Getting Off the Bus
This is not a coming out story. This is not a story of personal exploration. I know who I am, I know who i love, I know why I love who I love. I don’t care what you think of me. I care about what you made me think of myself. There is no door I need to unlock, it has been open for some time. There is only a window, a window through which you gaze upon me that needs to be un-tinted a little. This tint is dark. I’m talking ‘illegal in South Carolina’ dark.
When I was a boy, I learned about the world in a certain way at an age some would say was too young. I don't know if I agree. I enjoyed learning about the world. I loved it. I still do. What I hate, is the way that they made me feel about it after.
Lucius was two years older than me, we had been friends on the school bus for years. On that dingy, cramped vessel of which he occupied far too much space, he would show me the new songs he downloaded on his iPod. He would talk shit to the kids in front of us in a way that i was too young to stand up against at the time. He was bold, he didn’t give a fuck, he said what was on his mind. Then I went into fourth grade, and he went onto middle school.
Girls fell in love with the way he spoke to them so freely. In Raleigh, NC, the loud obnoxious ones tend to become the most popular — reservedness was rarely a virtue well appreciated. Lucius was different from the other rambunctious boys though. From a young age, he stole copies of “The Economist” from unsuspecting parents around the neighborhood who wanted a coffee-table accessory that would make them appear worldly and informed. Lucius had a younger sister who would not be messed with by anyone, apart from her three older brothers. Lucius made sure of that. He also looked after me, he was the type to treat you however he wanted, but he wouldn’t let a fly even approach someone he loved without reprimand.
The new found freedom of middle school life found Lucius unprepared for an encounter with Bella, the sweet, blonde 7th grader whose attention he had caught. It was no surprise that he had courted an older girl, it was quite the accomplishment for our our town, though.
It was unlike Lucius to show much vulnerability to anyone, let alone someone two years his junior that had been demoted to a status below his, via his graduation to middle school. It was so difficult for him that his secret had to be shared under the cover of a blanketed pillow fort draped over my treehouse-like bunk bed, hovering over a distant, oblivious ground floor. Under the cover of our canopy, Lucius confided in me the anxiety over his lack of experience. See, it was unlike him to not feel in control, and with Bella for once he was the one in unfamiliar territory. It was then that we agreed to stage a set. A ground for practice, from which he would learn the basics of how to interact. Under the shade of that cover, with the only light seeping through cracks, our arms would coil around each other like cobras vying for the security of their prey.
I remember vividly the thickness of his tree-trunk-like legs, the way they made me feel supported and without weight. On that day he taught me what it meant to be alive with someone. I didn’t fully understand what we were doing, but I knew I enjoyed it. The understanding wouldn’t come until my own entrance to middle school.
Charlie was another kid on my bus from my same year. He was goofy as hell and never afraid to mess with anyone, even twice his size. Charlie’s carefree, childish nature never outgrew him and never off put the girls in our grade. With our graduation to middle school approached the prospects of an unprecedented issue: the influx of horny hormones and sexual confusion we call puberty.
Kids raised in the south, even in semi-progressive, affluent neighborhoods, had no shortage of difficulty with the idea of sexuality at the time. It took the introduction of a new activity into our lives to bring some new ideas to light.
A late Summer night at our friends Sean and Matty’s house, Charlie mentioned a new website he had been told about, one that had an endless supply of beautiful naked bodies for four young boys to gaze upon. None of us had ever been with a girl before, but we knew from movies that there was supposedly nothing more heavenly than the feeling of entering a woman and feeling control over their body. This website offered us the opportunity to simulate and imagine ourselves in that position. Charlie showed us fascinating ways to stimulate our newly discovered toy, bouncing it up and down in his boxers to the amazement of us other boys. Since we were too young to understand what this all meant, we gathered around the phone and masturbated under our shorts until we came to the dry conclusion of a prepubescent orgasm.
In these moments, a foundation was set that would stick with me for many years. I learned that a man’s penis was private and not for sharing, and I learned that there is nothing for a boy to lust after other than a woman.
The funny thing is that I was raised in a fairly progressive family, one that made me believe that I was an ally and a friend to anyone coming out at the time. I believed that, but I would never go out of my way to befriend anyone. I told myself I was just too shy, but I know now that I was partly afraid of them. I had built walls around the idea of being gay from the normalcy of responding to any minor inconvenience with “that’s so gay,” or a mildly unique comment with “no homo.” These walls were unknown to me, and they weren’t explicitly built by me. Each brick was placed by the culture enforced upon me by the boys on the bus. A culture that I fully embraced despite the belief that I was different because I was an ‘ally’.
Taylor grew up in rural North Carolina where open mindedness was almost frowned upon, yet I’ve seen her grow to become more intentional and accepting than I could ever be. For a long time she was everything I could ask for in a friend. We met at the beginning of college, and I remember the nights we stayed up sitting on the stone staircase of our dorm, talking late into the night about our beliefs and the traumas that informed them. Taylor has listened to the worst of my mistakes, the harshest of my flaws, the coldest aberrations, and accepts me for who I am nonetheless.
She never could quite understand how I feel about my sexuality, but she supports me. She never had to so much as contemplate the idea of what love could be outside of the traditional mindset because she was never introduced to it. She was, however, the first person to learn of my bisexuality.
It was likely the first time she had been introduced face to face with something like it. There is nothing else that sticks out from my memory other than her excitement about it. It very well could have been excitement out of happiness for me and my display of self-acceptance, but my mind twisted that excitement into feelings of other-ness. She asked if I thought that this was merely a phase, if the truth was actually that I was only interested in men, if I was still confused.
I truly didn’t know at the time, I was still very confused. Now I am a bit more sure that that question might have been an attempt at rationalization for why things didn’t work out between us. She was likely just as insecure as I was.
Now, today, I lie beside the woman I believe I love. I say believe because there is that nagging thought in the back of my head that tells me I’m wrong 15% of the time. I’ve been wrong before, I can surely be wrong again. But at the end of the day, is there really such thing as right or wrong when it comes to love?
I experienced something when I was too young to know what it meant to be suspended in that moment. That moment between two people who don’t care about the worst minute details of the person who lays across from them, they only care for the pull of gravity that keeps them supported 6 feet above the ground. I still feel that pull from time to time, but it has weakened over time. Eroded by the turbulence of swirling thoughts. Swirling thoughts thrashing around within the walls of my psyche like hyperactive boys, bouncing against the walls of the bus that keeps them trapped within.
