It has been years since I last visited this place. This place, so cluttered, a city shuffled around and placed in a random spot on the map. I drive past the only grocery in the entire town, yellow lights flickering in purple night. The college is hushed, students all studying studiously in dorms, knowing they will wake at 9 for mass. The houses are quiet, little things, staring at me sorrowfully as I drive past. The houses have been captured and poisoned with judgement, and their sadness is tinged by superiority. I cannot breathe in this town.

I am in love with a girl, and I am not allowed in this stifled realm. This place where the crickets can barely catch their breath, this town where time shudders, floating in the summer air. I puke on the green floor, unsure whether I am 9 years old or 15 years old. I enter this town and the minute I cross the border, where hills are buried beneath corn, I feel it clasp it’s cold hands onto my shoulders and tug me into it. If I breathe too loud, I will disturb the birds with my yelling. The town is hidden, shrouded in low population and God’s Grace. The people are standing amongst cornstalks and Bibles. I am standing in the middle of an empty field, next to a fire and a pool of ice cold water. I have to choose.

I do not belong here. This town is echoing and I am giving them an earache with my noise. They pray for me every Sunday evening, around their dinner tables, in the brown pews. Their prayers float up to the vaulted ceilings and tumble back down the walls, landing on their laps. “Pray for yourself.” their prayers whisper, before dissolving into the stuffy air. The air is heavy with their prayers for me, I am floating amongst them. They murmur their amens as I murmur her name, and wonder why their chests still feel hollow. They gamble on my spiritual death in secret, tossing their teeth away as tokens. And when the girl who sits up front with mommy and daddy is alone, she cries. She thinks of how her mother has shunned me, how her father prays for my soul. She thinks of how she wants to kiss girls, and she goes to bed praying to wake up straight. She sits in the front pew, and she amens loudly, and she claps to the hymns, but when she is 17, she is my replacement. They will pray for her soul, and they will scorn the girl who “tricked” her into the homosexual lifestyle. They will comfort her, and remove her from public school. She will be their new project, and as they say they love her, but hate her sin, they ignore the whispers in their mind that say they should just love her. There should be no hate.