Your Silent Scream

It was a warm and humid evening in your small Wisconsin town on July 23, 2011, and we were together. Temporarily oblivious to Amy’s fate, you and I had made sushi together at your friend’s house, where we were staying for the evening. You’d convinced me to experiment with raw salmon, carrots and cucumbers, rice and seaweed, before I talked to your friend’s son about his writing, ate our experiment, and tried to concentrate on The King’s Speech. You’d taught me to roll.

But between seaweed and movie, we found out that Amy was dead, and as the skies threatened to open, we went out into the night. We wandered through the dark streets of your friend’s neighborhood, and you pointed out the trees that had been felled by the recent windstorms that had passed through your small Wisconsin town. The yards were littered with wreckage, with foliage that was disconnected from the life-giving soil, with saplings that would grow no higher, with an aura of death that contrasted sharply with the lively stars that guided us as they pulsated through the thunderclouds that passed swiftly overhead.

The stars led us to a fountain, which incongruously emerged in a sort of neighborhood square that seemed to have appeared just for us. The stars, which flickered in competition with the darkness of the night and the obstructionist clouds, illuminated the fountain and transformed it to a destination, a place for confession and community—a home.

I sat on the lip of the fountain’s basin and felt its coolness seep into me through my jeans. But this coolness, as relieving as it was on such a humid night, was paradoxical because I simultaneously felt the warmth of the eternal stars, as their glow transformed the water of the fountain into a milky bath into the warm embrace of which I wanted to plunge, headlong and fearless, like the man I always wanted to be.

You looked up at me for what seemed like the millionth time, and I noticed yet again a similar, inviting warmth in your hazel eyes. But their warmth was complicated and perhaps compromised by a confusion and an alertness, which were all too clear in how strangely open they were, as if you were having a vision of some unseen horror or memory that was always threatening to overcome your soul and determine the actions that you’d taken and would take. Your eyes told me—on the night of the day when Amy died—that the confusion and alertness would win yesterday, today, and forever, that the warmth and indeed the love that were you would lose out and you would die. I could also tell that you loved me with the power of the nature that had sent the trees spinning and splintering and with the constant light of the stars that led us to and ignited the fountain.

We talked as we always had done before, and you told me about a woman whom you had recently met and with whom you’d begun a physical relationship. As you described your sexual encounter, you told me that “things went faster than you wanted them to” and that your “shirts had come off.” You also told me that she made you very uncomfortable and that you desired to cease seeing her.

When I told you to trust your instinct and to break things off, I remembered the advice that I had given you about the man who’d serially verbally abused, tortured, and raped you—the man who, I would find out later, had masturbated over your naked body and ejaculated on you after he’d raped you. But I didn’t say anything about this connection. I didn’t have the courage to bring up this pattern in your life—your problem with submission to people who took deep advantage of your loneliness and your longing to be accepted, even if it meant absolving yourself of the burden of having to show your true self to the world and stand by that true self. It was more comfortable and easier, I felt, for you to be the creature of others, whether it was the conservative Catholic girl or the radical, politically correct lesbian.

I also didn’t have the courage to accept your love for me, which fought its way through your shaky words and voice and the confusion of your eyes. But it was obvious that you knew that I didn’t want to create you, that I had no interest in forging you in the smithy of my soul for the betterment of ultimately no one but myself. We would have to find our way to each other through the course of time—time, which could inflict so much pain, so much suffering, so much abandonment, so many sleepless nights when the waters closed in on us, threatened to fill our lungs, and drown the life right out of us.

Amy had died, we’d later learn, by drowning herself in drink, a probable suicide. You, too, had attempted suicide and used the bottle as a way to numb the loneliness that resulted from all the verbal and sexual abuse with which your family, friends, and acquaintances had tortured you—your mother calling you an “abomination” and throwing you out of the car when you’d decided to wear a shirt that endorsed tolerance for people of all sexualities, your friends taking naked pictures of you and not listening to you when you needed them the most, and your acquaintances raping you as you slept, took a shower, and were at your most vulnerable as you sought a new career in a new town.

These same people condemned you with labels that diminished your identity and authenticity, leaving you a bug-like specimen sprawled on a pin with your legs twitching helplessly and futilely above your body as if to scream, “I’m alive! I’m a person! I’m not a Catholic! I’m not a lesbian! I’m not your plaything! I’m not your definition!”

This scream, which rivaled anything Munch or Ginsberg could ever concoct, was real, all too real—the real you to which you’d been reduced, even in the very moment that you, in your quest for love and acceptance, suppressed because you figured yourself a lost cause, one who’d never find an outlet for the self that contained multitudes but that no one, it seemed to you, would ever recognize, much less love.

You were a multitude of voices, experiences, inner victories, loves, passions, interests, and worlds that had been reduced to labels against which you raged and never accepted—against which you screamed.

But screams have a knack for not being articulate and the one person on whom you could count, the one person before whom you could cry out with the helplessness of despair, knew what your screams meant when you fell to the floor in the bookstore, weeping tears of rage and sadness, not because your girl-lover had left you having extorted thousands of dollars from you, as you announced, but because you felt that you would never be loved for who you were.

What bullshit. You knew that I loved you—and you knew that none of the labels applied. You knew that you wouldn’t have to submit before me. You knew that you loved me for this very reason, and for the very fact that you could tell me anything without fear, that you were deeply physically attracted to me and wanted to act on sheer impulse to kiss and ultimately to fuck in the timelessness of a night of rebirth when the two of us would circle each other and come together in the power of mutual, bodily resurrection.

Our Easter would come soon. But time would take its toll as we climbed toward each other and into the cave of your apartment, where we’d spend days in the dark touching each other softly and deeply, before we emerged to a new day, standing strong and together on a tower overlooking the April day of another small town in Wisconsin.

Amy was dead, but we weren’t.