December
December in Portland smells like rain and Douglas fir and something approaching an ending that is also a beginning.
December || Atmosphere || Change || Alex
The month had a quality that I couldn’t name immediately and then named: threshold. Like a room at the edge of another room. Like the last page of a chapter, where you could feel the weight of what was coming even before you turned it. I was aware, in December, of being in the last weeks of something — the last weeks of the version of myself I had been constructing since eighth grade, the version whose third index card was a daily reminder of what not to say. The thing was, once you put the word Soon on the card, you had made a promise to yourself. And I had always kept my promises, particularly the ones that cost me something.
Things happened in December. Priya and Zara went on six dates and Priya told me, in the way she told me things that were significant, by showing up at my door at nine-thirty on a Thursday night with two cups of tea and sitting on my bedroom floor and saying: “I think I’m in love with her.” She said it with the expression of someone who had organized this conclusion very carefully and had arrived at it through a rigorous process that had nevertheless produced a result that surprised her. “I think so too,” I said. “You can tell?” “You’re different,” I said. “Like you’re in color in the places you used to be in black and white.” She looked at me. “That’s a little dramatic,” she said. “It’s accurate,” I said. She sipped her tea. “Are you okay?” she said. “You’ve been different too. Quieter. Thinking more.” “I’m always thinking,” I said. “Different thinking,” she said. “Like you’re on the edge of something.” I thought about the word Soon. I thought about December and thresholds and the weight of what was coming. “I might tell my dad something,” I said. The sentence came out before I had decided to produce it. Priya went completely still — the particular stillness of someone who had been waiting for a sentence like that for two years and was receiving it with the full seriousness it deserved. “Something,” she said, carefully. “Something he doesn’t know yet,” I said. “Something true.” She was very quiet for a moment. “Can I know?” she said. “The same something?” I looked at my hands. I looked at the desk where the index cards were. I took a breath. “I’m gay,” I said. The words came out at normal volume. They came out without my hands shaking, which surprised me. They came out and then they were in the room, occupying the space between me and my best friend, and the room did not collapse. Priya set her tea down. She moved across the floor to where I was sitting. She put her arms around me, not a quick hug but a real one, the kind that had weight and duration. “Hi,” she said. Into my shoulder. “Hi,” I said. We stayed like that for a minute. “How long?” she said. “Three years of knowing,” I said. “Ten minutes of saying.” She pulled back and looked at me. Her eyes were bright. “You okay?” “Yes,” I said. “Really?” “Really,” I said. And I was. I was shaking slightly, a post-adrenaline tremor, but underneath it something that I would only identify clearly later: the beginning of relief. The coat, starting to come off. The river, starting to run.
She stayed until eleven. We talked about everything — not just the disclosure but what came after it, the things I was thinking about, the questions I hadn’t answered. She asked about Jamie, very carefully, and I said: “That’s a different conversation.” “But there is a conversation,” she said. “There might be,” I said. She nodded, with the expression of someone filing something with the appropriate weight. When she left she hugged me again at the door. “I’m proud of you,” she said. “It’s just the truth,” I said, which was what she had said to me, months ago, in the park with the roses. She smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “But saying it took something.” She went home. I stood in my room with the word Soon on the index card and thought: okay. That was the first one. The safe one. Now the hard ones.