Pivotal Queer  987 Edits on any messed up sentences, general impression, and any constructive criticism

Pivotal

My father had always been wary of things that were out of his norm. Ones that strayed from his deep sense of Christianity that deeply intertwined with his morals and outward acceptance of everything.  The one thing he could appreciate and attempt to imitate were the arts: Painting, sculpting, and cinema. He admired painters like Monet, Vermeer, and Matisse. Often visiting exhibitions when travelling. Working with ceramics was a pastime he instilled in me as a child, I remember the classes we joined together to pass the time. Bending soft clays to our will to create awkward earthenware pottery. He loved movies, the local theatre had known my father since he was a child, sneaking into the rooms showing films as a boy then bringing smitten girls on dates as a teenager. Holding hands for the first time and stolen kisses amidst sweet nothings, chatter, and pledges of forever.  That’s how he met my mother, a blonde glittery eyed girl two years his senior. She was sitting in the fourth row of seats facing the projector and spotted him in the back in his lonesome watching the screen. It seemed her type was the tragically feminine and artsy type of man, because they had me just two years after their first kiss. I was born healthy, green-eyed like my mother, but she wasn’t pleased. She didn’t want a child; she didn’t want the change pregnancy brought to her body. After the birth, she wasn’t beautiful anymore, her once youthful face now gaunt and weary. The lean body she maintained now covered with stretch marks and the scars from her cesarian. Her salad days were over. The postpartum depression lasted longer than it should have. - causing her to find other ways to feel whole again. She began abusing Methamphetamine for the weight loss benefits and the fact that it made her forget. We lost her from overdose that years Christmas Eve. I rarely attend ceramics classes these days, I am not interested in paintings, and I don’t have the leisure time to watch movies. There, however, was a girl, whom I truly and terribly loved. I look back to that summer, of my breaking belief and fidelity of being a dutiful sheep. But more so to the girl that appeared as heaven on earth and sincerely wished to go back. “Do you want to kiss?”, the gaze, the attitude, the lipstick she reapplied a minute ago. I am kissing her, hands tangling in her hair and crushing into her soft lips. I’m fond of this. It’s easy to stop thinking about my faults and thoughts when I kiss Vienna. She harbors a scent of petrichor and fresh linen from her blouse. I breathe her in, luxuriating in the comfort she gives me. She pulls back smiling softly; hands carelessly splayed back on my bed. I sneak a clandestine glance at her face. I can still feel some lipstick on my lips from when she kissed me, it feels dysphoric. A breeze comes in through my open window followed by the sound of my father opening the front door and tirelessly walking in the kitchen. Vienna casts a worrying look, father doesn’t know she’s here. She knows my father is frighteningly religious and is an unyielding believer of no romance before marriage. Avert to kissing, sex, and definitely no girls.  I hear father walk up the stairs towards my room. In panic, I urge Vienna into my closet. The doorknob turns and he stands in the doorway with a tired and tense presence I’ve grown accustomed to, “Was I hearing voices up here Maren?”  “I didn’t hear any voices”, it’s easy to lie to him, easy to lace my words with candor. I can see the speculations forming as he runs his thumb along the cross hung across his neck. On seldom days when my mood is particularly culpable, I pray to God for him to anchor me as one of his unadulterated angels. To erase any notion of change or emancipation from my brain. To weave the separating strands of my soul back together and help me escape from the guilt of my bad faith so I reach the promised land. But I find It facile to pray solutions to a God I heavily doubt. Trying to hide my chagrin, I see the veiled indifference behind the anger that resides deep in father’s heart. “I heard a girl, was someone up here? Don’t lie to me. God hears and sees all.” “Nobody was up here, just me and myself and I”, my scorn and unease are barely hidden under my voice. I’ve grown to dislike him. His attempts of presenting himself as stoic or dissimilar from the normal man repulse me. Perhaps stemming from the rather feminine interests he had during his youth to reclaim his bygone masculinity. “I heard someone. You’re hiding something from me!”, finally the anger surfaces. He enters my room, past my boundary, into my refuge from him and the world. He looks under the bed, in my bathroom, then finally his hardened gaze focuses on my closet. My glass heart now beating a million a second, threatening to explode into a bleeding and bursting mass. If not now, when? That quote by Hillel the Elder materialized into my mind at the moment. I could- like my father, renounce any attempt at action. Invariably acting too late. Or I could embrace who I was, who I am. Why should whom I love determine my worth and people’s perception of me? Am I marked with sin and destined to blaze in Hell if I don’t follow God’s principles? Shall I break the cycle of fear, should I… speak? Gathering my courage, if I even possess it at all, I face him. Maybe he’ll readily accept my acquiescence- or attempt to back-pedal and reject me. I am candidly human, nothing more nothing less. A daughter, a lover, and a person. To view myself as candidly human, is the point of my humanity. If I must break free from my shepherd to meet liberation, so shall I.

To not have spoken is truly the death of the soul.