Nothing Wrong With Loving

Chapter 12: Friends.

The events that occurred after Jake's big reveal were a blur to me.

Jake said a bunch of things about me being gay, not really using that word but some others far more insulting. I have to admit that at first, I didn't care, I was surprised by it but I wasn't as scared or bothered as I thought I would be.

I was actually very fucking surprised when I felt relief. I think what he did was beyond awful. Nobody should be forced out of the closet when they aren't ready but truth be told, I don't know if I was ever going to be ready and to be even franker, I didn't give two shits about anybody in that house knowing. Those who I truly cared about already knew about it, so whatever everybody else thought about me, it just wasn't a big deal anymore.

It was quite funny, actually.

I spent years trying to find ways to convince myself that I wasn't gay because it 'wasn't right' or because it was not what people expected of me because I was afraid of what it meant... as if it meant anything other than loving. Because honestly, I was still me.

I was still boring and dull, I was still Nina who barely got the grades to finish Sixth Form, I was the same Nina who barely spoke Portuguese despite expending years learning to please my father, I was still Nina who liked to write things nobody would ever read, I was still me with the little difference that I loved someone delicate and soft, someone who had the voice of an angel and bony fingers with long hair and soft lips, someone who wore high heels because it made her ass look better and put on all these different types of creams to cover her stretch marks.

I loved girls... or more specifically, I loved a girl.

Jake, however, tried to humiliate me for it. He tried to make me feel bad for it and surprisingly, he didn't achieve it. And the more I thought of it now the more I'm convinced that the problem wasn't that I wasn't ready to come out. I didn't care if the people I spent years with knew about me being gay, I didn't care if they saw me differently because at the end of the day, I wasn't close to any of them, the opinion they had of me mattered very little to me and those who I ever called friend would still be there for me regardless of who I loved and took to bed. The few people that I was close with, wouldn't stare and move away because Jake decided to blurt out something about me. No, I think the problem was that I was scared of the people I loved the most.

I was scared of my father, even though I knew he had no problem with Tobias being gay, he wouldn't be any different with me and yet that didn't make me any less scared of telling him.

I was scared of my cousin, the one who visited once a year and always liked to talk about boys.

I was scared of my grandma who always sent me text messages of prayers before she went to bed at 9 pm and when she woke up at 5 am.

I was scared of my aunt who once laughed because she heard someone say LGBTQ+ and she said how we might as well add the whole alphabet to it since there are so many letters already.

I was scared of that woman... my mum's cousin who once wrote a thing on Facebook about how she had no problem with homosexuals but same-sex couples shouldn't adopt kids.

I never even thought about having kids but if I was to adopt a kid, would she talk behind my back? Would she go around my mum's family and talk about how wrong it was that I decided to give a child a home, stability and love just because during the nights I slept with a woman beside me because I'd hold her hand when we went grocery shopping and I don't know what else.

Would my family turn my back on me like my mum did with Tobias?

I was terrified of my mother. I was scared of the woman who I admired the most, the woman whose opinion mattered the most because I knew that once she found out, everything would be different and that scared the living shit out of me.