Say You Weren't You

Let's rewind. Let's go back a few years. Say you had either changed your class much earlier, or started in the right class outright and graduated in the same set — the same class — as Heaven, as Halima, as Eunice. Say everything went the way it was supposed to be from the very beginning — and no, I’m not just talking about school. Your life. Say you weren’t effeminate, weren’t queer, but straight and normal and fundamentally male. Say you were an only child. Say your parents actually started out in love with each other. Say they never met and Mummy married who she actually wanted to and ended up happier than she is now. Where would that leave you? If everything went perfectly right, in a straight and good and normal arrow from start to finish — where would you be? Would Daddy not be your father? Would Mummy not be your mother? Would you be born to someone else; a different set of people, a different family? But wait. Let’s keep them as your parents. Say you could never decide that because it’s out of your hands. And say you couldn’t decide on your siblings being born, either. What if you were the boy they’d imagined you to be — strong, masculine, tough, hardened by life, made of nails, made of titanium, a natural leader that could march any legion into battle? What if you could be that and everything else — the perfect child? Could they be happy then? Or; a different angle: what if your entire destiny hadn’t been seen by other people, good or bad? If your life and all it entailed wasn’t decided by whether some malevolent evil would make you crippled, make you blind, make you suicidal, make you deaf, or strike you dead in the middle of the night while you slept? What if you were only allowed to live without something haunting the dreams your parents have of you when they sleep? Okay. Say there isn’t much you could do about their paranoia. You were always going to be everything the rest of the family wished you wouldn’t be, out of spite, and out of the will to be who your parents could never be for themselves. Say you remained who you are now, unchanged. But what about everything else? The world? Would always hate you and want to erase you. Society? Practically the same thing. Your family? Never going to happen — Daddy truly believes gay people are ill; Mummy thinks they will never make it anywhere in life and will, for some reason, all die prematurely of cancer. Your friends? Your siblings? Your cousins: Half of the crew will move in your direction right now and then, but the rest will remain where they are. Don't try to push them, too, because they will break and their shards will, truly, make you bleed. So. Let's go back to the class thing. What do you think would have happened? You would be in the same class with Heaven, that’s for sure. Would you and Halima have been friends? Or you and Eunice? Maybe yes. Maybe not. Maybe middle school was where it would have ended for you three. And — you don’t even know if you’d have actually been friends with Heaven if you were in the same class with him. But then: You wouldn’t have met Felix and all the boys in Jade and Amethyst either. And nobody would have eventually found out about Amir, or about boarding school. And let’s not forget that, either: We’ll take a run back there in a moment or two. In the right class, you would have known the truth of your life much earlier. You wouldn’t have met Janice, though. Or Zarah. Or Asif. But then you wouldn’t have let Felix get close enough, get that far under your skin because well, you wouldn’t have known him. You would have graduated a lot earlier and started university much earlier, too. Would it have been KASU, though? Not sure. Maybe. Maybe that was always where you were going to go, no matter which route Hecate saw your destiny taking. Would you and Heaven have stayed friends? Would you and anyone have stayed friends? The life of this other version of you is uncertain and brief and only he, in whatever branch of time and space he exists in, knows how it goes, there. You will never know, but at least he will and that makes you smile. Now: Back to Amir. What would your life look like if you had been okay in the junior boys' hostel from the start? If Daddy never had the porter take care of you in his room, if you weren’t locked in the same room as him that night, sealed in the dark? What would have changed in the trajectory of your future if you had pretended to be asleep, had said “god forbid, no, I don’t know what porn is” even if you did, if you had pushed him off when it started, if you had even screamed or said anything at all. If you hadn’t let him come back and come back and come back again? Maybe everyone would have believed you, and you would have stayed there for the next five or six years in Jukwoyi. Maybe Mummy’s silver that she had to sell for you to go would have amounted to something; her sacrifice yielding a scholarship somewhere where you would do things with your hands that would be worth millions. But then: No. None of this happened, and almost nobody but you knows the full story. And then the questions that follow and everyone would ask later: Did he make you gay? (No.) Did he hurt you? (Yes.) Did your parents know? (Yes. They did, but a very long time later.) Did you tell anyone? (Yes. Did they know that you were telling them when you were telling them? Maybe not.) Did you heal? That you don't know. Maybe you have. Maybe you haven’t. Maybe you’re trying to. Maybe this is how you’re doing it right now. Maybe if you were as healed as you tell people you are, you wouldn’t always want to die, to climb out of your body, to set yourself on fire as much as you do now. You’re supposed to be healed, you know. You’re an adult now is what you will hear if you ask anyone’s opinion and you should be completely over what happened when you were nine years old, when you were seven, when you were twelve, when you were fourteen, when you were sixteen. When you were fifteen, and you wanted to die more than all the other times: when you were fifteen, and you actually did it — or at least, tried to. Because even thought that moves you to perform even an imitation of the action is just as real, macabre and terrible as the action itself. So. Say you had opened your mouth. Say you had moved. Say you had not listened to your mother. Say you had kept your head down and graduated quietly. Say you ran away. Say you told the truth. Say the good things that came out of the bad were made of only smoke. Say you knew what would happen. Say you had rebelled. Say you had fought and bitten and torn and chewed and scratched and kicked and screamed. Say you were normal. Say you weren't going to hell for what you are. So you did your best. Say you did your worst. Say you mutated, morphed, changed. Say you transformed. Say, in everything and every decision you’ve ever made for when you were born until now, you’d changed your mind, changed your character, changed your heart. Say, child, that you weren’t human. Say you weren't you.