For Pride Month, An Awakening

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Thursday

June being Pride Month, I share this wonderful Julie Marie Wade poem about an awakening. In this instance, a literal awakening foreshadows a later metaphorical awakening as the speaker gets an inkling of her true lesbian self.

Waking up in an unfamiliar house during a slumber party, Wade tells us that, back then, she “did not love women as I do now.” Or rather, she loved them “with my eyes closed, my back turned”—which is to say, without fully acknowledging that love. Her reference to “sleeping bags like straitjackets” hints at how she is herself trapped in an anatomically assigned identity. Her face “pressed into a slender pillow,” like the closed eyes, points to how close she is to a desire she dare not name. Only a slender membrane separates her from this other reality.

When I Was Straight
Julie Marie Wade

I did not love women as I do now.
I loved them with my eyes closed, my back turned.
I loved them silent, & startled, & shy.

The world was a dreamless slumber party,
sleeping bags like straitjackets spread out on
the living room floor, my face pressed into a

slender pillow.

All night I woke to rain on the strangers’ windows.
No one remembered to leave a light on in the hall.
Someone’s father seemed always to be shaving.

When I stood up, I tried to tiptoe
around the sleeping bodies, their long hair
speckled with confetti, their faces blanched by the

porch-light moon.

I never knew exactly where the bathroom was.
I tried to wake the host girl to ask her, but she was
only one adrift in that sea of bodies. I was ashamed

to say they all looked the same to me, beautiful &
untouchable as stars. It would be years before
I learned to find anyone in the sumptuous,

terrifying dark.

One day she will step into that dark, touching the stars, and it will be sumptuous.