Queer Writings, Adventure & Spirituality

Sometimes, you cannot survive and still be who you were.

We must forget what we've learned to remember what we know.

Scars are the paler pain of survival, received unwillingly and displayed in the language of injury.

It took up all my time to remember who I was supposed to be. This character I overlaid on myself to pretend my life was normal.

At my front door, he kisses me, and I feel his lower lip trembling. My mind is still at Nurses Creek, on Coral and the shimmering dead girls. I feel the river, the trees, the ferns, caught in their grief. Life waterlogged. Heavy as a dripping sheet cold in your arms. How to lift it? Maybe you can't, or shouldn't.

His voice had that light veneer of humor that we all get, because if we don't pretend we're laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are. It's like telling stories at the bar about the worst pain you've ever been in. You laugh and you brag about it, and it turns the pain into something that will buy you a drink.

I should have said no. I should have stamped my foot, or begun to cry, or icily demanded we leave right away. But I didn't. I loved you too much, my lord. I craved you like maidens crave the grave, the way death burns for human touch: inconsolably, unrelentingly, aching for the annihilation in your kiss. I had no practice saying no to you.