All Down Darkness Wide

by Seán Hewitt

(who can tell if the lone man in the cemetery is the man you’re looking for, or the man you don’t want to find?),

Though I did not know them, their ghosts haunt me. I am, somehow, their descendant: I arrived into a world full of ghosts, and owed a part of myself to each of them.

I felt the sense of feigned equality drawing out of my veins. The lie I had told to gain entrance into this clique of righteousness gave way.

When they said, ‘I’m just scared that you’ll be unhappy,’ what I really felt they were saying was ‘I am scared that if you continue being yourself, we will make you unhappy.’

I always felt myself to be looking in on an ideal queerness.

These stoppings and startings, these gradual assays into sex, were often lonely and unshared, and seemed every time to be more daring, pushing me outside the bounds of what my straight peers were doing, or not doing, and I only learnt later that this was a feeling shared by many queer people

I made a hierarchy of each facet of my identity, and at the bottom of the shaky, unstable tower I called ‘myself’ there was a little locked box.

A thousand little lies, all neatly stitched into a protective barrier, though I wasn’t sure if it was myself or the religious that I was protecting.

everyone has to translate when they try to bring something of themselves into language, hoping that the person listening might catch the sense of it, might see in the words a glimmer of the self who speaks them.

Before I came out, it was so deeply integral to the way I lived my life that it was hard, afterwards, to unpick which parts of myself were armour and which parts of myself were real.

Boys of my generation, born in the late Eighties or early Nineties, grew up in a febrile, uncertain, and still hostile atmosphere. We were born during the most deadly years of the AIDS epidemic, but came of age after the tide had begun to turn. Even so, that history was embedded into us through a series of hints and warnings.

It was inevitable, and my grief came from the confirmation, the utterance, of things I knew could not be changed.