(For a while now, I’ve wanted to write a novella about the journey of a person’s view of her or his evolution when it deals with gender, sexuality, and growing up. I still want to write a novel about the circus life that is centered around a character, a freak if you will in being a hermaphrodite (no longer used, I know), with the name of Sequoia. This future story (more developed in due time) deals with life in a more recent decade). I wanted it to be sort of a version of a bloodletting if you will, a purification of one’s soul, a freeing kind of experience. I still haven’t given up hope and (motivation) of my second novel idea. I plan on going back to it very soon and might change the POV. In the meantime, I hope you find this flash fiction enjoyable to read. This subject matter is not for everyone, which I wholly admit. I also have ambition to write a crime/mystery/detective novel with hints of the Chuck Pahlaniuk writing style. I state this because I thought about again last night while trying to sleep. Oh, the inspiration is everywhere, isn’t it?
Until next time,
Pisaries Creator
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People have felt sorry for me, hated me, and wanted revenge on me because of who I am. My father died before he knew my true identity. My mother died believing I was an anomaly. In fact when she couldn’t handle the truth, she disowned me much as many parents do when they can’t accept their children aren’t made in their image. She wanted the best for me. The problem between us was simple. I wasn’t able to give her what she wanted.
It all started in middle school when I deviated from her childhood values. Despite my crush on a heartthrob in a movie, no matter how many teeny bopper magazines called Tiger Beat and others with names that cater to girls only interested in boys I had, I believed girl’s legs were just as attractive. In fact, it was her skinny legs that made me secretly cut out the model in my mother’s clothing catalogues. For every time I swooned over the way his hair glistened in the sun, I did even more when I looked at her body.
He pretended to play a teenager but she was a real teenager in life or so I cultivated it in my mind. I really didn’t know. She wasn’t a supermodel with a recognizable first and last name. She might’ve had an ugly name for all I knew. Marriage was important part of my mother’s life. In fact, was the only part she boasted about to her friends. It was implied I, too, was supposed to follow in her footsteps. “Women marry strong men,” my mother would tell me. “Don’t go marrying someone shorter, weaker, and most of all, don’t marry a man who’s got nothing but pennies in his pockets.”
My father never had a say in how to raise me except the occasional threat of slapping my behind when I didn’t listen to my mother. So when my yearning to touch an actual female instead of wondering what it would feel like in my last year of middle school, I was confused well enough. In fact, it brought me great embarrassment about what I was doing but not enough to crumple the clippings of the model, hide them inside blank sheets of computer paper, and throw them away in the kitchen garbage when my parents were out of the house.I held onto them or years and sometimes when I should’ve been sleeping, I pulled them out from my drawer and touched her face with my finger. Her eyes were the most beautiful. They were dark and smoldering. Her lips were the perfect shape and color.
I didn’t want to see what was underneath that bikini. All I wanted to do was tell her how much I admired her curves. More than ever, secretly wanted her body. My mother told me I would be a blossoming rose like herself. Instead, I was still wearing bras reserved for scrambled eggs instead of fried. For all the desires of wanting to be that model, I felt out of place, and this scared the crap out of me. I wanted to be that girl that turned into a woman my mother spoke about when she brushed my hair. I wanted to be a feminine flower such as herself. She radiated a kind of peace within herself from every pore of her body.
When my desire of finding girls more attractive than boys heightened in my last year of middle school, I told myself this was not proper. At night, I would recite passages from the Bible, in the hopes it would lessen the pain of my secret. I knew a relationship between a man and a woman was sacred and anything else was evil, wrong, a sin. Upon entry into high school, my views of relationships only got more convoluted. My best friend in middle school was no longer my best friend. There was gossip going around about her being raped by another student a few grades above us. I also heard another female student in my class was raped by the same student. Knowing both of these encounters might be true, it retreated further into myself. My views on relationships had been solidified. It didn’t matter if I wanted to experiencing kissing a woman for the first time. This would never happen.
When I left my parents’ house in search of a better future, to become a better person, to learn how to use my fully developed wings, I vowed never to let my secret get out. There was shame involved but more I never wanted to be known as “the dyke.” I hated labels and the vitriol that came with it. I suppressed my feelings and desires. My focus was on my career. It would’ve been okay, staying on the course I planned for myself in my head, except in the summer of 1999 I bumped into someone. The issue was he wasn’t just anybody, a nobody, a man disguised as a former lesbian. This was the moment I knew my education wasn’t only occurring within a classroom but in a coffee shop on some street or avenue I don’t remember because for now, it really doesn’t matter.