There's no one to hold me when the horrors come, I wrote in my notes app in January. There was an ache inside that would erupt in shudders in the dark, cutting me open and leaving me raw. It’s hard to put into words the despair, the naked dissolution of identity that encompasses those moments that I feel could adequately describe it. Pain in technicolor, no wound to show. Just a sheet of tears. Every step to better brought something new and somehow worse, more frightening. Is this my life now? Other widows tell me it doesn’t get better, but it gets different. Different, and more horrible? Maybe the spaces between the fractures get longer, but when I found myself wailing on my kitchen floor a few months back, I didn’t know how I was going to survive it.

“Just because I am filled with anger and grief doesn’t mean I don’t have room for softness. The soul is limitless,” she texts me. Don’t you understand, I plead, a warning, a confession — “I feel like I’m filled with knives.” Monday, I cried in her arms for the first time. An unexpected refuge, unexpected time, unexpected place. A week of whispers and curated playlists. A dance in the liminal space we occupy together as beacons in the dark swirl we navigate. Holding on as survival. Breathing as a sacrament.

“If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m queer.”

We were standing at the lockers, near our chemistry and physics class. The classroom where we’d sit in the back behind the experiment tables, each wearing an earbud attached to a walkman, playing music - sometimes a bootleg Rocky Horror cast recording, or some dance hit I’d never heard of. I met Jason my first day of high school in art class. He introduced me to Rocky Horror, rave culture, tarot, ballroom culture, drag queens, John Waters and Divine. And no, I hadn’t figured it out, but the weird light with unnamed identity inside me recognized the weird light in him as friend, as kin.

To be queer is to know grief. The losses come early, and they come fast, and if you’re one of the unlucky ones whose body or mannerisms, interests and fascinations, are not easily suppressed or hidden? You’re fucked. The cuts and losses come from all sides, even within queer communities that you hope are safe. Who knew you could do queer wrong? And it maims and kills. The audacity to exist outside of some proscribed norm - to just live and be in the world, buy your groceries or do your fucking laundry? We got to love each other. I found out Jason died a few years ago. He stayed in the Cincinnati area, and I know he fought addiction.

We’re just out here trying to live our lives, and some of us can slip into a heteronormative mask for a minute or more. Jon and I never really hid our queerness, but people also see what they want to see when they see a couple performing as “man” and “woman” and “parents” and “married.” All true, all incomplete. When queer people in what appear to be heterosexual relationships pass, there’s the risk of erasure because it’s tidy and convenient. He wasn’t closeted, it was in his social media bio blurb. It’s in mine. What am I worried about when writing this?

Because, as I spoke at a National Coming Out Day event, you never come out just once. It happens over, and over again. As we’re approaching Pride Month, in our current political environment, the risk of being vocal and queer is as bad as it has ever been, and it’s getting worse. This coming month, I want everyone to be more vocal about trans rights. When we police gender and gender expression, it hurts literally everyone. It’s absurd. Every person deserves safety in their bodies, and deserves to be able to clothe and express themselves authentically. Every person deserves to love authentically.

In the last year of Jon’s life, I noticed he started calling me his spouse instead of wife when posting on Mastodon. We both added ‘they’ as a pronoun option in our social media bios and con badge tags, but we never discussed ‘spouse.’ I had started using ‘spouse’ at work when talking about him as well. We never talked about it, it just happened organically. Because of that, I’ve tried to intentionally make sure I use ‘spouse’ instead of ‘husband’ to honor that. It’s a little thing I can do.

Finally, I do like hearing from readers. What started as a way to do something instead of just sitting lost, has turned into a year long project that may turn into a book. I’m starting to collect the ‘outakes’ and consider maybe spicier bits for a memoir, based on some of that feedback. I’ve come to terms with the fact that maybe I am a writer after a long hiatus from writing. Each week I find myself a little deeper into the process.

In the end, though, this project is for me - as I feel the best art can be. If I ever stop producing because I’m worried about audience acceptance, then I don’t see the point. This, in part, is what brought out this piece today. Going into June, remember Stonewall was a riot. Pride was and is a protest. Stand in solidarity, and stand up for folks who are not free to stand for themselves.