Dear KJ

Dear KJ,

Today you are in the seventh grade, and someone will call you a faggot for the first time. Like you always do when someone insults you, you will say "thank you," to try to disarm your assailant. But this time you won't know what that word means. A friend will look at you, horrified, and explain it to you. And you will be shocked and backtrack madly into denial. You will be shaken to your core without realizing why. You won't realize until a few years later that someone called you something you knew you were, something that you denied because you thought it was wrong. And even worse, they use it as an insult. You will know at the depth of your being that it was meant as a great insult to who you really are, and you will deny the truth because you are terrified of who you really are.

You will remember that boy's name for a long time. You will still see him saying that word a decade later. You won't have any idea of where he went after that moment. To you he is an immortal truth teller, frozen forever at the age of 13, handing you a scary truth about the world. Two years before this moment, your childhood innocence was toppled on the same day as the Twin Towers, but this is different. This didn't happen in a far off city, this wasn't an attack on the country you call home. This happened to you, this was an attack on you, the very core of you.

You will bury this memory, and for the next few years it won't bother you very much on the surface. That boy will move and you will forget about him, for now. You will go to high school. You will have a teacher ask you if you are out, and you will deny vehemently that you were ever in. Her innocent question will dredge up the pain of those six letters, exposing the scar on your soul that they created. You will go through the process of questioning yourself. You will accept yourself.

Years later you will be at a party, and the topic of the word "faggot" will come up. Someone will talk about the first time it was thrown at them, and suddenly, in rapid fire detail, that boy will pop back into your head. You will greet the memory with more maturity and information than you had the last time that you met it. You will look at your 13 year old self, confused and naive in so many ways.

And you will see that he is beautiful. You will see that he grows into a beautiful man who not only accepts what makes him different, but embraces those differences wholeheartedly. You will stare at each other, you and your younger self, and he'll ask you if that thing is true, "are we really that word?"

You will look into his wounded eyes and you will say "Yes. And that is one of the greatest gifts we have been given."

Love,

KJ