High Cholesterol

Overheard on my block tonight: "You act like a boy so I'm going to fight you like a boy."


Right now I am looking at this picture where I'm riding piggyback on a new friend. You can't see it in the picture but we are in front of maybe a hundred cheering queer people who are out in the park for a day of games, dress-up and socializing. We are on our way to collect a tiny prize for our field day team as part of a very promising evolutionary current in the local community ecosystem. Suddenly I'm thinking back to a certain day in high school. After school I was walking to my car and somebody threw a rock that hit me on the left hip and bounced off. It was about the size of a baseball, probably a chunk of broken concrete and gravel. That shit was everywhere where I grew up, paving a new parking lot or strip mall that would go unoccupied. Somebody threw a rock at my crotch. I never saw who threw it but I wonder where are they now? Sometimes I still think about all the people who convinced me to feel so alone and subhuman that I wanted to kill myself when I was little more than a kid. Now I have my share of problems but my life turned out all right. How did the conformity you so passionately enforced work out for you? I imagine your cholesterol is sky high and your wife left you and your house was foreclosed and you lost all your hair. I wonder if they do anything differently now in my old high school, if the teachers and children there have heard about Lawrence King or Sakia Gunn. I think about how fortunate I was to suffer only the most minor of forms of violence, the rocks, spit and insults. It would be great to one day feel more compassion for people in my past, but for the moment I just know I need to release all this rage I tried to swallow for so long.