I see him, standing there opposite me. The version of myself that was perhaps supposed to be. Straight, married, wife, kids, wedding, success - some things I am but never in the same way he could have been.
I love him. I killed him.
This version of me that everyone wanted, everyone expected and who nonetheless wasn't. The one my parents grieved when I came out after moving away; the one they still cling to when they express a want for grandchildren and weddings. He never existed, of course, but he felt real and left a real mark on the world.
I have been trying for too long to be him. To contort and cut off myself and to apologise for my failings to not perfectly emulate the version of myself I am not.
I buried him today. And I grieved him. And I wept.
Everyone talks about the grief of parents finding out their kids are queer, but there is a kind of gried for the queer kids themselves - the burying of all that everyone supposed you were going to be. The funeral for a version of you that never existed but everyone felt.
Every time I come out to someone, he dies again. I killed him. I loved him.
There is mourning here, for the version of myself I have projected when useful, the thing everyone expects to see, not the ideal (I am the ideal, the real) but the obvious. I grieve him.
The new, real, version of myself who always existed buries the one who never did in an old run-down churchyard. He would have liked it there.
I grieve him. I bury him. I love him. I kill him. I couldn't be him.