I Tell Jamie
Some things you can only say to the person they’re about. The courage required for that specific truth is its own category.
Jamie || Coming Out || Honesty || Heart
Itold Jamie on January third, which was the first Thursday of the new year, the first library session after the break. I had spent the two weeks of winter break thinking about it — not organizing, not indexing, just thinking, which was something I was doing more of now that the third card was clean. I had thought about what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, and I had arrived, by the third of January, at the conclusion that preparation was the wrong approach for this specific conversation. That what it required was not a framework but honesty in real time, which was the thing that debate with Jamie had been teaching me all semester and that I was apparently still learning.
We were at our table. Jamie had their coffee. I had my notebook open but wasn’t looking at it. “I need to tell you something,” I said, which was not a sentence I used often and which caused Jamie to put down the coffee and look at me with the full attention. “Okay,” they said. “I told my dad something over Christmas,” I said. “Something true. That I’ve been — that I’ve been not saying for a while.” Jamie waited. They were very good at waiting — the specific waiting of someone who understood that rushing this kind of moment was the worst thing you could do. “I’m gay,” I said. The library was quiet around us. Someone at the reference desk three tables over was typing something. The January rain was doing its thing at the windows. Jamie looked at me. Their expression was — I want to be precise about this — not surprised. It was the expression of someone receiving a fact they had been holding the space for, and finding that the fact, now delivered, was exactly what the space had been designed to contain. “Thank you for telling me,” they said, which was what my dad had said and which I was starting to understand was the right first thing to say — not because it was a formula but because it was true, because receiving a true thing from someone you cared about was something to be grateful for. “How did it go?” they said. “With your dad.” “Better than I thought,” I said. “He was — he was good. He’s been good.” “And you?” “I’m good,” I said. “Actually good. Not managed good.” They smiled. “You do look different,” they said. “Like something’s been — ” “The coat,” I said. They raised an eyebrow. “Priya’s metaphor,” I said. “Taking a heavy coat off.” “Priya knew?” “I told her in December,” I said. “Before my dad.” “Okay,” they said. “The safe one first.” “Yes.” They picked up their coffee. They looked at me over the rim of it with the brown-green eyes. “Can I say something?” they said. “Yes,” I said. “I’ve been — ” They stopped. Reorganized. “I’ve been hoping you’d tell me for a while,” they said, carefully. “Not because I needed to know. Because I could see that you were carrying it and I wanted to — I wanted you to be able to put it down.” I looked at them. At the careful, open face. At the person who had, across four months of Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, become the person I most wanted to tell things to. “Jamie,” I said. “Yes,” they said, which was not an answer to a question I had asked but which I understood immediately as an answer to the question I was about to ask. The word they had said to me in October, after the walk north. For what it’s worth, whatever you’re working on, the answer is yes. I sat with it for a moment. The library. The rain. The new year with its new quality. “Can I ask what the yes is for?” I said. They smiled — not the small warm one, a larger one, the one that changed the whole face. “Ask me something specific,” they said, “and I’ll give you a specific answer.” I looked at them. I thought about the debate resolution: authenticity requires courage. I thought about the coat and the river and the word Soon and Now. I thought about everything that had led to this table in this library on this January Thursday. I said: “Would you want to — sometime — get coffee somewhere that isn’t the library?” Their smile got larger. “Yes,” they said. “I would want to do that.” “Okay,” I said. “Good.” “Good,” they said. We looked at each other across the library table for a moment that was exactly long enough. Then Jamie picked up a pen. “Okay,” they said. “State is in six weeks. Where are we on the second rebuttal?” We went back to work. Everything was the same as it had been an hour ago and also entirely different, and both of those things were true, and both of them were good.