Zach Zimmerman

Is It Hot in Here (or Am I Suffering for All Eternity for the Sins I Committed on Earth)?

Andre Bohrer

There’s a tension in southern air—the strange bedfellows of homophobia and humidity, and the ever-present terror that the person you were might be long behind you, but they are still breathing down your neck.

At fifteen minutes total, the meal was more of a feeding than a sit-down dinner. Its brevity kept us from hurting each other. Family members always have the nuclear codes for each other, the precise collection of words and phrases that, when entered, cause total annihilation.

But I'm not Dad's therapist. I'm his child, and I still want an "I’m sorry." An apology for why I imagine burning in Hell on turbulent flights, after I jerk off, and after naps. For why I have a hole in me so large only Christianity can fill it. For why my journey to find myself has been polluted with the poison of eternal doubt.

I cried at the coming together of people who were left out… I cried because when you grow up feeling on the fringe, it's easy to reject an invitation to come inside.

We are interconnected enough to cause global pain and suffering but not yet coordinated enough to alleviate it.

"Some parents go to Pride Parades with their kids. There these signs that say, 'I Love My Gay Child." "Is that what you want?" she asked. I wasn't sure if I did… But part of me wanted some spectacular act of love, some waterfall of affection to counter the fire-and-brimstone sermons I'd been burned by as a kid.”

How do you figure out who you are in an impossible matrix of inherited identities? Is identity a thing we construct or that we uncover? Is who I am a skyscraper I build or a treasure I find by digging a hole to the center of the Earth? Maybe both?

Is It Hot in Here (or Am I Suffering for All Eternity for the Sins I Committed on Earth)? quotes

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