What I Haven’t Said
The things I haven’t said have their own weight, their own gravity. Sometimes I think they’re the realest things about me.
Alex || Internal || Identity || Turning Point
Iam going to tell you what’s on the third index card. Not what’s written on it — the card is blank now, has been blank for a week — but what used to be written on it, what I wrote and rewrote and refined over three years of mornings. It said: Remember that you are Alex Reyes. You are the debate partner, the restaurant son, Priya’s best friend, the student with the 3.9 GPA. You are these things. Focus on these things. That was the third card. Not a denial — I never wrote anything on it that was a lie. Just a redirection. A daily reminder of all the things that were safely true, which was the technique I had developed at fourteen for not thinking about the thing that was also true but that I had decided I was not ready for. I was seventeen now. I had been not-ready for three years. Somewhere in the last month, something had shifted in the readiness. I wasn’t there yet. But I could feel the edge of it the way you could feel the edge of sleep — not the sleep itself, but the boundary between the waking version of yourself and whatever came after.
Here is what was true: I had known since I was fourteen, in the specific way that you could know something without being able to say it, that I was gay. I had known it the way I had known, at six, that words on a page meant something — not suddenly but inevitably, like something the brain was always going to arrive at. I had known it and I had managed it. I had managed it through index cards and argument frameworks and the careful construction of a self that was real but not complete. I had managed it because the thought of my dad’s face if I told him — my dad who worked doubles at the restaurant and loved me in the quiet, exhausted way of someone who had done everything alone — the thought of that face was too much. I didn’t know what expression it would make. I didn’t know if it would make the wrong one. And not knowing was, somehow, more manageable than finding out. So I had managed.
Tyler Chase had known, at fourteen, that something was happening between us. We had not named it. We had not discussed it. We had conducted our experiment in the specific privacy of two boys who did not have the language yet and who were operating entirely on instinct and confusion and something that felt real and that neither of them was ready to call by its name. When he moved to Seattle we had let the silence cover it. I had, at fourteen, made a decision that felt like protection: I would get myself to a point — a safe point, a planned point, a point where everything else was in order — before I had this. Before I said this. The plan had felt reasonable at fourteen. At seventeen, watching Priya tell people in the cafeteria at normal speaking volume, watching Dean say bisexual the way you said I like coffee, watching Jamie look at me with the brown-green eyes and the expression that said I see you, take your time — at seventeen the plan felt like what it actually was, which was a very elaborate form of being afraid.
I was afraid of my dad’s face. I was afraid of the conversation, of not having the right words for it, of the silence after the words. I was afraid that the version of me he was proud of — mi hijo brillante, his brilliant son — was the managed version, and that the real version would require something from him that he might not have, not because he was a bad father but because he was an exhausted one. I was afraid that loving me differently would cost him something I didn’t want to cost him. I was afraid of being wrong about what he could manage. I was afraid of being right. I sat at my desk with the blank index card and all of this arranged around me like furniture I had been living with so long I no longer saw it. I thought about the debate argument: authenticity requires courage. I thought about every person who had asked me if I believed it. I thought: I believe it. I believe it because I know exactly what it costs to not be authentic and the cost has been very high and I am very tired of paying it. I picked up a pen. I looked at the blank card. I wrote one word on it: Soon.