Creative piece published anonymously in Issue 9 of Portrait Magazine, page 32.
Edited by Heejae Jung.
My queerness wraps around me like a warm blanket. My queerness wraps around me like a burial shroud. And I can fashion it into the noose around my neck. And I can hold onto it as the last hope keeping me alive. 妈妈，do you know all the ways I have wanted to unravel it for you? Do you remember that I have tried? Part of me wants to tell you everything at the end of a long road trip, to leave you with something to think about while I’m away. Or maybe I’ll testify to you this time, after I’ve already fallen apart in the living room. But the rest of me is enmeshed in fear that turns hesitation into a factual “I shouldn’t.” I want to shove myself into a narrative of “I’ve always been like this.” Mother, someone as brilliant as you wouldn’t have raised a straight daughter. I want to bury you under the realization that I knew of my queerness long, long, ago. I almost want to strangle you with the confrontation that you denied some objective truth. Really, I only want to dissolve into your arms in a bath of salty tears and affirmations of “I will love you anyway, always.” But I don’t know just how many layers I should peel back. I am not so radiant. I am so dull that I can piece together how you have failed to see. So I decide to leave who I am for you to imagine.
Today I give you everything else. I tell you so many of the worst parts of myself and you sit and listen. You try to understand, even though you’ve seen the world differently for so many decades. I don’t think you can ever really understand all of me and I don’t give you the chance to. Oh, the little mistakes you make years ago that come to haunt you. You’ve tried everything else. But is there a limit to the unconditional? When I fall apart, when I’ve slept the days away and glued myself to an empty screen, I come crawling back to you. You’re always here for me; everything else is the corpse in your arms. Yet my queerness remains nailed to the cross.
After I tried to come out to you the first time, you shoved that moment out of your memory. I know you’re afraid. You’ve seen the signs the Christians post. You know what my father would say. You don’t know that I’ve been down part of that path already, so you don’t have to hold me every step of the way. Mother, I have a lot of thoughts about sin for a generational atheist. Dreams where I burn in hell and rot away haunt my childhood slumber. But time has shown me that this thing they call sin can feel so light. It is the joy that’s just around the corner that will keep me going. It feels so light, like the sensation of melting into a kiss on a rainy summer day. It feels so light I could just float away. How could it drag me down to a hell I hardly believe in?