To be honest I wasn’t looking forward to the holidays because I wouldn’t talk to my parents by that time and I was positive that I wouldn’t want to go see them either and I wasn’t sure if I could manage to score an apartment until then and that meant that I would be locked up in my room or I would ask to go to Lazarus’ apartment and celebrate there, but he had a plan (because I had asked) of playing video games like he always had to celebrate with all his buddies online, but he still said that if I wished he would do an exception and celebrate with me, but he had no idea how since he hadn’t been doing that in years. I promised to help him choose a tree this year, instead of his small plastic one and the more we talked about it the more I saw that indeed we would both end up in his computer room working out how Christmas should be really celebrated with all the crackers stored under the tree. I had no idea what to give him as a gift and the fact that I had now roommates which would demand gifts wasn’t too thrilling either, I wasn’t excited about that and I had no idea what to give any of them, Nathan for instance probably wanted me or some other young boy, so all gifts which he’d want were taken away as ideas. I didn’t know what to get Dick, I didn’t know what to get Frank, Peter or Julien. I’d give myself to Julien, but he clearly didn’t want it even if I came in glitter and wrapped with a huge ribbon. We kept walking on in silence, as we slowly started reaching the apartment.
I offered for him to go into my room, to continue the conversation, but he sadly said that that had been all, that the rest was really things dear to him and which he wanted out of... And he stepped up close to me and tapped on my chest where I had hidden the notebook in the pocket of the coat, that it was all he’d allow to be written down because some memories should be killed alone with the person since the other lover doesn’t want them anymore.
I went into my room then, quickly glancing at the silent Julien going to the kitchen for a snack, since he had barely eaten.
When my brother had come out, it had been weird, it was like watching a whole spectacle unravel and see them yell how it was unnacceptable, that if he had been bisexual with just flings on the side it would’ve been okay but this way how they even expect something which I had been yelled that I was the support they needed. They had seen me as the son who would do everything correctly and before my brother had come out, I had the days where I was counting down to tell them that I loved men as well, but instead he had called us all to give out the news and even I hadn’t known it.
In the end I had a dream where my mother was shaving me and that had been the crispest shave I had ever gotten, I recall how smooth my face had felt. She had done it with one of those razors which I grew up with watching my father shave. That stuck to me and I remember I had shaved that morning with a different blade, now we’ve got them fancier and with all the world cups combined we get all this additional crap to it.
I decided to give my mother a ring.
She was furious that the university had started in the beginning, but I had that dream and soon enough she calmed down, saying that she trusted me. The thing is, we have far too much faith in our parents. Far too much. We think that they’ll always be on our side and that they will always defend us, but the thing is once you open up with who you really are, they’ll never bite you, meaning that they’ll never dare to touch you in the way a mother’s touch should feel. Instead they’ll accuse you of everything you’ve ever done.
I came out.
I told her that I was gay.
And I wrote it all down, crying as I came to Lazarus and he had read it all, patting my head and then he had hugged me and I couldn’t stop crying.
I have to write this down a second time, because I was crying all the first time and that ended up sagging up the paper, but Lazarus had somehow managed to read it through my tears and sobbing. Also I had ripped out the pages, still having everything flash in my head and not understanding how could it so happen that I wasn’t accepted even if I had known everything, but the thing is I had relied on the dream, to which Lazarus stroke down his skepticism and just stared ahead of me, thinking probably and saying that perhaps by the end of the day she would manage to accept me somehow, maybe that’s what the dream meant and regardless of what was done, that I had done the right thing.
I hugged him again, feeling easier that I would be celebrating Christmas and New Year with him instead of my family and now I didn’t know, what if she would decide to visit me after all and I didn’t know how I would feel about it. I just wanted to spend it with Lazarus instead and all of a sudden I thought of the apartment and how everyone else would celebrate, at least hypothetically I could picture Dick with crackers and I could see Julien on his phone, I could see Peter being angry about something but still gossiping with Frank with whom they had started to bond and it only made sense that they would continue bonding even more. I wondered if I even wanted to spend New Year’s with them and what would happen to Christmas. With whom would I spend it even if both holidays had been decided with Lazarus. I just felt lost as soon as I had left Lazarus’ apartment and that’s when all the wordings had started circulating in my head all over again, reminding me how unwelcome I know I was in my mother’s home. I had ended up biting my lip so much that I was bleeding and I was tracing my blood around my lips as if I were in Velvet Goldmine.
I didn’t know what to do, because fear was ceasing me to exist and even write, I could barely write the past few days after it had happened, making all the days slowly sink and remind me that I was pages behind my goal, the whole idea that I should be doing this to keep myself sane and the fact that something was happening was the reason I had kept this delightful journal, because I had the pure belief that I would manage to somehow make the world turn and give it some events.
I ended up getting bored of the journal and I would start thinking of different men and how they would act in different settings, how they would feel and what would motivate them. I wanked to a few, allowing my mind to drift and believe in some fictional love as I started doing sketches in another cheap notebook, how they would look and what would start motivating them to do things.
And with every hour I could feel a cold jerk that I had finally managed to come out to my own mother and I had no idea how she still tolerated me, how the words I had uttered managed to root in her brain. I had never felt so exposed, it’s as if confessing to an old crime, because if jail defined a person then so did my homosexuality. It defined me to the core, it was a part of who I had been, of who I was. I just ended up trailing my blood further down the chin, as I realized how deep that cut must’ve been or I had been fiddling too much. I ended up pressing the toilet paper and then rinsing it with alcohol.
Regret kept filling me up.
Why had I done it?
What kind of stupidity had motivated me and specifically with the fact that I had no intentions of telling that to my dad, so it was a parcel of explosives sent solely to my mother to do as she would wish and it felt like a matter of time until she would send it back and lit to me with my father’s words. It felt so surreal to tell her, as if I wasn’t gay at all, as if I was faking it for attention like she had told me or that all the volunteering jobs had gotten to me as I had held the phone against my ear. I had heard it all, all the perversions she had accused me of and I couldn’t say anything at all. All I had known that in her eyes I was entirely guilty and that somehow I couldn’t bring myself to tell her to stop suggesting me girls whom I had never been interested in.
It was like standing in her kitchen all over again, against the yellow light and watching her cut the vegetables, knowing what terror was entirely ahead.
I couldn’t let my mother out of my head, because I had brought this cruel nightmare upon me selfishly, I had some hope that somehow it wouldn’t happen to me because of one dream and it did, it came and crashed upon me and I was drowning under all the waves. I couldn’t help but just keep feeling regret all over again and again, as she would avoid the topic day after day and the more I felt like a grenade, whenever she would come over and see me with other men, I knew what was coming.
I hadn’t known what to say, just feeling betrayed from her words and not understanding why couldn’t a parent’s love stretch deeper than where it ends and actually manage to reach every corner as advertised? Why can’t a parent love their child unconditionally? What’s the problem with not being said as advertised?
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It was hard to choose a moment where to trim it, because the animal comes without chapter dividers, so I pray that I did a good job x) also sorry about the delay, I've been tired and busy. But I'm doing my best to put the blog back up again.
I like the whole atmosphere, story-wise, of the animal because it's quite stuck in the moment and filled with fear of tomorrow which doesn't seem to be coming, which was how I was feeling when I was writing it and it was an awful headspace to be in, but it made the novel really pop out.
I was also stuck without an apartment and I was dreading that I would spend the holidays in the one I had, which was the worst I've even been at.
The whole fiasco was something I heard when I was a teenager, that being bisexual is okay, while being gay isn't.
I had a dream that I believe my mom shaved me and that was the smoothest I've ever been shaved, so that was an odd thing I saw in my dreams, so I decided to use it for the story, as it was briefly after I had come out to her. The whole novel ended up being more desperate because my coming out hadn't gone well.
A lot of what Max's mom says is something I was told, so yeah.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Thank you
<3
Jamie
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