What I Know Now
The things you learn in the year you figure yourself out are not the same as the things you learn in any other year. They are more foundational. They are the ones you build everything else on.
Alex || Reflection || Identity || Growth
Here is what I know now, that I did not know in September. I know that the third index card was never going to fix the thing it was meant to fix, because the thing it was meant to fix was not a logistics problem. You cannot organize yourself out of being who you are. You can be very efficient about the management, and I was, and the management was expensive and exhausting and produced a version of me that was technically impeccable but had, as Jamie identified in our first library session, no pulse. I know now what the pulse is. It is the part of you that believes what it’s saying. It is the part that shows up in the room completely rather than showing up in the version that the room is safe for. It is the part that Priya showed in the cafeteria and that Dean expressed when he said bisexual like a fact of weather and that Abuela Elena finally got to show in the tin box and the kitchen with the hot chocolate, forty-seven years late but arriving nonetheless.
I know that my dad loved me before and loves me now, and the loving is the same and also more, because he loves more of me now, the real amount of me, which is more than the managed version offered. I know that the fear I had — that knowing the true thing would cost me the thing I most valued — was the fear that kept me from finding out that the true thing was exactly what the thing I most valued needed in order to fully exist. I know that courage is not the absence of fear. I argued this position for an entire debate season and then lived it and confirmed it in the specific empirical way that theory becomes knowledge when it is lived. Courage is the decision to act in the presence of fear. The fear is not the enemy. The fear is the companion. You take it with you and you go anyway.
I know what I want to do next year. I know what I want to study and where I want to study it and who I want to be studying near. I know that the answer to every question that has been asked of me since September is yes — yes I believe it, yes I’m here, yes I’m working on it, yes this is who I am. I know that the river runs and the room is warm and the coat has been off for months and the air feels like itself now, the way air feels when you have been breathing it without restriction for long enough that you cannot remember what the restriction felt like. I know that Priya is going to Stanford and that Zara is going to Oregon State and that they are going to be fine, better than fine, exactly right. I know that Tyler is going to find his way toward who he is, slowly, with the help of people who have been where he is and made it to the other side. I know that Mrs. Callahan was right about everything. I know that Jamie is the best argument partner and the best friend and the specific person I want to tell things to when things happen. I know that love is not a lightning bolt. It is morning light arriving gradually, then completely, in a room you have been in the dark of for a long time. I know because I watched it happen. I know because I am the room and I am also the light.
I am Alex Reyes. I am seventeen years old, almost eighteen. I am a state debate champion and the son of Carmen Reyes and the grandson of Elena Reyes who gave me a tin box and everything in it. I am Priya’s best friend and Jamie’s person and the kid in the hallway who nods at Tyler now with the nod of two people who have left something behind and are both better for the leaving. I am organized and intense and driven and I have a 3.9 GPA and a pulse in every argument I make. I am gay, which I know without managing it, which I say without hedging it, which is part of who I am the way every other true thing is part of who I am — not the whole story but a real chapter, a chapter I wrote in this year and will keep writing in every year that follows. I am the person who put Soon on the index card and then lived up to it. I am, finally and at last, not afraid of being fully seen. The room is warm. The river runs. The colors I carry — all of them, the whole spectrum — are mine, and I am keeping them.