When I was 11, my best friend told me that they were gay.
Their eyes were glazed with watery doubt and their voice quivered to the same pace as my trembling heart. I prayed for seven hours that evening, begging God to cleanse them of these sins that I didn’t quite understand to be wrong but that my mother and father and sister and aunt spat out like deadly poison.
When I was 11, my best friend told me that they were gay. And I screamed words that I learnt from my family, words that felt ***** and disfigured in my mouth, words that had no meaning that I could decipher.
When I was 11 years old, my best friend told me that when we watched Harry Potter together, when our friends drooled over Cedric Diggory, they
fell
in
love
with Hermione Granger
When I was 11, my best friend told me that they were gay… and I didn’t know what the word meant. Just that it was awful and demonic and that they were going to rot in hell. At the tender age of 11 my mother’s religion eviscerated a 7 year friendship.
When I was 12, I realised that it wasn’t God I worshipped, it was the feeling of belonging. I idolised my Father’s radiant smile and my Sister’s reverent voice, her face raised to the heavens and her song echoing across a stained glass chapel. When I was only 12 years old, I discovered that I was a slave of my family’s beliefs, and that I didn’t understand what my religion even was, only that my aunt liked it when we clasped hands around a dinner table and that my gran reminded me to recite the same words before bed every night. Pretty words like ‘glory’ and ‘heaven’ but also malicious words like ‘temptation’ and ‘evil’ and ‘sin’, words that I, with a shudder and an almighty stab of guilt, remembered saying to my best friend at 11 years old.
When I was 13, I was angry. A furious cloud of space-black smoke swirling in my stomach and pulling on my tongue, until I was a silent and malevolent storm. When I was 13, I realised that if this is what being close to god feels like, then I would rather burn in the raging pits hell, surrounded by the same billowing barrages of blackness as those inside of me. When I was 13, I found out what gay meant, and I sobbed and howled and screamed. Inside of my own head. When I was 13 I apologised to the person who was once my best friend, and with eyes glazed with watery defiance and a voice quivering with nothing but assuredness I told them ‘me too’.
And we clung onto each other promising to never let go.
~When I was 13, I learnt what gay meant, and I understood why my heart beat so so so incredibly fast all the way in my stomach when we hugged.