I Live in the Space Between Words

And for over a decade, I’ve been trying to come out.

Photo by John Jennings on Unsplash

A few months after I get married, I stand beside an older colleague who doesn’t know me well, making casual conversation about our dreadful commutes. We talk about how bad the New York City subways have gotten since COVID. We talk about her daughter’s new apartment, with a basement and a yard — such luxuries in Brooklyn! We talk about the weather. How fickle, we agree, flurrying one day, in the 60s the next. November in New York, we say knowingly, in that way New Yorkers often do when we talk about this not-so-secret, secret club we belong to, all 8.4 million of us.

She asks, then, how the wedding went. How my husband is. And, suddenly, seeming embarrassed, adds, “or wife?”

“Husband,” I say.

What I don’t say is, “Husband, yes, but it could have just as easily been wife. It could have just as easily been anyone.”

I don’t tell her about the women I loved before I loved Ravi. I don’t tell her about the dozens of imaginary alternate universes and alternate selves and alternate lovers occupying the space in my head. I don’t tell her that if only one little thing in my life had gone differently, one single thing, perhaps I never would have met Ravi. Perhaps I would, after all, have answered “wife.”

Instead, I say, “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?”

Being unconventional this year, she tells me. Doing breakfast! Who’s ever heard of breakfast for Thanksgiving? But it’s easier, she explains, less stressful than spending hours roasting a turkey. I nod in agreement.

I don’t tell her that I wish I hadn’t asked. Not then. I wish, for once, I’d said the words on my lips instead of swallowing them.

At my desk, I stare at the computer screen and think I see myself reflected in its blackness before it whirs back to life. I wonder what Gloria from Facilities sees. Wonder who.

It’s not that I don’t want to tell. I want to. I just don’t know how.

I spend the whole rest of the day wondering if Gloria, practically a stranger, has seen me. Or at the very least, has sensed this part of me beneath the small talk, beneath my surface self, and has stepped, gently, into the realm of the unspoken.

I find it difficult to concentrate. I have emails to send, articles to write, meetings to prep for, but I can think only of Gloria, how she’d viewed me as the sort of woman who might, possibly, have a wife.

In the bathroom, I almost start crying. Snap out of it, I tell myself. Am I really on the precipice of tears merely because Gloria maybe, potentially, (but probably not, let’s be honest) guessed this truth about me?

The most likely explanation, I suppose, is that she’s simply learned not to assume things about people. And isn’t that how it should be? No one should have to “come out.” There should be no default anything. But there is. And I’m, well…not. Though, to a casual observer, I probably look like I am, with my fake eyelashes and fake nails and my very real, not fake, not at all imaginary husband who, for the record, I love dearly.

Perhaps, I think, Gloria’s queer too. Perhaps I was giving off some sort of bat signal, queer woman to queer woman.

I type her name into my phone, trying to glean what I can from an Internet search. Nothing. No social media I can find, no LinkedIn page. Online, it’s as though Gloria doesn’t even exist.

I’ll have to ask her, then, what I want to know. But I probably won’t.

There are many times I try to speak my truth without actually speaking it. I Google “queer fashion” and wear thumb rings and cuffed jeans as recommended by the all-knowing search engine. I buy a rainbow wristband for my FitBit. In conversations with friends, I’m not shy about declaring my many celebrity crushes.

On women.

Damn, I say, Rachel Maddow is hot.

I would totally do Janelle Monáe.

I would totally do Connie Britton.

I would totally do Taraji P. Henson.

No one seems to get the hint, and I grow irritated. Must I really spell it out? I A-M Q-U-E-E-R, I mouth to the ceiling at night, over and over, as though speaking an incantation, as though, by whispering words into the dark, I can hypnotize this knowing into everyone from afar, from my bedroom, from this blissful aloneness.

There, I think. I’ve said it. Is it enough? Why isn’t it enough?

Part of my reluctance to tell, I think, is that I’ve ended up with a man, a man I’ve been with now for over a decade. I wonder if it’s self-indulgent. I wonder if I’m queer enough. Is this a space I’m even entitled to claim?

I spend an afternoon catching up with a former writing professor of mine. I fill her in on the book I’m currently working on, a major part of which involves the queer experience.

“I’m not straight,” I preface, lest she think I’m writing a queer book without myself being queer.

“You’ve never said that before,” she says.

“No,” I say, “I haven’t.”

We’ve known each other for 13 years.

I change my “Interested In” section on Facebook to say “Men and Women.” But who even looks at that, anyway? And who will care that Tracy Neiman is “Interested in Men and Women” when it also says that Tracy Neiman is “Married”?

Weeks pass, and I replay my conversation with Gloria constantly, fixated on the other thing I didn’t say, the thing I never say, even as I think it. I white it out, off the page. Try to.

There is, after all, one very particular reason my path crosses with Ravi. One very particular event that leads me to him, across an ocean, to the town in Spain where we meet.

My father dies.

In my junior year of college, I am set to spend a semester in Thailand. And, since studying abroad is part of my program’s curriculum, three of my best friends are going, too.

We spend hours each week, sprawled out with our laptops on the floor of our dorms, planning for our trip the summer after. Our nine-page spreadsheet of potential itineraries is the thing OCD dreams are made of.

Two of us begin a travel blog called “Collecting Pearls.” Too excited to wait until we’re actually traveling, we pen our first entries a full year in advance. Family members, I note, are too concerned about my budget and the political situation in Thailand to take my plans seriously. A lot can change, they say, in a year.

I write:

2010 is just too far away for people to wrap their minds around the thought of our venture, and it’s a lot to take in, even for me. There’s a part of me that won’t believe I’m going until I have a plane ticket in my hand, or heck, until I’m standing in the airport with my luggage.

I was right, I think now, not to believe it. So were they. We just didn’t know why. Not then. Not yet.

A few months before I’m supposed to leave, I get the news about my father’s illness. I withdraw from the program.

That semester, almost every single friend I’ve made at college leaves.

When my father dies the following school year, I go, reluctantly, to Salamanca for an intensive Spanish course. It is there I meet Ravi. There I fall in love.

Fall.

Written in the stars, I tell people. It was written in the stars.

My father, my brother, and I were all born on the seventeenth of a month. So was Ravi. This is part of the story I tell willingly. Part of the story I tell everyone. Part of the story I tell myself.

Proof, I say, that Ravi was my father’s gift to me, or the universe’s. God’s consolation prize, perhaps, for all that I’d been through.

This, of course, is also spin.

I could just as easily tell it like this: Meeting Ravi was not destiny, but a series of coincidences, starting with the day my father’s cells began mutating into something abnormal, dividing and growing and spreading, dividing and growing and spreading, until his body is no longer his. No longer a body.

I believe he is scattered somewhere over New Jersey, but I don’t actually know. We don’t have a funeral. We pick the funeral home’s Simple Cremation Package. My mother does not want the ashes.

I could just as easily tell it like this: My father’s death was the downpayment for my future husband.

And maybe, in another universe, I convince him to try different drugs or get a second opinion. Maybe I notice something is wrong and encourage him to see a doctor before it’s too late, before he’s too far gone, before I’m sitting at his bedside, watching him soil himself and listening to him accuse my mother of trying to kill him, a side effect, we’re told, of the cancer. The toxins in his liver have poisoned his mind. He is paranoid, pulling out his IV, which apparently, is also going to kill him.

Could I have saved him? I often wonder. And would I still want to? Would I try to change whatever “one thing” that needed changing, if I could?

An impossible choice: My dad lives and I don’t meet Ravi; my dad dies and I do.

Wait. How is this even a question? How could I not save my father? What kind of daughter wouldn’t save her own father just to be with a man?

Besides, it’s not like men are my only option.

One night, in the throes of the pandemic, I read Ravi a spoken word poem I’ve written about not feeling “queer enough.”

“Is that from the perspective of one of your book characters?” he asks.

“No,” I say, incredulous. Is it not obvious that the subject is me? “It’s my own.”

“Wow,” he says, “you’ve never said that before.”

All these years, I’d assumed Ravi knew this about me. I’d assumed that when I mentioned my many female celebrity crushes to him, he knew. Assumed that when I told him I was writing this book, he knew. Assumed that when I spoke of the Times Before Ravi, he knew.

How could he not? Was it not implied? Was it not sitting right there, right between the lines, right smack in the middle of the words?

But I’d never actually said it.

And now I’d accidentally come out to my husband.

I’ve lived in the space between words for as long as I can remember, before I knew I was queer, before my father got sick, before Ravi.

In many of my earliest memories, I do not find it easy to say what I mean. At four, I cry for my mother every time she drops me off at my summer daycare program, but I don’t tell her I’m afraid she might not come back. I don’t tell her I’m afraid she might die. I don’t say that I’ve been having nightmares of ambulances, that I’ve been having them since the night Grandma Mae was lifted onto a stretcher, through an ambulance’s double doors, and the next thing I know, my father is sliding into the front seat of our car, telling my mother, she’s gone.

At her apartment earlier that evening, I am too young, at three, to grasp what is happening, so I do not know my last words to her are my last words to her. I say them right after stretching my arms over her supine head, trying to show her my toy animal.

Look, I say to my grandmother, uncurling my palm to reveal my plastic bear. Look what I have! Then, I tell her I love you, and the paramedics arrive.

I love you, I tell my mother at the end of every conversation, every call.

I love you, I tell Ravi.

I love you, I tell my father as he takes his last breaths. Somehow, the paranoia has started to wane, in his final hours, and he mouths it back to me. A whisper. I love you, too.

At least, I think, I do not have too much trouble with this. At least the most important thing I can tell people is not stuck in the space between words.

I begin to tell more and more of my friends this thing I’ve been holding back, and each time, the response is more or less the same. People are supportive. They tell me they’re here for me. They tell me they love me. They thank me for trusting them. But there’s something else, a familiar refrain.

“You’ve never said that before.”

Amidst my militant truth telling campaign, one friend is emboldened to emerge from between her own lines, her own pregnant spaces.

“You know,” she says. “I’ve been wondering the same thing about myself.”

Months after my conversation with Gloria, she leaves our place of employment suddenly. We don’t have each other’s phone numbers or personal emails, no reason or means to stay in touch. Still, I find myself now wondering if, somehow, she’ll read this. If she’ll recognize herself behind the pseudonym. If she’ll remember that November day, when we talked, it seemed, about nothing. And about everything, really.

I go back to the conversation. I replay it again. I imagine Gloria imagining me imagining her.

“Or wife?” she says, and I doubt she knows, as she speaks, the multitudes these two words contain. All that exists in the spaces between them. All the stories I could tell. Tell myself.

And, too, their endings.

Of my father.

Alternate lives.

Alternate loves.

“Or wife?” she says, and she doesn’t, couldn’t possibly know, the thousands of universes that pass through me at that exact moment, like a planetarium projected on the back of my eyelids. In these stars, I see every version of me that has ever existed or will ever exist, forever being written and unwritten through time.

“Or wife?” she says, and hypothetical histories fade. The answer, after all, hasn’t fundamentally changed. It’s still “husband.”

Husband, yes, but could have been wife.