Coming Out, Coming Into Yourself, Coming Back Home
- a mini-biopic written for the July #makingspace writing group at @chariscircle
Hi, my name is Abigail, and I am a black queer freedom fighter. In my parallel life, I am a comedian. My traveling caravan includes Luther X, my beagle, and Frida Kahlo X, my diesel-engine Volkswagen Beetle Convertible. My show is called, “Dancing with a Professor”. It sheds insight into the highlights of my life from growing up in a trailer to making it “big" in the city. It has toured all across the eastern seaboard, California, and the Midwest. My manager says there’s plans for us to head out to Vegas next.
I live in the interstitial spaces of transition. I spend a substantial portion of my earnings traveling, from act to act, adventure to adventure, woman to woman. I love anything that comes out of a Keurig machine and mint tea at night. I can be intelligent and witty yet self-conscious and introverted. Some say I am a pendulum. I say I am equilibrium turned on its insides, tossed in a grinder, and spit up by a nine-year-old beagle who hasn’t had his treats by 10am.
I am an absolutely horrible singer, but tune and tone are not important when you're born and raised in Atlanta to a cult of holy rolling, bible thumping, Jesus believing, drunk with the Holy Ghost Pentecostals. I was to be married with kids well over a decade ago, but at the tender age of 16 I confessed to my best friend that I found pleasure in the fantasies of women loving women that chased me to sleep each night.
I left my home, community, and friends at the age of 18 and never seriously dreamed of returning. Now, I’m back. Filled with questions of whether this time I can actually be myself in a place where I was told by my born community that I should never expect to find love in the arms of a woman and should always expect that the women who love me are in fact psycho, lesbian killers.
To their disappointment though, homophobia has failed me: I continue to dream of that life-never-after with a beautiful, intelligent wife, 2.5 children, and a house on the near east side of Atlanta. See, sometime in my mid-twenties, thankfully, I began to find my connection to humanity through the women that I loved. In loving I found what is right with the world and what is wrong. Through the murmurs of twilight lovers, I found that sadness is only temporary and community is what you make it. I found happiness is not a noun, but a verb.
To happiness. Not, I am happy when we…But rather, we happinessed each other into 10 orgasms a piece and 7 back arches between us. We happinessed ourselves into believing that if marriage was for fools, we’d rather be fools than intellectuals. We happinessed ourselves into seeing lifetimes and infinities in the minutes spent apart, and we happinessed each other into believing in love.
Maybe the line that captures me best is: Once I never wrote love poems, but now, I do.
Hi, my name is Abigail, and I am a black queer freedom fighter. In my parallel life, I am a comedian. My traveling caravan includes Luther X, my beagle, and Frida Kahlo X, my diesel-engine Volkswagen Beetle Convertible. My show is called, “Dancing with a Professor”. It sheds insight into the highlights of my life from growing up in a trailer to making it “big" in the city. It has toured all across the eastern seaboard, California, and the Midwest. My manager says there’s plans for us to head out to Vegas next.
I live in the interstitial spaces of transition. I spend a substantial portion of my earnings traveling, from act to act, adventure to adventure, woman to woman. I love anything that comes out of a Keurig machine and mint tea at night. I can be intelligent and witty yet self-conscious and introverted. Some say I am a pendulum. I say I am equilibrium turned on its insides, tossed in a grinder, and spit up by a nine-year-old beagle who hasn’t had his treats by 10am.
I am an absolutely horrible singer, but tune and tone are not important when you're born and raised in Atlanta to a cult of holy rolling, bible thumping, Jesus believing, drunk with the Holy Ghost Pentecostals. I was to be married with kids well over a decade ago, but at the tender age of 16 I confessed to my best friend that I found pleasure in the fantasies of women loving women that chased me to sleep each night.
I left my home, community, and friends at the age of 18 and never seriously dreamed of returning. Now, I’m back. Filled with questions of whether this time I can actually be myself in a place where I was told by my born community that I should never expect to find love in the arms of a woman and should always expect that the women who love me are in fact psycho, lesbian killers.
To their disappointment though, homophobia has failed me: I continue to dream of that life-never-after with a beautiful, intelligent wife, 2.5 children, and a house on the near east side of Atlanta. See, sometime in my mid-twenties, thankfully, I began to find my connection to humanity through the women that I loved. In loving I found what is right with the world and what is wrong. Through the murmurs of twilight lovers, I found that sadness is only temporary and community is what you make it. I found happiness is not a noun, but a verb.
To happiness. Not, I am happy when we…But rather, we happinessed each other into 10 orgasms a piece and 7 back arches between us. We happinessed ourselves into believing that if marriage was for fools, we’d rather be fools than intellectuals. We happinessed ourselves into seeing lifetimes and infinities in the minutes spent apart, and we happinessed each other into believing in love.
Maybe the line that captures me best is: Once I never wrote love poems, but now, I do.
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