Teach the Torches to Burn

by Caleb Roehrig

After all, as my father likes to say: If you can’t find someone else to blame, you are not trying hard enough.

And, as always, his counsel was maddeningly obscure. At the end of every story is a new beginning. Whatever that means.

“It’s a womanly pursuit, Romeo. It’s fine to admire a painting or a statue, but drawing little pictures of flowers and trees and things … it’s what girls do to pass the time and make their homes pretty. It’s not a respectable hobby for a gentleman.”

I was visiting a monk, because I needed someone to understand me, for once—to take me seriously. Someone I could be wholly honest with, knowing his vows require him to keep my secrets.

Benvolio talks about girls the way I try to talk to him about sunlight—how magical it is, how undefinable, how exquisitely beautiful in all its permutations; at any given time, he is pursuing multiple paramours, and each one is uniquely alluring, uniquely irresistible. But I have never felt that way about any girl. Why have I never felt that way?

And yet no girl made me half so weak in the knees as Mercutio did. And I had no idea what that truly meant—for me or about me.

How can you want to … be with someone you barely even know?”

For once, he has chosen to describe something that actually happened, and yet he still muddles all the facts—it is very like him.

He smiles beatifically. “I’ve just had the most wonderfully terrible idea.”

“I do know what you mean,” he interrupts softly, saving me from drowning in my own mortification.

“Sometimes I feel as though I am being crushed alive, but it’s happening so slowly, no one believes me when I tell them. Sometimes it feels like the most important parts of me are the ones I can’t share with the people who are the most important to me. Does that make any sense?” “Yes.” His voice is barely a whisper, but it echoes in the depth of the well. “When someone has decided who you are, and they won’t let you change their mind, what are you meant to do? Where is left to go?”

“A deceiver always pretends he is telling the truth—it is only the virtuous who lie.”

I grin, charmed and confused, wishing this interlude could last the rest of the night.

It frightens me, the way I feel inside when he smiles while looking into my eyes—like water just before i...

“I guess that’s the thing about masks … you wear one long enough, you eventually forget it isn’t your real face.”

The rest of us spent most of the afternoon trying and failing to cheer him, and when he erupted at Valentine, it was because he had finally found a convenient outlet for his restless anger.

“What is happening?” It feels as if lightning has struck me, is striking me. I can’t breathe, and I can’t stop breathing, and I can’t stop thinking about how close he is. “What happens now?”

The breeze swirls, redolent of black earth and blossoms on the cusp of fruiting, and I’m lost in a rich sensation of living in a way I’ve never known before.

When he pulls back, his mouth swollen, his eyes dazed and glittering, he gasps, “Is this … is this what it’s meant to feel like?” “I don’t know.” I am unable to catch my breath. “I’ve no idea what it’s meant to feel like—but if it’s always like this, how does anyone ever stop?”

We draw apart at last, our eyes still wide and searching. I know he feels it, too—this breathless, scratchy awareness of the world, this new realization of its vibrancy and sharp edges—because I see it in his face. It’s like being thrown from a horse, having the wind knocked out of you and realizing you’re still alive.

We tell people what they want to hear, or what we think they need to hear in order to be happy. Sometimes it works. Sometimes allowing someone to believe a harmless falsehood can feel like an act of charity.”

“It can be much harder to live with a lie than you might think, Romeo. Even one that feels safer than the truth.”

“You do not yet know what lies on the other side of the truth, Romeo. Some leaps require faith—and, sometimes, achieving your purpose in life, your happiness, requires sacrifice.”

Looking into Valentine’s eyes and recognizing myself in them was … apocalyptic, in the original sense of the word: a revelation.

“Something I have learned, both through observation and personal experience, is that happiness is not guaranteed to anyone. If it finds you, if it seeks you out, it is best to revel in it for as long as you can. It is perhaps the greatest gift fate has to offer.”

“When a world that has no room for us together inevitably forces us apart?”

There is more space in this world than you could ever dream of.”

“There are far stranger things on this earth by heaven’s design than a Montague desiring a romantic liaison with someone who is not a girl. Romeo … have you never considered that perhaps you are meant to have this happiness?”

No one has ever told me I might deserve to be happy on my own terms, rather than just happy with what I’ve been given. No one has ever told me I might simply deserve to be happy.

“we can go outside and hunt for rainbows.”

“But he is infamous for his paranoia, which is fueled by the belief that everyone else is as unscrupulously conniving as himself.”

“Have you all taken leave of your senses?

Two days ago, I could not think of one thing to look forward to, and now I am dreaming in weeks and months and years.”

When I didn’t know what passion felt like, it wasn’t hard to imagine living the rest of my life without it. But now that I know what I will spend my whole future missing

the main principle that governs life in our social stratum is eternally consistent, and never fair: Blame always belongs to the most defenseless person available.

All you can do is run or hide, and all I can do is split the minutes into seconds, pretending it lengthens the dwindling hours I have left before I must marry a man who despises me.”

“I tried very hard to understand what my friends were talking about. I reached down deep and struggled to pull those feelings out from within me, to look at a boy—or anyone, really—and foster some romantic inclinations … but they wouldn’t come.” She shrugs again, her mouth pulling to one side. “And I’m not certain they ever will. Whatever fuel causes that particular fire to burn inside others, it does not seem to burn inside me.”

I finally began to realize I’m not alone after all. He made me see that I am whole, just like this, and that I do not need that particular intensity in order to have joy in my life.”

“We do not always get to choose the future—sometimes the future simply happens, and we may only choose how we will live with it.

The ground does not shake, and there is no change in the air, no change in my soul; I am merely unmarried one moment, and married the next—my life altered again in the blink of an eye.

“A good omen,” Friar Laurence pronounces optimistically.

the stars revolve slowly overhead … gradually uncrossing themselves, or so we hope.

Are husbands and wives afforded no personal privacy?”

“For the last time, drop your sword, and call off your manservant, or I will show you what a woman is capable of when she is in an ‘emotional state.’”

Leaning in, touching my forehead gently to his, I whisper, “We will teach the torches to burn.”

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I have no idea what the future will bring, because I’ve not decided it yet. Instead, I choose to float in this happiness, and to imagine all the possibilities that lie ahead—for they are as boundless as the sea.

A story about queer people snatching happiness from the jaws of a world that has been fashioned against them. A tale as old as time. As the shadows deepen, and old ugliness awakes to shake its loathsome head against the peace we’ve fought long and hard for, remember this: We cannot be corrected or contained. We are as boundless as the sea, and we will teach the torches to burn bright.