I Am Sitting

I am sitting in the pews of the church in a pretty little dress with bows in my curly hair. My mother is beside me, and the voice of the pastor bellows through my ears, my juvenile fingers flip through the pages of the Holy Word. A woman is to submit to her husband in all things- such is natural order. Beware, homosexuality is an abomination, a sin, a curse, an agenda set to destroy the family of this nation. I had no measure to believe otherwise.

I am sitting at my classroom desk donned in a chifonnen rumfled up uniform, my ribbons dangling over my face, my teacher and colleagues giggling over a life plan everyone seems to have in common except me. Girls, we all know how cute boys can be, or how exciting it will be to have a boyfriend one day, or how beautiful you'll look on your wedding day when you marry the man of your dreams forever. I guess I woke up too early for that dream.

I am sitting in front of the television set. Rainbow flags and happy couples holding hands illuminate the screen, rejoicing at the latest news. My parents sneer and change the channel for my sake, they say. That's American nonsense. The local news comes on, and the people on the streets and the members of parliament and the leaders in church and all your friends and your parents in your own country make it clear: that isn't welcome in the Caribbean.

I am sitting next to a girl- the girl. It's the heaven on Earth that could take me to hell. My stomach, what should be the home of butterflies fluttering fervently in her presence, turns itself into a knot of shame. All my life, I had been told that this was not a love story, but a tale of perversion. It felt natural as breathing, but every snark of disapproval towards a lifestyle they think I must have chosen poisoned my air, leaving me to hold my breath in a cloud of smog. I was taught to hate an unchangeable part of myself before I even knew it existed within me.

I’m tired of sitting. Now, I am standing up.

I am a lesbian. I am a girl, soon a woman, who is solely attracted to the female sex. It is not definitive of my moral compass, nor is it a political agenda I have been recruited to endorse, nor a clothing style, nor an insult, nor a choice. Nonetheless, even if I could turn straight at the snap of a finger, I wouldn’t. My journeys through womanhood and sexuality are inseparable from one another, and I have been told what to think of my identities by people who are neither. To be a woman, and to love a woman, require intense internal courage and resistance to what society told you about yourself.

Even in the closet, even as those closest to me turn their backs, even when invisibility and singularity seem inevitable,

I am standing up.