A beautiful love… lost to normalcy. A queer story reduced to nothing more than a “sin.”
By Arika Heaven
I wonder when it was first taught that we should be ashamed of the things we love.
Perhaps it begins with a warning. A verse recited by someone who loves you. A look that lasts a second too long. A quiet correction when you speak too fondly of someone you should not want. Nobody tells you that you are a monster outright. No, they teach you through silence, through distress, through the sudden warmth of a room turning cold.
And slowly, you learn.
You learn which parts of yourself to hide. Which names to silently swallow. Which feelings to bury so deep that, eventually, you begin to wonder whether they were ever yours to begin with. You pray to be different. You bargain with a God who, you have been told, made you perfectly, only to condemn you for the way you exist.
Isn’t that a peculiar kind of cruelty? To be given a heart capable of such tenderness, then taught that the tenderness itself is a sin?
There is something frightening about being perceived as unnatural. Not because you are, but because people can be so certain of the things they fear. They will call you broken before asking what hurt you. They will call you dangerous before allowing you to speak. And if enough people agree, you might begin to see yourself through their eyes.
Perhaps that is how monsters are made. Not without love, but denied the right to express it. We give our fears faces and our prejudices names, then act surprised when the people we condemn begin to disappear behind them.
I think about how lonely it must be to love someone and feel that, in doing so, you have become something unforgivable. To want to reach for another hand and hesitate, not because you are afraid of rejection, but because you have been taught that your own touch is wrong.
But what if there was never anything wrong with you?
What if the monster was only ever a story someone needed you to believe? What if the shame you carry belongs to the people who placed it there, and not to the person you have spent so long trying to correct?
I hope there is a day when nobody has to mistake their own reflection for something frightening. A day when love is simply love, and nobody has to kneel before the world to ask permission to feel it.
Until then, perhaps the saddest thing about being a monster is never having been one at all.
