ANOTHER TIME — ANONYMOUS

To write like this is to reopen my wounds

But I’ll gladly split my chest

If it lets someone else feel seen.

The day I decided to come out To come out to you another time

I knew I’d have to split my chest to you.

It’d already happened before, Sitting shotgun as you drove me, Asking what would happen if I wasn’t straight.

That day I took that same car out for a drive, I took it out to get away from our house

If not forever, then just for these moments.

I had to run every option, every time I had to run them all through my head, Looking at every option I had or could have.

I imagined a time where you just accepted

Accepted me the first fucking time,

And I didn’t spend all these years waiting.

I imagined a time where you lashed out instead

Instead of what you said, you drove me away

The way my deepest anxieties thought you would.

I imagined a time where I spent high school out, Not trying to decipher who I could trust with myself, Whose loose lips wouldn’t destroy my family.

I imagined a time where I lost my home, Where I lost even more than that, All because I couldn’t wait those years.

I spent so long just driving that day, Driving and looking for somewhere to pull over,

As my eyes began to blur the rolling snowfields.

White queer men screamed on the stereo

Because that was the closest possible way I could try to feel heard

The times I was imagining bore down

Alternate timelines, entire universes

With all their contained mass weighing

My shoulders started cracking,

Tears squeezed from my eyes

And quiet sobs escaped my mouth

Every timeline collapsing on to me, Shattering me across time and space

My tears and wails to fill the void.

In another time, I could be someone else I could love in a different way I could be part of a different family.

But those universes had evaporated, And I was stuck to the skin this world

This world and my family had given me.

Stuck with the realization that What has always hurt me the most

Is the influx of identities that form me.

And what I’d been mourning all that time

Was less what could and couldn’t have been But the years of my queer teenagerhood already lost.

And so I had had enough. A quick text to you And I was on my way back home.

I sat you down and tried my