I’ve been giving consideration to space lately.
Not about astronauts and the greater pull of the universe outside our atmosphere although that is pretty school stuff but space under a social microscope.
What spaces I am allowed to occupy in microcosm of a small southern city.
Being openly queer in the south is walking around with an invitation for stares.
Some stares are slack jawed children.
Some stares are clenched fists,.
Some stares are curious lip bites.
Some stares are former friends.
Stares linger. They linger in the few safe spaces we can exist in, in a place like this in a times like these.
All of us lose places when our hearts are broken.
It might be places we refuse to enter or spaces we can no longer exist in comfortably.
We clearly cannot cut our town in half but you, clearly, can cut our friends in two. At least, I have not seen or heard from them in the months since our asunder. I must no longer have access to their eyes, smiles, and warmth for I have not heard from them in a while.
However freedom is a place too. I carry it with me wherever I go now. What place do you carry with you?
When we occupy shared spaces, the places I have asked for space from you but you refuse to yield, I see sadness and empty within you. Did you always live there?
If trust were a place I wish you would visit; then I might believe you when you say you have not slandered my name in our spaces. I would not walk in to conversations wondering if the feeling of my name hanging in the air came from my friends mouths or are they echoes of imagination staring me down.
