It was the the summer after freshman year. The day was plain and simple. I had just finished playing and beating (might I add) Dante’s Inferno on my new PS3. The world around me was calm, nothing but blank space. I was totally and utterly tuned in to the game. Suddenly I died, like in the game not in real life, meaning I had to start from my last check point. I was over it, time for a break. After my short mental breakdown, because of the fact that I lost my place and had to start the game all over, I finally tuned out of the game. The walls reappear and the sounds of my house grow louder. The real world was ahead of me. Being exhausted from hours at the TV, I sat down, put the cold earphones in my ear and relaxed. I remember the slight pain the earphones gave me after wearing them for a while. It’s either because they were really big or because I admittedly have strangely small ears. At about the fifth song “Same Love” by Macklemore came on. It was the first time I had ever heard it.

“I can’t change even If I tried, even if I wanted to” the lyrics read.

It got me thinking... I thought about why life was the way it was, why people were made differently, why I was made differently. After thinking through my life values, I thought about how we we’re all same and how all of us are people. People are just people. All of this lead up to the two biggest question I’ve came to, my entire life. Who am I and who do I want to be?

“ I am me,” I told myself.

“Who do I want to be?” “I want to be who I am.” I mumbled.

The second that thought went through my head, my eyes glossed over with water and salt. Water droplets began to form at the corner of each eye. I get up and run. The world around me was colorful but blurry. I later find myself on a cold wet tile floor. Thought after thought after thought ran through my head. After a while my body was exhausted, I did not have enough energy to produce a single tear more. I raised my head and realised I had been in the bathroom for 2 hours. I get up. I can feel the weight dragging on all of my limbs. I head out of the bedroom into the kitchen. There sat my mom. She was fiddling around with her cell phone, trying to find the power button. I grabbed the phone, took her hands and told her I had something extremely important to tell her. After I pulled her aside I was speechless. I wasn’t able to form one word. My throat felt like it was getting tighter by the minute. I eventually gave up. After my pathetic attempt to speak I grabbed a pencil and paper.

I wrote with my shaking hands, “Mom, I’m Gay”