growing up it was god. all, always. i wanted him to fill me. i prayed for friends. i was always different, constantly trying to be the same. nothing else existed. if just once playground kids called my name to join their game i would have cried to god later with tears of excruciatingly deep joy. but i never heard that call. i took their shit. i created my own shit. i thought there was something to gain by silence, and same, same, same. i cried every night. i cried every night. but NOW i've made choices. now i hear my name every morning and a painfully hot cup of coffee prepared just right sits calmly in her hand as she coaxes me out of bed. when i go downstairs, i am greeted by him, and him, and her, and her, and him, and her. six. SIX! i cried every night, but NOW i have SIX brothers and sisters, a family in a house full of the hugest hearts and the warmest hands always calling, always waiting, ready to laugh and accept and learn and grow. i am still different. but we are all different. and we all love. except. except... there are things. you know what things, but they do not. did i learn them from choices i made? a community that taught me? would i have ended up this way in the end, anyway? you can't teach queerness. it's easy to forget, too. to displace feelings of discomfort, however slight, on the weather. the cat. bad day at work. forgetting is easy when everywhere you look, a girl is a girl and a boy is a boy. it's that simple. but when remembering comes.... that's when it gets tough. it's when i start to think. it's when i look in the box upstairs, my summer clothes box, and see over a dozen ties sitting crisply together, folded over one another like starched memories. how do i tell them, these people who finally love me, how do i tell them? how can i explain? they would love me no matter what; it's not about that. it's not that i am afraid to be the only one. i can do that, i can be one standing visibly alone. but it's lonely. i want, i want, to walk anywhere and see colors and shapes jump out at me, people fucking with bodies and ideas all day every way. it's lonely here. where are you? where am i, for how much longer? i wonder what more i can be. i wonder how much more there is to discover. i wonder how far i will go when the time comes for me to fly away towards you. you, you, you my people, my crazy homo people.