The funeral was on Valentine’s Day. I remember this detail because of the irony and because I mentioned it in every poem I tried writing about Peter’s suicide—and there were many. Until that year, it was my favorite holiday.

The other reason I remember that it was Valentine’s Day was because I went to a party that night, thrown by a girl I barely knew with a big house and lots of friends. I wore the same dress I had worn to the funeral, black with white dots, and tights the color / of day-old blood. 

It was the first party I was invited to in high school. There was no alcohol, but rumors of people kissing in the bathroom floated around. For most of the night, we all sat in small circles in the living room and talked about nothing. A middle school crush of mine was there, but he wasn’t interested in me and I was over him anyway.

My friend Olivia quizzed me on my current crush. She listed boys we knew and I rejected each one. “I can’t think of any other boys you’re friends with,” she said finally, exasperated.

I caved. I muttered, “It’s not a boy,” and threw myself backwards on the couch behind me. Olivia didn’t seem to hear me, distracted by my dramatics. She asked through giggles if I was okay. Still, it felt like a small victory, that first confession.

When I went to bed that night, my head swirled with visions of my crush’s grinning face, her pink hair. I dreamt that I crawled into a twin bed with her and grabbed her hand under the covers. It felt like I had stumbled into another version of reality. Peter—my friend Emma’s dad, my old softball coach—was dead. And I liked girls—which itself wasn’t surprising, but the fact that I could admit it was. My heart felt eerily close to my skin, as if I could dig my nails into my chest and touch it. These are two stories I always falter at telling: my first queer crush, Peter’s death. Maybe it’s because I’ve exhausted them already, scribbling poem after poem with the words all wrong.

no one said suicide is something / you can edge with lace and tie up / neatly in a funeral on valentine's day, / but they meant that

I used to lay awake at night watching the headlights of cars outside streak across my bedroom ceiling. Sometimes I fixed my eyes on the streetlight on the corner, which I got a glimpse of through my curtains. Some nights I couldn’t sleep.

It was worse if I started to imagine death, what it would feel like to be deep in the earth with no consciousness, nothing. It sent me spiraling. In childhood, I constructed a mental barrier there, not letting myself think about it. Alarm bells ring in my head if I get close to imagining it again. Whenever I tell people my biggest fear is dying, someone always replies that they aren’t afraid of it at all. They might want to impress me, but I never believe them.

Peter’s death hit me harder than other losses I had experienced. I spent months remembering his hearty laugh that carried through the house while Emma and I played Minecraft upstairs. I kept thinking about when he chaperoned a field trip to the science museum and I got spooked by a giant replica of an ant. Instinctively, I clutched Peter’s shirt sleeve and stayed there until we left the exhibit, and he let me.

On the article the local paper posted online about Peter’s death, the comment section filled with the town’s memories of him. My friend Lily recounted when he helped her and Emma make salt and pepper Halloween costumes. The memory I shared, for some reason, was the time Peter drove me home because I was anxious about being underdressed at their country club. I don’t know why that stuck out to me in the wake of his death, but it suddenly felt like the most meaningful thing anyone had ever done for me. I think it was the memory of being taken seriously, being taken care of, by an adult who wasn’t my parent.

The reception after the funeral was at that same country club. As we drove there from the church, we had to drive past Thatcher Woods, where Peter had died. I pointed this out to my mom and we wondered if the family had considered that in planning the services. But there was really only one route to the country club, which was through the woods. You couldn’t get there any other way.

That was the first of many drives I would take past Thatcher, all of them bringing the fact of Peter’s death back to the forefront of my mind. All through high school, Thatcher was a popular hangout spot, especially for smoking weed. I turned down any invitation I received. It freaked me out too much. I grew superstitious about what might happen if I hung out in the woods.

In my English class, only a few weeks later, we watched an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that ended, as it always does, in a double suicide. In this version, though, Romeo holds a gun in one hand and Juliet’s mouth with the other. He shoots her then himself, but the camera angle is skewed towards the sky. The audience only knows they die because we hear the gunshots. I sat wincing through the scene, the two gunshots reverberating in my ears for twenty minutes after the film ended, as I sat in a bathroom stall trying to slow my heart rate.

For months, I had to remind myself that Peter was dead nearly every day. The card from the memorial service sat among the clutter on my dresser, flipped to the side without his face on it. That summer, my dad mistook someone for him in public, forgetful in the momentary joy of seeing his friend again.

It was much easier to integrate queerness into my life. I had come out to most of my friends in the first few months after my realization. Many responded with their own confessions. I was lucky. I couldn’t talk to them about everything turning over in my head, but I could let out a little of the pressure. 

At that age, I felt burdened with intense emotions and absolutely no idea how to talk about them. Even telling my friends about my middle school crushes on boys embarrassed me. I wonder if it’s because I was trying to play the role of someone else. My best friend at the time was boy crazy. She had a new major crush every few months that she would pursue relentlessly, usually to the point of scaring him off. The first time I told her about a boy I liked, she was eager to listen, but I felt awkward. I didn’t know how to translate my feelings into the language she understood—the language of obsession, shamelessness, spontaneity. I wasn’t a shy kid, necessarily, but I always felt inside out. My secrets were out of my own reach, but I felt sure that everyone else could see them. That feeling haunted me for all my adolescence.

I checked out library books about queer girls and hid the covers, sure that anyone who saw them could surmise their contents. Still, I hadn’t realized what my need for secrecy meant, or why I kept reading those books. My favorite of these books begins with two girls kissing beneath the covers at a sleepover. They wake to find out one of them was orphaned that night. Both parents died in a car crash. Two girls kiss and something terrible happens.

I remember a scene from before. Emma and I sharing her bed for a night. Her room, with its low ceiling and bay window, reminded me of fairy tales. As we lay there, facing each other, I wondered if she’d kiss me. I fell asleep wondering. We woke up with all four of our parents alive. We had a few more years. We didn’t kiss and something terrible still happened.

i’m trying to grab onto boys as i sink / but they slip between my fingers when i imagine / being next to her as the sky turns the color of her hair

The night that Peter died, I was playing dress up. I stood in front of my bedroom mirror, tightening the straps on my bra. I was testing if I could pass as a different kind of girl. Some of the girls I knew from eighth grade entered high school and immediately began drinking at parties and wearing low-cut tops. My fascination with these girls was part jealousy and part desire in a way I could not untangle. I wanted to be them or be with them. It didn’t matter. Neither were within the realm of possibility. That night was the first time I tried to think of myself as desirable. It was the first time I looked for some part of myself that someone could be attracted to. It felt all wrong, like wearing hand-me-down clothes. Dissatisfied with this experiment, I went to bed.

A few hours prior, I had been watching a movie with my mom when we ignored a call from a family friend—What could they need this late on a Saturday night? The call, had we answered it, would have informed us of Peter’s death. Instead, my mom heard the news when my dad came home later that night, while I was upstairs preening in my mirror. She thought I was asleep and decided not to wake me. I heard voices downstairs, but felt no curiosity about what they might be discussing. My life was mundane. Someone I knew dying unexpectedly was the kind of thing I imagined in fits of masochism, making myself cry in the process. That wasn’t my life.

When it became my life, my mind immediately forged a connection between Peter’s death and my actions the night before. I knew it was irrational, but some part of my brain insisted that it was my fault that Peter died. Or at least, that I was doing something morally shameful when I should have been grieving. Someone died while I was standing in my underwear in front of my mirror. It felt like my actions had unwound the thread of the world as I knew it.

I have trouble even translating this thought process to words because I don’t know how to make it believable. I can’t express to anyone else how ashamed I felt about that night. You might understand if you were ever a teenage girl, quick to absorb blame and take responsibility for life and death. I’m in my twenties now, but I still feel traces of that shame. It’s mixed with a sense of regret; how could I let myself hold everything in for so long? I wanted to make sense of things so badly that I tripped over my own feet blaming myself.

this was the winter / my head begged to slip / underwater and stay there / the way he slipped under a bullet

One summer in middle school, I spent a week at Emma’s lakehouse with her dad and younger brother. I was nervous before the trip because I was thirteen and my friendships flashed in and out of existence so quickly that I didn’t know if Emma and I would still get along. My worries were quickly assuaged. We swam in the lake and went tubing and walked through the woods and ate lunch at a diner in town. My cellphone had no service, so I left it in my bag all week. Each night, I called my parents on the house phone and told them about my day. That week is one of my fondest memories of that time in my life, a glorious bright spot amidst friendship drama and excruciating crushes and anxieties about growing up.

If I lean in close enough, maybe I can pick up on dark undercurrents of that week, moments that I might have felt my life begin to shift in another direction if I had paid enough attention. The first night, when I was given a tour of their property, we walked over to an old barn out in the middle of a field. We peered into stalls—I think cows had lived there once—and tested the feeling of hay bales beneath our feet. It was eerie, though I was the only one who felt that way. Emma and her brother explored fearlessly while I tagged along, never straying too far from their flashlights. My memory of that barn has been compounded by dozens of horror movies and video games set in abandoned rural areas. I still remember it because it was a validation of the horrors of fantasy worlds, a reminder that those stories were never too divorced from real places.

The other scene that clings to my memory from that week was a day we went tubing. Emma and I lie flat on our stomachs on the inner tube while Peter drove the boat, pulling us. He drove straight for a long stretch and we laughed and bounced across the lake. Water sprayed my face. Then I saw him nearing some big rocks along the shore of the lake.

I watched as we approached, an alarm ringing dully in my head. I was half sure Peter was doing it on purpose, waiting until the last second to turn quickly and leave us swinging behind on the tube. But seconds later, before I could even think to yell out or warn him, the boat crashed against the shore and came to a stop.

It wasn’t a big crash, though the boat was sent in for repairs and we didn’t get to go tubing again. It left me shaken, though. My parents had always instilled in me a certain kind of trust, in them and my friend’s parents. I had been raised in a safe, secure household, where nothing ever went terribly wrong. I never saw adults make mistakes. I remember how Peter accounted for the crash: “I didn’t turn around and see how close we were because I was focused on you guys having fun.”

The whole incident made me sad in a peculiar way, like I had seen something I wasn’t supposed to. I didn’t tell my parents that Peter crashed the boat—not over the phone, and not when I got home either. It became a secret for me, which endowed it with a kind of significance. I decided not to tell them for the same reason I pretended to believe in Santa long after I knew the truth: because I felt that I could deal with it myself, because telling them would complicate the matter. I’m still working on this instinct of mine to smooth things out at my own expense. I’m still unraveling the reasons why I think I can handle everything on my own.

That’s largely how I dealt with the grief, too. The only time I cried openly was the day we learned the news. I baked chocolate chip cookies for Emma’s family, tears rolling down my cheeks as I shuffled around the kitchen. My parents weren’t around anyway. I wonder if they were in other rooms, crying. I hadn’t considered the possibility until now.

that was the summer / the boat skimmed through / the lake til it slumped against the rocks / this was the winter / everything collapsed into rocks

At the funeral, sitting beside my mom, I held it in. She sniffled and unsheathed the tissues from her purse. I sat rigid, my posture the best it had been in years. Maybe part of the impulse was to preserve my dignity, especially sitting beside my mom, who I was desperate to hide my grief from. But I also knew that if I let myself cry, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I was already ashamed of how much I had cried that week. If I could hold it in until the funeral ended, it would go away.

The thought that kept tears from spilling was imagining my crush beside me, holding my hand. The secret meant to tear me apart was the only thing holding me together. In the months before I realized I was queer, I felt an inkling that it was coming. I wouldn’t have been able to say it aloud or even consciously think about it. But I remember leaving English class, watching a girl’s hair swing from her ponytail in front of me, and knew that one day, I would have to deal with this. It wasn’t a sense of dread necessarily, just the recognition that someone would come along and ruin the lies from which I had constructed my sense of self.

When I sunk to my bedroom floor that night and let those thoughts in, it wasn’t surprising. Realizing I was queer felt like opening the door to a room I already knew. A room so familiar I thought I’d been standing in it my whole life. 

In the midst of crisis, I prioritized feeling safe over feeling normal. That instinct saved me. In the media, more often than not, staying in the closet is framed as the safe choice. Usually that’s because of the threat of violence from family members and employers and strangers alike, and I know I’m lucky to never feel unsafe around those parties due to my identity. But I also want to challenge the idea that queerness can’t also be about safety, or at least comfort. People can be violent to themselves, too, if they aren’t honest with the world.

In December of the year Peter died, I finally wrote a poem that felt right. It ended up winning a prize in a writing contest. The more I edited the poem, the more it felt like the grief itself was a performance. The scenes in the poem detached themselves from my memories. If I was older, perhaps I would have recognized this as healing. At the time, though, it felt like ripping open stitches to find there had never been a wound beneath them.

I’m not fifteen anymore. I no longer have to remind myself that Peter, a frequent figure in childhood memories, is dead. The proof is his absence in the last seven years of my life. I still struggle to write about what happened, perhaps because I haven’t deciphered all of my own emotions yet. It feels ridiculous now, as it did back then, to feel this way about a friend’s parent’s death. When tragedy veered from the track of someone else’s life into my own, my world toppled in a way I couldn’t have predicted.

Just before I went to the lakehouse, a YouTube star my age, Talia Joy Castellano, died of cancer. Cory Monteith from Glee died that week too. Emma and I talked about each death, but it felt inconsequential. 

“So sad,” we echoed. Death felt far away then, something happening to celebrities. We were barefoot, walking to dinner at her grandparents’ house across a path of pebbles. Our tender feet distracted us from the people dying. We talked about the calluses we would try to build by the end of the week, made plans to walk barefoot everywhere. Tragedy was something / we could curl our feet / across and adjust to.