July 18, 1999
Dear Mother,
There was a point when the gentle comforts of the rocking chair on Grandma’s porch were no longer soothing. When the shrill calls of kids playing in the yard or the conversation in the house were unbearable. When the only familiar face was yours... and I recognized it only for a moment, before you too disappeared into the faceless swarm of people.
I stopped into the gas station down on the corner to fill up before I forgot to do it that evening. Maybe grab a drink or some snack before I arrived, since dinner never starts on time. And no one has Diet Coke on hand. The attendant recognized the name on the check, but not the face. It was an amazing coincidence, he said, that I have the same name as a man he went to high school with, the same name as my father. But he was quite sure he never had children.
I recognized his face from years of buying things there after school when you worked in the video store across the street. I quietly pulled out a credit card and put away the checkbook. He wouldn’t understand the northern Virginia address anyway. Especially since my license still had a local one. It was just easier that way. I took my Diet Coke and chips back to my car. I wish I had paid at the pump.
I haven’t lived in Fairfax that long. Two years. Two years and 24 days today. I guess I haven’t lived in Scottsville now for sometime. I wasn’t really around much when I was in college, even though it was only 10 miles away. I didn’t stop in and buy gas. I didn’t hang out and talk to the mechanics. I didn’t get arrested throwing beer bottles on a Sunday night. And I never hired the one prostitute… or dated any of the even easier women.
I just wasn’t as visible those four years after I graduated high school. Not that I was visible those four years I was in high school either. My career took me through student council and honor societies, not the football, basketball, or baseball fields where the community gathered. But then I guess history doesn’t really help as much as a great arm when you are pumping gas, or sweeping floors, or even working at the minimum-security women’s prison they just built behind the elementary school.
When I’m there, if someone does recognize me, they do not call me by name. Its not “Hey John”… its “Its you… you are Chris’s gay older brother.” How funny, how that works.
Each and every holiday I return, the faces seem further away, more distant. Less familiar. The stories are less interesting, less comprehensible, less applicable. People I knew from middle school are now strangers. Conversations are muddled, quick … complex when someone recognizes me at all.
I feel not from here when there.
My life has taken me to a very different place than these people can dream. Than my family can dream. I hear them chatter in the kitchen about how much money I make, or the type of house that I live in, or the extravagant nature of my car. I hear them utter prayers for my soul for my sexuality. I hear the whisper small resignations between themselves, “Isn’t it a shame.” Or “He must be so happy to have so much.”
And each time I look on their face, and see their eyes look at me like a stranger, their wonder revealing the true deficit of their knowledge and understanding of me, the space between our worlds grows even larger. And I do not feel.
These days I return to this place and I swing on the porch in quiet. I answer questions when spoken to… I share a little story about how things are going… I smile. But only my lips have curled. My eyes are empty, staring ahead, wondering if not here, where? Four simple letters, H, O, M, E… and yet they are so important when they are missing.
I eat the food. I laugh at the jokes. I hug each and every one of them and say how wonderful it is to see them. But I have dismissed a hundred prospective employees with a smile more genuine. I have hugged a hundred perfect strangers and found more meaning in the embrace.
These people do not know me. They do not wish to know me. My anecdotes are cleansed. My smiles and manners rehearsed. My thoughts subdued, postponed, prostrate. My visits are brief.
I’m never quite sure why I put these words to paper. What do I hope to achieve? In closing, I’m hoping to draw you near, bridge the chasm between our worlds to make it our world. I’m not sure if it is possible. I’m not sure I will even have the courage to let you read these words. God willing…
Love always, your son,
John Albert