he was heavy as a broken heart
CW: death, hate crime (mentioned), suicidal ideation.
This morning I spent two hours squeezed between so many people I can't tell which of the dudes was attempting to feel me up, the smell making me want to faint, my brain shut down. When I came to, I'm at the office, thinking, wouldn't it be nice to be hit by a bus instead of suffocating in one, and also thinking, I think people don't know who Matthew Shepard is anymore.
It's not like I expect people to, I guess. I go months without thinking of him, sometimes. But this morning his name is in my head when I come to, and I think, he would have been 45 now. I wonder if he would have been a kind person. I wonder if he would have been one of the problematic older white queers. Or someone in between. I guess it doesn't matter, because he would never be 45. He never got to be 22.
He died on the day after my 15th birthday - he was my Emmett Till, my George Floyd. The name that would haunt the rest of my teen years, even though at the time I've set aside (temporarily) the stories I've been reading of nights of sentinels and mutant massacres. I wondered, then, if I would ever reach 22.
My sister never reached 30. It's strange because it never really feels like she's gone. Just yesterday I was walking past Typo and something caught my eye, and I stopped for a moment, turning to enter the store, thinking she would love that, then remembering. In other ways, I never forget, though - I was watching one of the newer Netflix romcoms (it's strange to think that she never had Netflix) and it reminded me so much of the Voltage otome game we both played, Be My Princess. We loved otome games and were playing two different Voltage games together when she died. I deleted the games from my phone almost immediately, knowing I could never play them again without her to talk to about the characters, or do party events with, and I haven't played a single one since. Being reminded of Be My Princess, though, made me regret deleting my games without taking screenshots of all the messages and letters we sent to one another in-game. We talked more in-game than on LINE, and I didn't think about that before deleting all that data.
I think about what it would be like if I never got to be 30, and while of course there is a part of me that would always be relieved at the thought of not existing, I also think it would be a sad thing. For me, not for others. Because if I never reached 30, I would never learn all the things I've learned about myself since, things that do make things feel a lot lighter at times (and a lot heavier at other times), things that make me finally make more sense to myself.
Sometimes when I think about the future, I still wish I stopped before 30, before my sister did, so that I wouldn't know this weird existence without her. Sometimes I wished I stopped a lot earlier, before Matthew, before it really hit me that so many people out there live with so much hate in them. I almost always dreamed about never existing at all. But sometimes I think of my sister in her 30s - of how different a person she would have been, as different as the person I am now was to the person I was at her age when she died.
Today, I think of Matthew at 45, all the people he would have met and loved, the passions he would have discovered, the strangeness of this world would have been to that young man in 1998. I wonder what Matthew would have thought of a world where Bobby Drake can finally come out; a world where Destiny and Mystique's marriage is no longer just subtext; a world where there are shows like Everything's Gonna Be Okay; a world where wonderful young people - people like Rowan Ellis - exist.
I'm reading a book by Rowan Ellis that's coming out later this year, and I'm already thinking of getting a copy for my niece, while also thinking, I wish I had this book at 15. I think about how I was 15 when Matthew Shepard was 21, and the difference that made, and how different things will be for my niece. And - I think I want to see how different things can be in the future, when I'm 45.
I hope to see 45. I will try to see 45. (I don't really have that long to go.)
Note: I apologise for yet another depressing newsletter. Especially when I'd planned to do a reading wrap-up! (Aren't you glad I did the mid-month one when I did?) Mercury retrograde will be over on February 3rd, so here's hoping things will be lighter when I write next week's.
The title of this newsletter is from a poem by Lesléa Newman, about Matthew Shepard, who was kidnapped, beaten and tortured to death in October 1998. Some years ago a journalist alleged that the circumstances regarding his death was not as simple as originally reported. I believe the truth is probably somewhere in between.
STUFF TO CHECK OUT
- A Reading Spreadsheet Doesn't Have to Be Complicated - this made me want to try using spreadsheets again, particularly to keep track of the single issues I read, and manage my ARCs.
Stay safe!