A Letter To My Straight Self

Featured Image: Jernej Graj

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Dear Straight Self

I wish you had known many things

Though I know you needed to stumble

Blindly groping about in the darkness

Before you could rip that blindfold off your eyes

And finally sprint into daybreak.

I now know you were deluded

So deluded by the illusion 

Of your heterosexuality

You pushed me down

Deeper into those cold depths of yourself

Holding my head though I thrashed loudly

Drowning and desperate for oxygen

All because you feared me

Though I am yourself

And you were me.

Dear Straight Self,

I’m sorry I didn’t fight harder

To claw my way to the surface

But you buried me under comfortable lies

Even while I loved ‘the wrong people’

And secretly doodled rainbows in pencil

On the margins of old notebooks

Hoping one day to color them 

Onto this dark mahogany skin

With pride.

Dear Straight Self

I sometimes mourn you

As mistaken and miserable 

That you were,

I miss your surety 

The way you looked to the future 

And knew the person you would be.

As if that future self were some marble sculpture

In this museum of my life.

But dear Straight Self,

I’m sorry for the pain I caused

Though we both knew the day would come

When I would pull that sword from the rock

And come for this soul

That became our battleground,

Our Holy Camelot.

And as strong as you were

Our enemies made you queen

Not the thoughts and dreams in this head

I shall call our subjects

No they crowned you with a wreath of poisonous thorns

While you slowly died.

So I took the throne,

Unsure of everything

But my queerness

So dear Straight Self,

I’ve made it to the surface.

Sanaa Mirz

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