On nights when sleep eludes me, I often pretend to be in the company of Nell. I close my eyes and attempt to recreate from memory her voice, her laugh, her verbal mannerisms, the shape and scent and warmth of her body. I draw from every memory of her that I’ve retained over the years, right up to this one, the final one: Nell running into the rain, arm extended toward the taxi.
But tonight that image is superimposed by Nell as I saw her today on the street outside the Meetinghouse. I see Nell wearing a long-sleeved shirt beneath smartly tailored scrubs. I see Nell with her sandy hair professionally tapered and faded. I see Nell as a nurse, capable and competent and butch. I see her from behind as she moves away from me.
In the taxi that Nell had hailed for me, I thought again about Daylily and Juniper. How fearlessly they’d touched each other. How easily Daylily had said love. All along, then, there had been others like Nell at Idlewild, sitting in the Meetinghouse and going to class and performing onstage alongside her. She had never needed me at all.
Of all the ways I let her down, this one haunts me especially: I could still have told her. But I couldn’t bear for her to know.
What I felt in that taxi was not precisely self-loathing, but grim self-knowledge. I knew myself to be an impostor in Nell’s world. I knew that I had tried and failed to attach myself to her queerness—which existed independently of me, even as mine was contingent on hers—and that I’d hurt her in the attempt. And I knew, even then, that I would spend the rest of my life trying to outrun the shame of it. An escape route was already forming in my mind.
The cab carried me crosstown, sluicing through streetlight-shimmering puddles, its windows so wet I could see little past my own faint reflection. The whole way home, I planned.