Her Name in the Sky

by Kelly Quindlen

I realized I was afraid of the truth. I was scared. I felt, like—I felt like I was trapped by these feelings I didn’t want to have, and I didn’t want to deal with what it meant, and what people would say, and how I would negotiate with my faith…and I resented you for finding your way into my heart like you did. I was scared of you. Being around you, it was like—you were everything I wasn’t supposed to want. You’re—no one told me about you. When I was growing up, it was always, ‘One day, when you meet a nice boy,’ or, ‘When you have a husband….’ No one ever told me that it might be different. That it would be okay to be different. So I just—I had this deep sense of shame about myself. About the way that I felt.”