I lived in this house. And in this house there were windows. And I would sit in the Great Room – that is what they call the biggest living room in a house with more than one living room – and I would stare out of the big windows at the lake. What I really wanted to do was break through the invisible barrier and swim in the water – not float. I wanted to swim.

Instead, I was trapped in the middle of a horrible conversation. “But you’re just so pretty,” my mother whispered through the shaking spit and tears that ran down her face and neck. She reached for my daddy’s hand. They embraced. I sat five feet across from them in a stiff chair, surrounded by windows but stuck to my seat. It felt like I was helplessly floating through a horrible nightmare and everything was crashing all around me. All of the walls and cabinets and picture frames, all of the televisions sets and refrigerators and ceiling lights were all tumbling down upon me, hitting me, but I was floating and silently screaming for help.

No one could hear me.

“I am overwhelmed with sadness, Britney. And let me tell you, I have only felt so completely,” he paused, “overwhelmed with sadness two times: once when my little brother died and right now,” he stabbed as he held onto my mothers shaking hand and stared into my face across the room. “Maybe I’ll cry about it someday,” he finished.

I ran up the stairs sobbing.

And so time passed as time does when everything in your life suddenly gets messed up: very slowly. I went to my senior prom with my big cousin. Soon enough, graduation came, and high school ended. All the while, I kept sneaking to see my girlfriend while my parents, pastor, and grandparents prayed that the homosexual demons would let me go.

It was time for me to go.

I knelt on the white, carpeted floor of my room and carefully rolled skirts, shirts, and other forms of fabric and shoved them into my brown luggage and black duffle bags. I wished I could just lift my room from the top corners of the wall and throw it out my window. I did not want to take any of it with me other than my teddy bear, my CD collection, and my notebooks of poems. Everything else was unnecessary. It was excess baggage. As I continued the robotic operations of packing, my girlfriend and I whispered “I love you” and “I’m going to miss you” back and forth and sometimes in unison into the phone.

And I really do love her. I love her brown complexion, speckled lightly by dark shadows of skin troubles in the past. I love her little twists-becoming-locs that she started about a year into our relationship, when everything was still okay. I miss her smile already, her teeth shining so brightly between her lips darkened by her smoking habit. But that is only half of her smile. The other half is her beautifully slanted eyes; they get so slim and crease at the corners when she smiles. That night as I was packing, I thought about how much I would miss her rough palm rubbing all five of my fingers. I would miss pressing my lips against her soft, round, stomach and forcefully blowing air into it and hearing her let out those big giggles. I thought about how I’d miss her warm arms wrapped around me, and at that moment, I wanted her to appear and kiss my forehead. I thought if only I could squeeze her in the duffle bag, my load would be lighter.

The following morning everybody got up and piled all of my things into the back of a mini-van we had rented. There was very little left of me in that room upstairs: an empty CD stand, a bookshelf, a few stuffed animals, a ballerina music box, a clear jug full of change, and a perfectly made bed. My mother, father, and two brothers I all climbed into the vehicle and my dad started driving. There were sixteen hours to drive from St. Louis to DC. Plus, there were stops. We stopped for gas. We stopped for bathroom breaks. We stopped to eat. And we stopped by Uncle Joe and Aunt Claudette’s home in Virginia for two days. The whole time in the car I slept, and when I wasn’t sleep, I stared out of the window at the street. I wanted to stretch my legs out more, but we were all so close together that it was funny.

By the time we arrived at Howard’s campus, everyone was anxious to stretch. We moved quickly through the check in process and upstairs to my room. I was the first of my suitemates to arrive. In fact, no one else came that day. After we moved all of my belongings into my dorm room, my parents asked me whether I wanted to stay alone in my room or to go back to the hotel with the rest of the family. I chose to stay in the dorm that night, and I sat on my bed in my clothes that were wrinkled from the two hour trip from VA to DC, with all the lights on – sleepy, but too scared in my new environment to even blink. Yet I was so happy to be someplace new.

Oh, but I am so angry right now. I am catching the Metro back to campus from church. I have been in DC six months now and have yet to find a church home. Because all the churches are just like back home.

“Britney, I know this is a strong demon to deal with, but God will deliver you; you just have to walk in your deliverance.” I remember my own pastor’s words.

My stomach is churning and twisting and tightening in an aggravating knot playing dodge ball with my insides. As I think about the medicine I chose to forego in my frenzied rush out of the door this morning, I curse bitterly while my best friend rubs my back and tells me to stand up straight. “When you hunch over like that, B, it contracts your muscles even more. It’ll only make your cramps worse,” she warns me. I groan.

“It is a disgusting, abomination. It is unnatural. Vile,” my father, the minister, had emphasized.

I want to rip my stomach from my body, throw it through window of the Metro train, and watch it splatter on the tunnel wall and slide down to the rails to be trampled by the next Green Line train to Branch Avenue that rolled by.

“It would have been better had she been pregnant,” Granny said.

And the words of today’s Minister echo in my head, as well. He had introduced his “special ministry” to help the gays overcome their demons and get out of their lifestyle of sin. He told the audience that God had “healed him” from his homosexuality and that he had been “walking in his deliverance” for four years, now. Everyone clapped. My best friend clapped, too.

“And if you are living in a homosexual lifestyle right now, I am talking to you, my brother or my sister. You were raised in the church, and you know you are wrong. But the truth!” he screamed, “The truth shall set you free!” His voice calmed as he said, “Because right now you know that you are swimming in sin.” He wiped his brow with a white handkerchief.

The “amens” and “yes, Lords” had appropriately followed.

I know that I am not floating anymore, silently screaming. No longer am I being pushed along with what everyone else considers the “natural” tide. Sure, I may be against the tide, but I am pushing. I am pushing upstream. I finally broke through all those big, pretty windows, and yes, I am swimming.

Also by Breeze:

A Trip

See Yourself