6 years ago
I’m 19 years old. I live in and attend school at a private Christian university in the Bible Belt of America. Oklahoma, specifically. First week of classes, I sit in the pew of a mandatory chapel service. A paper copy of the Code of Honor is distributed throughout the student body to be signed and dated, then collected by the chaplains of each gender-segregated dormitory. Code #5 of 8: I PLEDGE at all times to keep my total being under subjection from all immoral and illegal actions … whether on or off campus. I will not engage in or attempt to engage in any illicit, unscriptural sexual acts, which include any homosexual activity and sexual intercourse with one who is not my spouse through traditional marriage of one man and one woman. This is copied and pasted directly from their Honor Code which is still available online as a PDF in the student handbook. I sign and date the bottom of the page. To refuse is to be kicked out of the school, at best placed on probation and suspended from courses. Forget about scholarships. “Homosexuality” is listed among illicit substances and academic dishonesty.
Fast forward two years spent here. I don’t have friends. I sit alone in the cafeteria. I don’t want people to sit with me. I don’t want friends if they belong where I cannot, if they signed the same code that I did without flinching. Without feeling nausea and rage. I’m stuck. I’m sick. Everything I eat makes me throw up. I take allergy tests to no avail. Doctors tell me, “Everything is normal.” Normal. To be existing in what should be “normal,” and to feel so alien. So wrong. To be having visceral reactions to my environment. My face is breaking out – cystic acne for the first time in my life. I lose nearly 20 pounds. I look back on photos of me from that time, closeted and dying. Wasting away in front of everyone, yet no one to bear witness at the same time. Words can cut like paper. Intolerance can kill, and it can kill slowly, silently, secretly. Death by a thousand cuts.
I needed a lifeline desperately – more than I could even know at the time – and it showed up in my sophomore year. My salvation took the form not of a man, but of a road trip to Colorado, my three closest friends piled into a Subaru and bound for the Rocky Mountains. I could feel the miles begin to gather between myself and that place, those people, that code. I watched the grasslands and wind turbines whip by from the interstate, unbinding my chest, unraveling and shedding my shame. I laughed, I marveled, I dreamed for what felt like the first time in years. Maybe in my life. By the time the mountains crept up on the horizon, I had molted like a reptile into a new, shiny skin. The shell of dead skin sluffed off somewhere in Kansas. I’d forgotten what anything other than complete exhaustion felt like.
Feeling life inside again for the first time since I was a child, I wish I had better words to put to that moment. It felt like the way a t-shirt did, hanging flat and loose against my undeveloped chest in 3rd grade. Before training bras, before periods, before all-female dorms. When being a kid was more important than being pretty or feminine; when love was innocent and belonged to me.
We drove through the Roosevelt National Forest, windows down and blasting The Lumineers. The wind smelled of pine – sharp, cool, and fresh. A nearly full moon hung suspended in the blue sky, refusing to be obscured by the day. I remember wishing I could do that: reject the urge to be eclipsed by expectations and fear, to hide. We pulled over to the side of the road, clambering up a rock face glazed with snow. The knees of our pants dampened by a few falls in the slippery snowmelt, we thrust ourselves to the top of the outcropping, howling and chittering at the moon like a pack of feral coyotes. There was an old, preserved stone chapel nestled among trees beneath us. How small He looked to me. How unmenacing, incapable of shutting me up. Our faces were flushed with the cold air as we half-slid, half-crawled back to the car.
Walking into a clothing store, my body splits in two. Or at least, it would if it were possible. Instead, I take my time wading through the women’s section before making my way to the men’s. Something for “both,” because to exist as myself, society tells me I am two different, contradictory things. And even “both” isn’t complete. But here, in groves upon groves of Douglas firs and Ponderosa pines, I am myself without a need to separate into pieces. My blood runs like the Colorado River, my thoughts whisper like Aspen leaves in the wind. My sense of self evolves and changes, like limestone eroded by the wind and water, taking shape over and over again each millennium. People might chop down my trees or ravage my body with wildfires in the name of industrialization. But I grow back surer and stronger, fuller and more fragrant.
Our last day in the Rockies, we explore the foothills. Hey Siri, play Warm Foothills by alt-J. A trade-off of voices, seamlessly together and yet distinct, forming a story of love and letting go. We stand on the edge of Horsetooth Reservoir, its surface frozen still and solid. We take turns throwing rocks at its icy barrier, every once in a while breaking through with a satisfying crunch as a stone sinks to the bottom. I know in a matter of hours I will be retracing my steps through fields and decreasing altitude to Oklahoma. The thought alone is paralyzing. I think of the way the reservoir below me swallows rocks whole and wish it would swallow me, too, numbing me with its frigid waters. I wonder if I’d sink with the rocks, or float trapped between inches of ice and almost 200 feet of black water.
We pile back into the Subaru and I wonder if I’m not so hard to understand or love as I’ve been made to believe. If people can explore the wilderness, trek thousands of miles of forest for answers and discovery, why can’t I do the same for myself? Why can’t people do the same for me? Am I not so beautiful and promising as a trailhead to a mountain lake, or fresh snow that will eventually melt into white rapids? I think of the Olympus Dam of Estes Park, and the man-made barriers in my own life, plugging up my current like the Big Thompson River. Is it possible that I’ve been barricaded not because I am wrong or impossible, but because I’m viewed as a dangerous force unless I’m controlled by those around me? Are my rapids intimidating, fearful for myself, or just for others? When there are feet of snowfall, schools close but people don’t hate the wilderness, the patterns of nature. How many snow days have I been blamed for? How many times have I been made to feel “unnatural,” when proof of me exists everywhere in history and nature? I am not obscure; I am obscured. I am not unnatural; I am nature itself.
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Author bio: Madeline was born and raised mostly in Oklahoma. Identifying as pansexual and genderqueer, they came out in their early 20s after escaping the confines of a deeply religious family culture and upbringing. Writing always served as a form of escape and expression for Madeline. They currently work as an editor in Sacramento, California.
