My sexuality was never an easy thing for me to handle, or to even understand. I don’t know when the lines began to blur; when I caught myself staring longingly at a particularly expensive pair of Mary Janes, maybe (I was five), or maybe when I admitted to my ninth-grade psychology teacher that I found comfort in the hues of periwinkles and soft blush pinks. Maybe it was way back in the sixth grade, when my mother’s shaking hands could at last plait my hair into braids. I was fifteen at most when I realized the complexity, the sinful nature in my innocence.
“I’m different, aren’t I?” My mother looked gradually smaller every time I glanced her way, and I worried that one day I would turn to look and she would be gone forever, mere particles of dust floating away on a nonexistent breeze. Her wilted blonde hair was muted by the continual brightness of her cerulean eyes. Still, I remember a time when even her eyes were brighter, not red, not blurred from a hazy high.
“Oh, Ell,” she’d breathed, touching my cheek with a clammy hand. Her fingernails were tinged with a sickish blue-purple, the color of bruises. “You’re you, and that’s brilliant.” Her words had come out sluggish, dragged forcefully through her teeth. I had given her the most malnourished of smiles- not because I believed her, but because I was inexplicably filled with pity…for the both of us.
I didn’t need her honest answer to know that I wasn’t like everyone else- what I truly sought was compassion or assurance, or something as simple as a hand on my shoulder and a solid foundation beneath my feet. I needed someone who would tell me that there was nothing flawed within me, that nothing about me was horrid, despicable, disgusting. I guess the frightening part about that was that I felt that way about myself, and what I wanted was someone to save me from the demons in my head. In a way, she needed that too, and I pitied us as a normal man who could see through our dusty, busted windows.