Hijab Butch Blues

by Lamya H.

don’t want to die in any of these ways that would leave people grieving, would leave behind shock waves and melancholy and the certainty of pain for others. What I want instead is to disappear. Stop living, more like. I just want to stop being alive. It’s a constant ache, this wanting to disappear.

All year that I’ve been having these feelings, not a day goes by that I am not terrified that someone will find out, paranoid that people can see through me, to this core of me that is wretched and wrong.

We hang up, and it’s funny, I don’t feel different, don’t feel gayer. If this is supposed to be the authentically gay experience, it doesn’t work. Everything feels pretty much the same.

This is the kind of gay I’ve grown into, this is what my queerness looks like and I have nothing to prove.

I’ve learned to reframe telling people as inviting in, instead of coming out—inviting into a place of trust, a space for building—and

With straight girls, I get to choose being rejected, I get to reject myself. But having feelings for another queer person makes the situation feel entirely out of my control; I wouldn’t know if or when or why they’d reject me, and what’s scarier is that I don’t know what I’d do if they didn’t reject me. I’m too afraid to find out.

But I can’t. I’m too scared to let people in. Too scared that they’ll have to leave.

And the truth is also that l love doing these things because I love these people. But in the quiet before Manal responds, I feel confronted anew with the flip side of this way of being with other people—a way that’s based in fear of people leaving, that prevents me from asking things of people in turn. That makes me recoil when others try to be there for me, even when I don’t ask. That prevents me from being vulnerable, setting up a double standard where I’m convinced that vulnerability is a repellent in myself but not in others.

“Talk to you next Wednesday?” I say, because it’s too hard to ask are you going to leave me? Now that you know these messy things about me?