Pandemic Revelations of Young Queerness

Last night, somewhere around midnight, I came across a TikTok of a Tweet. I won't take this time to develop the intricacies of this format, mostly because nothing in the video mattered to me except the tweet and that someone else thought it relevant. But it is interesting that this is the way I am consuming media now, like all the methods of social media are rivers that somehow end up in the ocean of an app for Zoomers.

This was the tweet:

I get a lot of #lgbtq content on TikTok, because the algorithm is infamously clairvoyant, but this post was so absolutely meaningful to me because it took something very personal, very unresolved in me, and condensed it into approximately twenty words. I have tried periodically to write about this part of my life, when I was living it and in the five years since, but it's not easy to write about something that is still so confusing, that hasn't gained any clarity in my heart. 

I had a very real and very complicated homo-erotic friendship in my freshman year of high school. It was so gay, in fact, that I wrote endless pieces of heartfelt poetry about it and once, in 2017 on a bus in China, a very long journal entry. I have a computer documents folder named "Some Gay Shit From 2012" that contains this poetry, which I leave here for your viewing pleasure. 

I checked the date on this. May 5th, 2012, 1:58 am. I actually remember this night distinctly because I had gone to see her boyfriend's composition premiere. She had sat between us in the audience, holding both of our hands at once. Believe me when I say that I do not demonize her for that.

Clearly, past writing projects (2012-present) have not resolved any of it within me. It is still so significant to me that after reading the tweet, I looked through the depths of Facebook to find a photo that would prove that this relationship was as gay as I remembered. I couldn't find it, but I know there exists a photo of me and this girl holding hands in the hallway. The photo is taken from behind, mostly overstuffed backpack. It was friendship in the loosest sense, meaning the tightest sense, the closest one. 

I have often thought that this was one of the purest loves I have ever felt, despite its confusion and complexities. This friendship ended for unknown reasons, although I can say that I know it had something to do with an abusive relationship I was in. I think she chose him over me, but I never can be sure. It is a conversation we have never had. I do not resent anything before this and this betrayal is somehow less important to me than demystifying the four years before it. When all of us are trapped in our homes, worrying about people we haven't spoken to in years, I am thinking of her. And I do wish I could talk to her.