It Feels Like Independence Day

[This one was hard to write. It may be hard to read]

Once, when I was smaller, I was terrified that my aunt and uncle were going to beat someone up in the big blue van they had. And when I say "terrified", I mean that. Memories of the nervous nausea that comes along with that kind of anxiety never leaves you. And I knew they were serious. A few years before, while we were camping at the Prairie Creek Reservoir, they captured a mole around 10am and stabbed it to death with a screwdriver. I begged them. I remember begging them until I threw up to just let it live. They didn't listen; I locked myself in our pop-up camper and cried until I was delirious.

So, I knew they'd do it. This time I didn't protest.

They lived near the rumored gay park in Muncie where, if you were driving through the park at night and someone tapped his brakes at you, it was invitation to get to know each other better. And this just didn't sit well with them. I still don't know the origin of the hate they had. Queer Bashing became an obsession in many conversations and it all became super aggravated after school one day. My cousin came home and said that a man tried to coerce him into his car. Which, I believe happened. Instead of praising my cousin for staying strong and getting away, and thanking their lucky stars nothing happened to their son, my aunt and uncle were furious. This was the night that someone was going to get it real bad, pay for these sins and get dumped near the White River, bloody and broken. They had a plan and I was this little tiny thing, petrified for another living soul.

Yesterday I was reminded of this memory while I was running. Running affords me a lot of time to myself - and yesterday... yesterday, I felt free. Absolutely and stunningly free. Somehow I got out of terrible situations in my formative years unscathed - save my gnawing anxieties. Somehow, even as a tiny, I knew killing a mole with a screwdriver was a disgusting display of brute and possibly the deepest sin I had experienced.

Somehow, even though I was inundated with the gospel that homosexuality was wrong and needed to be punished, I never believed it. I never believed it and I never understood it.

Yesterday I was reminded that sometimes there's a resiliency that needs to be praised.
I was reminded that even though some people hate, some people love. Some people love. Some people love.

And how lucky I am for a million reasons.

I Think I'm Cured

It's been a long time. And I'm not going to sugar coat anything, so, be prepared for facts that slice through human bodies easily and without remorse.

Let's start with the basics: life can fuck you up. That seems circular, I know, but go with it. Truths are vague and ever changing and unfair. Existence is hard, because it is, and also because, if we go in and out of it, is it really existing. Okay. Basics covered.

Now, on to the hard-stuff: Remember my grandma who had the health scare? Well, it wasn't over. As it is with life, things only got worse.

She was finally diagnosed with Giant Cell Arteritis. The devastation is, though, she was diagnosed too late by her back-woods physicians. She has lost complete vision in her right eye and approximately 80% in the other. No peripheral. She'll close her good eye and cry about the "gray mud" she sees. "Gray mud" she'll cry - that's all I see. Now, the 20% she has retained is dim. She calls life the "Dark City" - and it wouldn't be so beautiful if it wasn't so shattering. She'll smile and shake her head and cry and convince me that she'll be fine living in the Dark City.

Yesterday morning she woke up and everything was a little dimmer. She began shaking and crying and we admitted her into the hospital again. This time in Indy. (We'll never go back to Ball Memorial in Muncie. Fuck those guys).

Blindness, guys. We are battling an auto-immune disorder that attacks blood flow to the brain- it's already killed one optic nerve and it's trying so hard to slaughter the other.

We're sad. My papa cries and cries when she's not around. She cries and cries when he's not around. We're all dying in the Dark City.

But I suppose we all are.

I will write more about this somewhere, sometime.