gay is so completely fine but really actually still a crime that nobody else in your year has yet confessed to.
She doesn’t kiss you. Not at first.
You watch her hand like it’s in slow motion, and maybe it is, but there’s bad rap music playing in the background and the bass is so loud in your ears that it floods out your heartbeat. If your pulse is racing, you can’t hear it. If it’s slow enough to be a warning sign that you’re about to pass out, you can’t hear that either.
In essence: you’re fucked. Her perfume is so nice. Her throat is still a little wet from where you sucked a shot from the notch that her necklace sits in.
Her thumb finds your chin. Which is strange. You let yourself think, okay, maybe. Her thumb finds your chin and you need very suddenly to breathe, but you don’t, because you’re fifteen, and her hand is on your face, and maybe if you breathe too loudly she’ll hear it and realise that you’re more human than waxwork.
Then she’ll run a mile in the opposite direction. And call you a slur. But it’s a joke, right? You’re fag to her, dyke, queer, and that’s fine, it’s fine, these walls are oak and she’s axe, pick, flame.
Her thumb is in your mouth.
This is a boarding school. Her parents vote Conservative. The tequila in your system is funnelling all these thoughts at once into your head even though her thumb is in your mouth now, and she tastes like salt, she tastes like skin, and she’s seen the looks you get in this place when the word LESBIAN is stapled to you like a motherfucking scarlet letter, so she’ll graduate and find a man called Fergus who works in the city and she’ll marry him just like she’s supposed to even if she doesn’t want to and she tastes like salt and oh dear god.
It breaks your heart. Her thumb is sweeping through your mouth, across the ridges of your molars, and she gets to your incisors, and you think I’m too drunk to be thinking the word incisors right now. It breaks your heart.
She leans in real far, until her baby hairs are crinkling against your temple, until her mouth is trailing along the skin of your cheek right across to the shell of your ear. She’s breathing very hard. You hate being gay.
“You have a bar,” she murmurs, like it’s an even remotely seductive thing to say to anyone, ever, “along the back of your incisors.”
Which, okay. Guess she’s thinking the word incisors too.
“I do,” you say, for something to say. Now is not the time to be detailing your orthodontic history. She bites your earlobe. It’s not as nice as it sounds.
“It’s cool,” she says, drawing back and pressing her nose to yours. “You’re cool.” You are objectively not.
“You’re very close,” you reply, almost like it’s a warning, almost like she’ll even be able to start reading the subtext of hey, by the way, I think you’re gay but probably you’re going to lie to yourself about that fact for the entire rest of your life, like, as in, you’re gonna marry a man named Fergus and have three very normal children with him, but I also think that you’re about to kiss me, which is fine, but it’s going to fuck you up pretty bad, sorry.
In short: she’s going to kiss you. She’s going to hate you for it. Internalised homophobia takes no prisoners.
“I’m not gay,” she says, and it would make you laugh if it wasn’t such a sad thing for her to have to say out loud when her lips are this close to your mouth.
You give her what she wants. It’s only fair. “Sure,” you say. “Yeah, I know.”
“Okay. Okay. Good. I’m not gay. I’m not like you.”
This is a tragedy. You’re the eponymous heroine. You’re going to die in Act 5.
“Okay,” you say. Because you have to. Because she’s lying, and you’re letting her. You’re going to marry a man named Fergus. You will be desperately unhappy. In another life, in the universe where your parents don’t vote Conservative, and we’re not both locked in this boarding school where they still beat people like us up sometimes, you marry ME.
Incisors. Thumbs. You feel so bad for her.
This is a tragedy. She’s the nameless love interest. She’s going to live.
“I hate this song,” she says, and then she kisses you so hard that the lights go out.
She beats you senseless the next day. Kisses you again the week after. You let her. Oh, you let her. You’re just a kid.
Act 4
(You are seventeen. You will never stop being seventeen.)
Funeral lighting. Holy water.
The first girl to ever break your heart catches your arm as you stagger from the doors of a crematorium: it’s been five years since you last saw her. You don’t know how to do this.
She’s your worst nightmare, she ruined your life. She’s here. She’s all that’s left of this town. Her eyes are soft enough as you pitch out into the parking lot that you let her hold you, let her press you down into the gravel by your car because your legs are shaking and you’re retching a little and she knows you, she knows you. She does.
“You’re okay,” she whispers, the first thing she’s said to you in half a decade, “it’s okay. I know. I know.”
Fuck. She does.
It’s not a kindness you’ve ever learned to expect from her. She goes to hold your hair back as you’re throwing up — you cut it all off in January. You can tell that it surprises her a little, shocks her palm into stilling against your nape: the hair is gone. Your friend is gone.
She strokes your back instead.
“Awful day,” she says, very quietly, once you’re finally done.
“Yeah,” you give back, because you know you have to. It’s how this goes. You look across at her for the first time since the start of this, taking in the changes. Stronger jaw. Scar on her chin. The slit in her left eyebrow is gone.
“How’ve you been,” you whisper, and she laughs because of how insane this is. The two of you at a funeral, slumped against the side of your car, exchanging pleasantries like there aren’t so many miles of history between you that it makes your head hurt.
“Oh,” she says, “you know. Can’t complain.”
It’s a joke. Obviously. This is the worst day of both of your lives.
Minutes pass in silence. She keeps looking over at you, an expression written into her gaze like a song which neither of you can quite figure out the words to.
“We used to hang out together. The three of us.”
She says it almost like she expects you to have forgotten. Like you ever could.
“I remember.”
You remember the sun. You remember her fists.
“I’m sorry for how I treated you,” she says. “Back then.”
Something in your heart breaks a little, and you feel it go, the pieces slicing like shards of glass beneath your ribs. Your twelve-year-old problems feel so trivial all of a sudden. How she would hit you, kiss you, call you a sin. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Your friend is dead. All of it stopped mattering when his car crashed headlong into a hedge on the side of the B4035.
“It’s okay,” you return. Against all odds, you find that you actually mean it. I forgive you. “Really. We were kids.”
Scared kids. It’s all you knew.
She’s got you fixed with that look again, and this time you turn to face her, the tears on your cheeks matching the tracks on hers.
“You really haven’t changed at all,” she whispers, and it sounds like it’s upsetting her.
“I stopped smoking.” You say it like a joke. It ends up being less funny and more just very, blindingly true.
Blink. Pause. Blink. You take one of the deepest breaths you’ve ever taken, and then you reach across and grab her hand. Her fingers are cold, her palms are warm. Like always.
You find yourself waiting for a reaction, waiting for her to rear back and hit you like she would have done when you knew her last. She doesn’t even flinch. More than that: she lets it happen. Squeezes your hand in hers, once, twice. She knows you better than anyone else ever really has, and you forget that sometimes.
Nothing else, then, for minutes. You start crying again, eventually, and she notices, doesn’t say anything. Just stays.
“I don’t know what to do,” you manage, through it all. “I loved him so much.”
“Of course you did.” She moves like a soldier, impossible and wounded, drawing a hand up to press against your cheek in what might genuinely be the first open expression of affection which she has ever, ever showed you. “Of course you did. He was your best friend.”
You say her name. It burns your tongue a little bit. And then you’ve said it, the boundary is crossed, and then you’re sobbing it into her shoulder so hard that it eventually morphs into his name. The dead friend. The one in a box.
I don’t know what to do, you keep saying, over and over, like it’s a prayer, like it can save you. I know, she gives, every time. I know. I know. I know.
Her palm at your cheek feels like something revolutionary, this kindness so stark in the face of the violence which you came to know like breathing. The bruises on your wrists, your jaw, your neck. The way she loved you. The way she hated you. The way you let it happen.
Then gravel, then footsteps. People are starting to head back to their cars.
“Your family’ll be back soon,” she says, and it sounds a whole lot like I should go.
“Yeah.”
“Are you heading back to London?”
You nod. You will not be coming back to this town, the town without him in it, for a long, long time.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”
Then she leans across and kisses you on the mouth, and you feel the entire world shrink very quickly into the space between the corners of her lips.
She breaks away as quickly as she caved in, blue eyes flickering with this birdlike fear, this self-hatred which will stick to her no matter how kind she learns to become.
“Sorry,” she whispers. You’re a little too shellshocked to respond: you loved her. You told her, once. She socked you in the nose.
“It’s okay.” You’re telling the truth. Really genuinely. She has to know. People die young in this town, it turns out. She has to know, now, here, now. “You’re okay. I forgive you.”
Neither one of you can actually tell what she’s apologising for — the kiss now, or the violence then? Not that it matters. Your friend is dead. Both are so inconsequential that it empties you out a little. Saying the words I forgive you out loud makes you feel like some sort of weird priest in a confession box, but it felt important. This is a funeral, after all.
Then: “love you,” she says quickly, like it’s something you say to each other, ever. She takes your face between her hands, hard, stares at you hard for a second, like she’s trying to memorise your features, and maybe she is, and then she’s gone.
You’ll never speak to her again.
Act 5
(It doesn’t matter how old you are. Things like age stop worrying you so much once your best friend dies at sixteen.)
As written, right? The final act. The tragic conclusion. You fall in love with enough best friends, with enough worst enemies, with enough waitresses in random bars, and eventually the ending starts to write itself.
The key word is enough. Enough heartache, enough anagrams.
This is a tragedy: you know what happens now.
I wish you were a boy. Set-up.
I could love you. Countdown.
I’m not like you. Sucker punch.
You really haven’t changed at all. Knockout.
Even at ten, you knew the words would kill you. It’s how this goes — the slow seep into your bloodstream, this lifelong gas leak until eventually it’s all the air you breathe. Except you never get over it, you never get used to it: the agony catches up eventually.
You’re the eponymous heroine.
Close your eyes.
