Blog 6

Feedback: Id like to know if I should elaborate more on some of the experiences I mentioned within the story. Should I go into more detail.


My dad always used to ask me this one question and I could never really understand why. We would be floating around in the pool on a hot summer afternoon without a care in the world when all of a sudden “Are you sure you’re not gay? I’m your father, I’d still love you no matter what.” Defensive wasn’t even the word for my reaction. I’d get damn right angry. “No!” I’d say with a roll of my eyes. Then I’d float away and hope the issue was closed, and it was, until the next time he asked. That’s not a question that a son wanted to answer over and over again. I was a boy. I liked girls. All my guy friends in middle school liked girls. It was normal and so was I. I shouldn’t have had to prove it over and over again. I was just a late bloomer. That’s what my dad always said.

I remember it being so distinctive. Standing in my driveway with my best friend one day over the summer before I was to start the 8^th grade; the last year of middle school before high school. I remember suddenly thinking to myself “I’m really not happy.”Maybe I was upset that school was going to start. Maybe I was just a little lonely. Everyone I knew was in a relationship it seemed. Even my juvenile knew that it was silly and that none of them were “real” but just for show because it was the “cool” thing to do, but I still. Maybe it was time to get a girlfriend. It all happened pretty fast after that. I asked Rosa, my good friend since pre-k (who just happened to also be a girl) if she wanted to go out with me. She immediately responded with a resounding yes. Ah, things were starting to look up. Now I could start getting out of this funk, right? Even though I spent half of the year sharing secret love letters with Rosa during class and everyone said that we looked cute together, I couldn’t get away from this underlying feeling of gloom. If anything, as the year moved on, it only got worse.

My father used to have a lot of friends. That was before his business partner stole money from him and my dad lost all hope in humankind; becoming a recluse. Before that, there would always friends of his at home. My parents loved to entertain. The women would hang out in the kitchen or living room chatting while the guys were in front of the television watching sports and drinking scotch. I lived in a cliché. The men would yell and scream and curse and I was expected to sit with them and act in kind. My dad knew very well that I was not into sports. He made me try out for about ten different kinds when I was younger and I hated them all, except baseball. I actually really liked it until my dad decided to be a coach and ruined it all. Anyway, I would just sit with them and think about another book I wanted to buy or something when I’d hear, “look at that little faggot.” Or,“what a fairy” as they stared at the screen talking about someone on the team. I knew what these words were in reference to. It wasn’t a favorable position to be in. It’s a good thing I was straight then.

High school was about to start. Just a few months away. Rosa and I were going to be going to St. Mary’s together. What a treat. My sister had gone there and my parents figured that if it was good enough for her, it was good enough for me. Then one day a representative from this private college prep school came by and made a presentation in my class. It was an all-boy school but that honestly didn’t mean anything to me. It was prestigious. They had a reputation. I wanted in. I convinced my folks to let me take the entrance exam, and they finally caved. Took the test, passed it, and became an honorable student of Saint Joseph’s High School. I excitedly went up to my girlfriend in the hall the day after I found out to tell her that I had gotten in. “That’s great! Congrats.” I don’t think she understood what I meant. “I got in” I repeated. Her face suddenly changed. She was a statue. “Oh.” And that was the end of my very first relationship.

High school was hell. The absolute worst four years of my life. I was depressed all the time. I couldn’t get away from it. It was as if all happiness had been sucked out of my life. There is no way to explain it without sounding like an angsty little teenager, but that’s exactly what I was. Nothing made it go away. I was full of anger and jealousy. I would look at the guys in my classes and hate them but could not for the life of me figure out why. I turned to cutting because It was something I could control. It would put me in pain but at least it was pain that I could explain. Faulty reasoning but it’s all I had. I did it right on my wrists, easily visible to anyone willing to ask. But nobody ever did.

Being in a high school whose student body was entirely made up of males probably cemented the fact that I was what I was and that it was no longer realistic to just think otherwise. Being gay was a part of me. I was me. That didn’t mean I had any intentions of sharing it with anyone. I would remain silent. Gay guys got too much unwanted attention. They were looked at differently. During my Sophomore year, there was a boy who transferred out of our class and the rumor was because he was a bisexual and that that was not acceptable. Whether he left because he was being ridiculed or because the school asked him to was never made clear. No one really made fun of anyone at my school though so I was inclined to believe the latter. Either way, I was definitely not ready to risk anything. My life was rough enough. I didn’t need any more reasons to be sad.

Life went on, I had a couple of other fake relationships to try and play off as though I was “normal” and everything else remained the same. Uneventful. High School was finally over and I was ok with it. I had survived several suicidal gestures and had come out the other end. I learned to be numb to everything. I was unwilling to let the depression get the best of me, to the point where a gesture would become a definite act, but that didn’t mean happiness would just flow over me. My only option was to become numb. I had come to terms with being gay, but couldn’t tell my parents, so I decided to just not care anymore. About anything. This is how the beginning of my college life went. I didn’t want to die anymore but living didn’t really hold much splendor either because I had resigned to be alone. I was stuck forever in the middle.

One day, something happened. Something that I cannot explain even until today. I woke up one morning and had an epiphany. I realized that just because I couldn’t tell my parents, that didn’t mean I couldn’t tell anyone. From that day on, Things got better. I told my closest friends, met an amazing guy, and decided to finally take charge of my life. I decided that I had a right to be happy.

Blog 5

***Apparently this only saved as a draft and was not posted last week***

Potential story ideas for this one might be a little more difficult. I feel as though I want to go deeper into something more personal for me.

I can talk about the process i went through coming to terms with my sexuality...or something

Blog 4

Notes: I Have to focus on the message of my story. I have an idea but need to flesh it out more.

Paradigm Shift

My room has always been much smaller than I would have preferred it to be. Moving into what was once our guest room on the first floor from my even smaller nursery on the second would grant me, I thought, a bit more space and freedom from the rest of my family. Independence – or as close to it as a 13 year old could hope for. I no longer had to worry about being caught doing my homework at all hours of the night by my parents because they saw a light was on, acting like a beacon to signal my constant procrastination.  I could listen to my music as loudly as I wanted without having my sister pound on the wall separating our rooms because I was distracting her from her sticker collecting adventures. Clearly more important than whatever I had going on. If only I had a wall to pound on every time she decided to belt out and butcher whatever top 40 tune was on the radio during family road trips. I was finally free(ish) from the shackles of close-quarter-living and I felt like I could breath a little easier. The new room looked huge, until I got all my furniture and belongings into it. Sweet lord, I had a lot of stuff. I made a mental note to keep things organized. Probably should have written that down.

           

The Incident

The days of sleeping with a nightlight had long since passed so the pitch-darkness I woke up to didn’t feel frightening at all. What was a little unnerving, however, was the figure of a man I saw standing in the corner of my little room. It wasn’t threatening, but it was not someone I felt as though I could have a cup of coffee with either. He just stood there and suddenly I realized that I was sitting up in bed. I didn’t remember getting up like that but there I sat. Almost as though I had woken up that way. I knew for a fact that I was indeed awake. People think differently in dreams and this was not a dream. I stared at the silhouette and even though I couldn’t distinguish any facial features whatsoever, I felt as though he was staring right back. No, I didn’t feel it. I knew it. Silence fell and it was just the two of us now. I started to pick up on a slight shuddering. It wasn’t coming from me - I stayed perfectly still - but my room was most definitely starting to vibrate. Not as though there was an earthquake, but more akin to a shaky video camera recording. None of my possessions seemed to be affected by it even while it continued to escalate and grow more violent. It got to the point where my entire room became a large blur and I couldn’t make out a single thing, except for the shadow of a man standing in the corner staring at me. He stood perfectly still.

Up to this point there had been no sound whatsoever. That was quickly broken with what I could only describe as the shrill and ear-splitting shrieking of a woman. It not only filled my ears but my entire body. I could feel the sound piercing through my very core and, as though my senses had finally caught up to the situation I found myself in, I was suddenly filled with an unbridled terror. I lay back down in my bed and assumed a fetal position while the chaos continued to go on around me. I closed my eyes – tight enough that they actually started to hurt – and just waited. My heart beat so brutally in my chest that I thought it would surly stop at any minute. I knew he was still watching me. Seconds crawled by and then the screaming finally stopped only to be replaced by the sound of glass shattering. A lot of glass.

Silence fell once again but I dared not open my eyes. I continued to lie there for sometime until an extreme and fatigue overcame my mind and body and I fell back to sleep. 

The little girl with bells on

I remember sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen many years before she had passed away. She was cooking one Cuban dish or another absentmindedly as she listened in to the conversation my mother and me were having. The kindness of strangers was the main topic of our discussion, which was brought on by a news report of a good Samarian that had just been shown on the otherwise ridiculous Hispanic broadcasting network. My mother started recalling when she was a child living back in the homeland and that on several occasions, she would have episodes of sleepwalking. She recounted that on more than one night, she would find herself out in the middle of the street and that strangers who happened to be driving by would find her and escort her back into the house and alert my grandparents. It got to the point where they had to attach little bells onto my mother’s arms to keep her from wandering out into the night alone.