You probably don’t remember me well so I’ll cut to the chase.
I think I had just taken a math test or quiz or exam. I don’t remember what it was on, but I can still hear the rumbling static and Kill Bill sirens prowling out from the back of my mind, thunder approaching from a distance. Back when my mother still referred to it as my condition, before the panic disorder diagnosis, I remember the way the cold would settle over my shoulders like a kiss of death; my body’s own abrupt signal from Judas. This day I bolted for the semblance of privacy found only in toilet stalls. Of course, you must have heard about my sickness back then, sitting in my shadows and growing in peer-reviewed whispers. I was a severe asthmatic. I was the only queer person out in my class. I was crazy. We shared a locker room for soccer five days a week, and attended school Mass as a parish every month.
You knew me.
I can’t say I recollect what class you were trying to escape or if you genuinely had to use the bathroom, but you were there when I needed help. I didn’t need you. I needed help.
This distinction is so important to me.
My whole world was crumbling. Rubble was all I had. You didn’t know that though. You knew nothing and you knew too much. I don’t know if that’s why you did what you did, but – I was losing consciousness. I was dying. The static spilled into a roar that filled my feet and fingertips. It sat on my chest. I was evaporating before my own eyes. Drowned hands can’t call for help. They can’t even text, actually. Drowned feet can’t swim to shore. They can’t even stand. But then, there was you.
Appearing to me like a demigod divine walking on toilet water. Thinking you were my savior, I used the last of my mobility ramming my deoxygenated fingers into the lock until it opened. There I was at your feet, wheezing out a sob and what did you do? What did you see?
a sinner
You laid hands on my shoulders and told me to listen, that you were going to help me. Your eyes were so declarative. I was relieved. I believed you. I did. That is until you put your hands on my forehead and began invoking the holy trinity. Of course, the crazy immunocompromised dyke from soccer collapses in front of you, clinging to consciousness, and you decide that an amateur attempt at a bathroom exorcism would heal my body. Lord knows you had the passion, I can still hear the self-righteous timbre of your voice releasing an overflow of humble prayer. But, you didn’t have my inhaler. It was in my locker. I was trying to tell you this, pawing at your pleated skirt.
I prayed at that moment too. Of course I did. I needed help. But my God didn’t send you, he wouldn’t. I guess I still don’t understand. Did you think he wouldn’t listen to me? What could your prayer have done that mine wouldn’t?
Maybe you thought you were special. Does God answer his queer children? Your shepherd saves only the whitest of sheep. Why find the nurse when you can scorn my difference to the heavens instead? I’m starting to wonder if you were so scared of my pride that you thought my predicament was the punishment for knowing who I was more than I knew my place.
Maybe we had too much fear between us. Mine snaking up and around my chest, caught in the throat, while yours kept your eyes peeled and your body paralyzed, forcing you to see consequence. To this day, I want to understand what you saw. Maybe you didn’t even see me.
You looked for me and found only a demon in my shoes speaking in tongues. Untrustworthy in nature, you looked at me and saw Mark 9:14-29. I think I saw it reflected back in the glassy eyes of religious psychosis, but this time it read:
When the girl finishes her prayer, she sees she is surrounded by a crowd of her peers. She utters the last few words of prayer and sees the light return to the eyes of her fallen classmate. The wretched demon polluting the young weak female’s mind in sinful possession, flooding it with illness and unclean desires, had been conquered and sent to the nearest satan-associated animal (pig or goat), who will likely jump off the closest cliff they can find or drown themselves across the street in the Delaware river. For it was the sheer willpower and unshakable faith of this stubborn freckled Mary Jane Messiah-Sue that saved her classmate’s hellbound soul; for thus saith the lord with no possible room for misinterpretation: this is the way.
Because that’s how you were told it was supposed to go with sinners like me, right? I wasn’t supposed to heave myself back to the ground in horror. A different student wasn’t supposed to find us and get the nurse. The devil wasn’t supposed to be scared of you.
I know you went on to be the academy’s next golden girl and everyone’s favorite honor student, but the day you looked at me and saw a demon, I looked at you and saw a fault in my church, in the people who taught us right from wrong, in the world constructed around us. You made a judgment call and I suffered because you didn’t know how to love in any other language but the one you found burned into brimstone. Blind and illiterate, you kept turning water into wine and can’t understand why this skill only seems to satisfy the alcoholic.
I don’t know if I’ll ever find out what you felt that day but I’ve been thinking about you because – It happened again, you know. More rare now than when we last saw each other, but this April I was in an airport running heart over heels to catch a connecting flight. I was traveling alone. My inhaler was packed away. My phone was dead. The storm returned, filling fluttering eyes, full lungs, and a well intentioned binder. I fell to the ground. I awoke to an angel screaming for paramedics and an arm propping me back up, to an inhaler being located and shoved in my face, to oxygen in my nose and questions about my course of study, to one of the tallest men I’ve ever seen working at an airport telling me a story because I reminded him of his kid. They knew I was different. It came out and yet –
They saw so much in me. They didn’t know me. They knew enough.
After our encounter, I had been so scared of being found, of staying open to the world when I have been forward with an identity so dissonant with common ideals. I know you have felt the same way. There were rumors during quarantine that you were too scared to leave your house. Peer-shaped whispers of sickness told me that well after the worst was over, the walls were still closing in on you, keeping you inside. I want to see more in you. I know too much. I don’t know enough.
You once performed a recitation of Rita Dove’s 1999 “Testimonials” for a school event, that told me there could be more. I felt it. It was the way you spoke wonder, a time before learning, before someone else’s words were put in your mouth. It was wistful and full of a buzzing nostalgia, like you were looking forward to something that’s already past.
Back when the earth was new
and heaven just a whisper,
back when the names of things
hadn’t had time to stick; (1-4)
I heard you practicing it in the halls. It was well after our falter together. So when I heard you say it.
I caught my breath and called that life, (11)
I couldn’t distinguish the subject, but I felt the weight it had for you. I heard you say it again and again, trying to recall space to breathe. Once desperate. Once hopeful.
Last I heard, a friend ran into you at a queer music festival this past year. You didn’t see her but she saw something in you. She told me you looked different. I guess we both do. I’m glad. That day you had prayed for me, but today –
Freedom whispers the sinner freedom for us both.
– it’s my turn.
