By LHB
I’m speaking to you in a specific moment: You’re sitting on the floor of your high school’s music practice room, contriving reasons to spend time with the girl you’re hopelessly crushing on. She mentions she’d bought a comic book you wanted to read; you ask to borrow it, but she’d only bought it on Kindle. That week (that year) was a complete mess for you—constantly losing control of your body, your mind, your heart, your time.
I’ve just now finished that book, six years later, and I am reminded of you. Funnily enough, you finally found it in a bookstore while visiting the same girl—to this day one of your dearest friends. Of course, you bought it immediately.
It’s less that I want to tell you about the book (it was fine), and more that I wish that you, in that moment of wanting, could have a flash of what it is like to be you now. In this moment, we are the same person, connected by the conduit of this one tiny thing that you wanted to do, and that you (I, we) did.
I can clearly see you, tightly wound, fit to snap, and desperate for so many different kinds of love and care and safety. I wish you could see this moment: your community of compassionate and queer friends are moving to the same big city that you’ve managed to make it to. Your loving long-term partner sleeps over as often as possible in your cozy, sunny apartment, where you look forward to eating, and you value caring for your body instead of pushing it away. Your hair is buzzed, and you wear earrings that you bought while traveling abroad—one of the many things that you now have the autonomy and resource access to do. You are healthy. You are happy. You have control over your place in the world and relationships. And you are content.
At the time that you finally manage to read this book, this is how far you’ve made it.
Would you believe me if I told you that everything, shockingly, is okay?
I know without asking that you will do whatever it takes to get here. And it does take almost all the time between your now and mine. But you make it out. You make it to love. You make it to care. You make it to safety.
LHB loves to read and has the good fortune to work at a book publishing company. She is from Tennessee, though she no longer lives there.