THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A GIRL
Every home is government-mandated. In uniformity, they crest hilltops and sit amongst an inky sky of stars. The homes are glowing, almost pulsating, in the night and the windows allow for voyeurs to gaze in from the white valleys below. Each room is decadently furnished and lit by golden candlelight and fires are burning in hearths all throughout the house. Everything is wonderful, everyone is dancing, and everything is shining brightly. I’ve seen these homes on foreign hilltops, they glow like furnaces in the night and the music resounding from them is so loud it echoes throughout the moonlit valley. The government keeps them high and tidy and I watch them strobing in the dusk. You could walk for thousands of kilometres and the houses would still crop up out of the forests that separate the valley where I walk from the bluffs the houses sit on. They are unending and there is enough room for every girl on the planet to fill them, but I’ve never been able to step completely across the threshold even after the long climb.
I have had so many friendships with girls. Girls that care, girls that don’t. Girls that ignore what others think, girls that don’t. Girls that drink straight tequila like water at fifteen and do advanced calculus the next morning. Every girl is different, every girl is the same. Not because I categorise them as men do but by the way our relationship ends, slowly, fading, assimilating into the normality of nothingness like sugar into water that soon evaporates in the summer sun. Year after year, friend after friend, I’d find that things came first before me, like boys and drinks. I don’t fault them of course, boys are important to those who care, even when I find them unable to understand me and I, in turn, them. My friends though, are all golden girls, made quickly unattainable to me as they slip through the cracks in my fingers and slide down my forearms. I squeeze them like lemons into teacups and pick the seeds out, the boys they love catch in the strainer of my hands, unwanted to me as the friendships I cherish escape. I no longer understand how to be friends with these girls in the ways I did before, their boys get everywhere, spilling out of their mouths, weaving into my hair and my clothes, silk into polyester, smooth sand into gravel, all the places I don’t want them.
These boys are the government. They keep the girls in houses, unchained but not entirely free. This semi-captivity does cost the girls suffering and pain at times but there is comfort in the arms of these boys. The boys who keep their cages tidy and their bars gold and bright. Heterosexual love is important, do not misunderstand me, it is the reality that billions of people experience and have experienced for thousands of years, but it still is a cage for those girls who are not afforded their own seriousness. There is this illusion that I’ve experienced that I often try to liken to different metaphors as a method of explaining my feelings. These homes I speak of represent the circles of women that exist and the systems of misogyny that keep them there. These particular girls are predominantly heterosexual and their personal struggles with masculinity and patriarchy are ones that I cannot definitively define from the perspective of a lesbian person. What I do know is that these houses are sorts of impenetrable fortresses, especially impregnable when struggling with oddness and otherness that is urged onto queer people, specifically Lesbians. These communities, these parties of women are reserved to their circles whatever form they take. Teenage girls and their high school cliques, 20-somethings lost in the glitz and gore of metropolitan life, coworkers, mothers groups, endless categorizations of women, endless boxes that they bear the weight of fitting into. I have had many friendships with these girls, it has always been a fundamental part of my social life and was then muddied by the realisation of my lesbianism. I turned to poetry and art, diary writing, and screaming in my car every time a friendship became about the men in the other girls' lives. The reason I’d been cast out into the cold valley was not a conscious act the girls chose, but regardless it flattened me to be thrown into the biting snow when I was unable to relate to their love lives and told my opinion was unneeded on the matter of the attractiveness of a boy when the topic was brought up by the minute. They did not need me and did not care about my thoughts because they were perverted by my attraction to our shared sex. At that time, I refastened my coat and stepped away from the door, the warmth of the fire always barely reaching my ankles as I was never able to enter the house completely. I turned and, this time, walked voluntarily into the snow. It’s hard to remain in a stuffy room like the one I was in for so many years, their existence and mine, in a way, did not align and in fact, collided against one and another with such force and so frequently, that a hole was burned through our relations, rife with the remnants of our kinetic energy. I became othered, walking by my lonesome in a cold basin of the valley, the only light receding down my spine and then back up my chest as I walked between the houses. Like I said, they never end, even when the light dwindles.
Lesbianism has been a perennial night. Every step I took towards the houses, every time I stood, legs straddled over the threshold, was a pyrrhic victory. As a person with a poor ability for making friends and a vice for the wrong kinds when I’m able to, queer friends have been hard to come by. Again, please don’t misunderstand me, there have been many straight girls and women who have been good friends to me but especially in my early high school years, a time of hormones and hookups at weekend parties, it was difficult to relate to a class of people I could continuously find no common ground with. This affected my queer journey greatly, repressing my feelings and my emotional and mental comfort in turn for wasted nights and sleazy guys that I would soon release into the ether. I became the token lesbian, the token queer. I was compelling but the subject of much hesitancy which then caused me to feel like I couldn’t speak about the things that were important to me or even things as trivial as the girls that I liked. My straight friends gained ground, rounding base after base, kissing boys, sleeping with boys, and doing inconceivable things I didn’t want to even consider for a second. All this while I sat at home, often uninvited to their late-night escapades because of my reputation for being unfriendly. This led me down into the valley where I stumbled through the dark looking up to the glowing houses, flaming obelisks like the burning bush in the desert, as pillars of truth to light my way.
There is always great discomfort in places that are not familiar to us but this land becomes ever familiar to me. I had become somewhat of a stranger to friendships altogether in the past few months, but they’ve returned since, they creep into your smile and your laugh in the strangest of ways. Oscar Wilde said that society had no place for him in his letter to his love Lord Alfred Douglas, “but Nature…will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed.” You who know what it is like to stumble through crags of rock, skin your knees on misjudgement, and be frowned on for your expression of your own existence, should know that there begins a time when the black of night fades slightly in the light of the aurora. Green, pink, violet, and deep blue, lights engulf cliffs and trees, they illuminate your rejection and replace it with understanding. True lights, the light of the universe and nature alike are what lead you where you need to be, not the searing glare of violent shrines into which you cannot cross. Systems and institutions become stones underfoot and you know now that there are other parts of this world for you to fit into. The valley becomes somewhere you are ever observant and pansophical instead of frozen and impotent. The government can’t mandate nature, the government can’t stop it from growing wild and unfettered. From outside you can see all things and accept all things as I am learning to do.
There are moments in life when you must make a choice, homogenise or decompose. Find root in what is real, not what has been made. There are cages, there are smoking houses, there are forests and there are valleys. There is a cyclical and unending structure to this life and every bed I try to lie in reminds me of it. I walked in the night, lights fading across my body, I wished that I could be up on the cliffs, suspended in the stars, but I understood the cost, so I kept walking. Walking between the houses over and over again looking only at their forms. There are places besides these metaphorical cages. There are caves and crevices, hovels and grottos shrouded in green and glow in their own way. There are places where you can exist even after you leave them on your pilgrimage of assimilation, remaining perpetually when you return fully realised. They are a community, they are likeness, they are love. I don’t catch boys in my teeth anymore because there is no source for their agitation. There are girls, different girls who fit into me and the places I am, there are girls who comb my hair and hold my hand, there are girls who know what it is like and they are green, pink, violet, and deep blue. They like the cycle of discovery, are everywhere, forever and always. I wake up one day in the snow, it is still dark, and it is still cold, but I know and I feel and I see. There is warmth and a girl is standing far away from me. I go to her.
There will always be a girl.
Always be a girl.
Paragraph 5 (Quotation) - “Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
M.B Condún, 19, somewhere in the world ✯ IG: @mbcondun ✯ BACK TO ESSAYS: OUROBOROS