#and it was fear and I was just tryign to survive I know that but God. the hard-heartedness of a repressed Christian cannot be matched

[trifoliate-undergrowth]

I’m 24 today, on the 5th anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub shooting, which happened on my 19th birthday. I remember seeing the news air on the televisions at the restaurant where I was celebrating with my parents, who I’ve cut ties with just this year. It was a place with really great dim sum food but it isn’t there anymore, has been sold and converted into something else. 

It was a Sunday. We’d just come from Mass. I was wearing a skirt. I was still desperately believing in God and in the fantasy that I was a straight cis neurotypical Catholic woman. I was working on my first real fanfiction, which was a mess of contradictory elements, gay curiosity and repression. I remember it. 

I remember, and have remembered ever since, the author’s note I put in the day’s fanfiction chapter to commemorate the occasion. I had nothing to say, and I should have kept silent. I’ve been ashamed of it ever since. 

See, it was natural to be shocked and horrified That Someone Would Do That. Obviously you don’t just go out and shoot people, it isn’t nice. But the us/them dichotomy is deeply ingrained. I knew the shooter was an Us. All I could muster was a weak “well I don’t think shooting people is a good thing.” 

I saw art passed around one of the fandoms I was in commemorating the event with real empathy and grief, remembering and honoring the memories of the victims, grieving for them. And I felt.... I can’t describe it. I didn’t understand it. Repulsed is the closest word. A kind of embarrassment, maybe. I felt compelled to turn my head away. Sure, they shouldn’t have been killed, I knew that, but these weren’t people you honored. 

Fuck. Here’s the author note.  I have no one else to confess to because the technical catholic sin here was not my initial response but the fact that I’ve changed. Even if I still believed, which I don’t. 

“A/N: So you know how music sometimes starts playing in vanilla minecraft and it's just beautiful and it's… it's just… I love the minecraft music, OK? So I was wondering how that would translate in this world… If you're on DeviantArt you'll know that it's my birthday today. (I thought that I had disabled the birthday notifications actually, but apparently not.) I wanted to finish this and have a chapter update as a birthday present for you guys. We don't watch TV so we didn't hear about last night until we went out today. I'd decided to have lunch at a Chinese tea house that recently opened, and sitting there, drinking chrysanthemum tea, the news is blaring the story. A young man native to America walked into a Florida club with an assault rifle and killed 50 people. ISIS thinks he's cool because he supports them. Hey, free death, they didn't even have to come over here. And an American anti-gay group thinks he's the judgement of God on the gay club which he attacked. Listen. Nobody should be celebrating this, especially Americans, even if you agree with the some of the shooter's base beliefs. You don't walk into a business in peacetime in your own country and shoot people. That's how we make our world a hell. If we could all learn to respect one another enough to discuss differences in belief without screaming, setting things on fire or, for the love of God, SHOOTING people, we might all be able to help each other out. HAHAHAHAHA. Right? If your opinion differs, you're going down. Boom. That's just how we work here, apparently, and I'm sick and tired of being human if this is the only way we can relate to one another. We're sitting in the dark in a world filled with monsters, listening for the music. Do me a favor on my birthday. The music is very faint, you won't hear it if you're not listening. So listen for it. Oh, and drink some chrysanthemum tea while you're waiting. It's supposed to help you feel alert and it tastes like sunshine.” 

The best thing I can say for this is that, actually reading it again now, I can see how afraid I was--how afraid I couldn’t even begin to admit I was at the time. It wasn’t personal, it could never be personal, I wasn’t a Them. I couldn’t. 

That doesn’t change how... unnecessary, and patronizing, and weak it was to basically say “hey huh wow. um. maybe we could discuss how you’re going to hell civilly, with fewer mass murders..” God. God. 

I have nothing to add or to change. The only thing I’ll say is I wish I’d never written it because I had nothing to say. I have nothing better to say except that I now know that there’s nothing you can say and it isn’t my place and I wish I could erase it, but it’s been up and visible for so long I’m just going to post an amendment instead, because it does exist, it can’t be erased. 

But I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’m thinking--it took five years after that. Even with everything. It took me so long to get out. Some people never get out. I’m thinking about my mother and her obsession with those dangerous evil filthy lesbians who could so very easily seduce the weak. I’m thinking about “gay panic” and all the kids with guns. All the boys taught to trust guns over the slightest display of softness. 

But I have nothing to say, except that I want to cry, and it’s been five years, and I honor the memories of the victims I was ashamed to acknowledge before. I’m now ashamed of my shame. They have every right to be ashamed of me. But I’m here now, and I have had the horrifying experience of being able to see myself on either side of the gun.