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To Everything About Me Queer

Had you popped up years ago and told me you were here to stay, you would not have been welcome. I would probably still hate you; still resent you for existing and refusing to leave me alone. But you were slow to emerge, conscious to weave within my life a strong sense of self, an unbreakable foundation of open-minded, accepting values, so that when it was time for us to officially meet, we would get along and I would be thankful for you in my life.
I still have trouble liking you, feeling proud of you. So much of me wishes you did not exist at all - that I could roll you into a small ball and tuck it under my bed, hidden from anything real. But then I open my eyes and you are still there, sitting next to me, urging me to continue letting you in, urging me to trust you when you whisper that everything will work out in the end.

And it is. Working out in the end. For so long I breathed the air of the different, the secret different, the type of different where no one else can really tell. But instead of letting me close up you forced me outward, "Get out and learn," you said, over and over again. "Open your ears and extend your arms and allow yourself to listen." I listened; listened to your strange voice, for I knew not who you were, but still, something else inside of me knew that your advice was true.
And people talked. At first just friends in their daily happenings, then associates, family members, an older man whom I met on the plane. My ear liked their voices, my mind loved to search for that common ground between us. For so long it seemed that no matter how alienated or lonely or depressed someone seemed, I never shied away - I could not shy away, because again, your voice, raspy and unfamiliar, assured me that I understood their words.
And I did, inexplicably, understand their words. My parents could not fathom why I found such passion working with those inflicted with severe mental illness, but my energy did not falter. Stories; I wanted to hear the patients' stories, wanted to understand their evolutions, wanted to soak up their words and blink in their faces and vow to never stop listening. And I haven't. I won't. I simply can't.
I remember going through the routine steps of a Wyoming day and falling asleep with the stifling awareness that something drastic had changed. While the she and I spent an afternoon sitting by Bomber Lake and laughed about a meaningless story, you crept up from behind and tapped

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