Denial is a Powerful Drug

The day I came out? I’m sure it’s not uncommon to come out on multiple occasions. I expect the circumstances in which I came out are a bit unusual though. To understand that takes context: My girlfriend was once my neighbor—at a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—where we lived with our husbands—who were studying to be pastors. 

We met one mid-August morning as our street flooded. Hard rains are inevitable in South Louisiana, as are inundated roads. Locals are well acquainted with watching the concrete lanes of their neighborhoods quickly turn into small rivers. Cheekier ones go swimming or pull out their kayaks. It happens not because we’re below sea level, but because our storm drains are often jam packed with Mardi Gras beads and debris from old storms, sometimes including entire cars, like the Mazda 626 pulled out a few months back. 

On this particular day, the water had come down hard for several hours. After I woke up, I made myself a glass of iced coffee and stood in my doorway to take in the scene. I was thawing from the chill of the overactive air conditioner in the warm, moist air. Standing there, I noticed flood water pouring into the doors of the neighbor’s car. I asked my husband, “Is that the new family’s car?” He quickly ran down the breezeway to get them to move to higher ground. Afterwards, she and I stood together, an awkward distance apart, laughing with amusement at how, only in New Orleans, can a deluge emerge from an average Saturday morning. 

That year, we went to parades, thrifting, and all the kid birthdays. We rang in the new year together watching Mariah Carey beg for some hot tea on New Year’s Rocking Eve. She texted me the next day to see how Mariah was doing. “Ms. Carey is bathing in Earl Grey as we speak,” I replied. When my husband was offered a job in Alabama, she and I walked the campus of the seminary to discuss the prospects, but we carried an unspoken sadness in the space between us.

Neither of us were out then. Nor had we the self-awareness that our feelings were a bit out of the norm: more intense, more connected, more complicated. We were just glad to have one another: best friends that had come from out of nowhere, an unexpected blessing. I sat next to her on her couch the night before we moved. We both wore Target V-neck t-shirts and had braided our hair. We laughed that we were “twinning,” an oddly normal occurrence between the two of us. Her arm grazed mine on her cream colored, suede couch. I liked the feeling. 

In the days leading up to the move, we mostly did all of our crying apart. We put on strong, optimistic faces when together. Before the moving truck drove off, she and I stood side by side. I pulled her in for a hug and whispered, barely audibly, that I loved her. She whispered it back. It was still platonic. I was, and am, just that way. Showing how I really feel about anyone was, and is, hard. But I wanted her to know. 

When my husband and our family got to Mobile, Alabama, I was a different kind of heartbroken. I didn’t want to let the friendship go. It was unique, entirely special. We shared so much and, beyond all else, there was an ease and comfort to merely being ourselves. We felt no need to filter or wear a mask. I couldn’t let her go; so, I didn’t. 

The first few weeks, I waited until she would text me first. I wanted to know that she wanted to talk to me, that she missed me too. Sometimes I couldn’t wait. If I hadn’t heard from her, I’d find some pretext to talk. I’d send her pictures of the bunk bed I spent all day putting together. I’d send snarky texts about the bourgeois lunches we were invited to at the wealthy church where my husband served. She sent memes and updates about the Philippine boys who’d been trapped in a cave by the sudden onset of rainy season waters. 

What started there turned into a constant flow of messages. We told each other everything. For over nine months, literally not a day went by that we didn’t spend at least an hour texting one another. “I’m a little obsessed with you. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Indeed, our denial was palpable to almost everyone but ourselves.

There were all kinds of strains on our marriages apart from our relationship with one another. We shared together in those sorrows, even supported one another in our efforts to remedy them. “Maybe this is what he meant? You need to tell him how you feel. It won’t get better just talking to me.” For reasons very much apart from this story, it was an incredibly difficult year. Suffice it to say that in many days of this season, neither of us was entirely the hero nor the villain. This isn’t the story of the terrible sadness that comes with two failed marriages, as real and awful as both of those events were. This is a coming out story. 

So, when did I come out? Maybe a piece of me came out on the day I mailed her a letter the summer of our move. The card was about being the same kind of weird together. I wrote inside, “I just want you to know that you’re my best friend; more than my best friend.” I still didn’t know I was in love with her. After all, this had never happened to me before. I’d never loved a woman. I’d never considered doing so. How do you diagnose a feeling so foreign? But in that inscription, the sentiment is obvious: you are more. You are different to me.

Maybe another piece came out the night we stayed at my house. It was almost Halloween. She’d never seen the Harry Potter movies, so we’d steadily watched them together for months. We were on the sixth movie. Snape killed Dumbledore. We drank Prosecco and were a little light headed. She took my hand. We laid down on my couch together, and I put my head on her chest. She played with my hair. I didn’t want to move; I wanted to stay there until Harry killed Voldemort, and then send him back to Hogwarts to start over in Year One again. It felt like, just maybe, if I’d held her eyes a little longer, she might have kissed me. 

The following Monday, I went into the classroom of the Catholic middle school where I worked. A Sunday school class had come in over the weekend and utilized my classroom as a meeting space. They’d left the word: ADULTERY in giant, black expo marker on my white board. The coincidence left me feeling exposed and devastated, a modern day Hester Prynne. And yet, I still would never have come out to anyone, not to God, not to my husband, not to her, and especially not to myself. There was too much at stake to admit it. I couldn’t keep everything if I did. I would lose something significant, something that life seemed unlivable without. My thoughts repeated a mantra: Keep everything in its box. Keep everyone in their box.

Sleepless nights started. I began counseling but couldn’t admit the full extent of why, even to my counselor. It was impossible when I would not even allow myself to admit it. I desperately wanted to arrange my mind into compartments: a tidy box for my children, one for my husband, one for her. But, especially at night, she’d undo the tape to her box and fill those other sacred spaces with her presence. In the morning, I would wipe away the troubling recollections like sleep from my eyes, “I’m just overly tired and stressed. I’m creating something from nothing.” In the morning, I was convincing, and her box looked mostly undisturbed.

The boxes in my head came totally unwrapped in the weeks before Christmas. It happened at an elaborate choral service at my husband’s church. The four of us were all dressed formally, my girls in patent leather shoes and husband in a blue sports coat and knit tie. I’d just gotten my hair dyed red. It still had that slight chemical smell. The church was aglow in candlelight and awash in Christmas hymns: “all is calm, all is bright.” Inside of me, nothing was calm or bright. Inside, I was a wreck, flooded with thoughts. “God, do I love her? Am I in love with her? How would that even be possible? Help me to walk away if I am. Make me not feel like this.” I asked the same questions and made the same statements over and over. These thoughts were on repeat until, like before, when I saw ‘adultery’ written on my board, I was hit by an absolute wave of emotion. Although, this time there was an entirely different feeling that accompanied it. Where the black letters on my whiteboard had confronted me with emotional conviction, the black words of the Christmas hymns on their white pages were an outpouring of serenity: “I came into this with you. You are going to be okay. I love you no matter what.” 

For all of the certainty in that moment, I still left there having convinced myself the message was that I shouldn’t really worry about it; that I didn’t really love her in that way. Denial is a powerful, powerful drug. 

Despite myself, I took another giant step out on the way home from my mother’s house in New Orleans after Mardi Gras. She’d come to see my mom and me. I sat in front of her on the floor as she was on the couch. Someone had taken the spot immediately beside her, and I couldn’t bear the thought of not being near. I’d spent the first part of the visit sitting across the room, our eyes locked. But, like a magnet, I had to move closer. I sat on my mother’s rug in front of her and she played with my hair once more. My mom called my aunt that afternoon, “Meg and her friend are awfully…. close,” she said, knowingly.

While she was on that call, I was driving back to Mobile. I turned on music to tune out the sadness of going back to Alabama without her. I flipped to Brandi Carlile’s “I Belong to You.” The lyrics hit this soft, aching spot I hadn’t yet found the words for: 

I know I could be spending a little too much time with you

But time and too much don't belong together like we do

If I had all my yesterdays I'd give 'em to you too

I belong to you now

Finally, at least on the inside, I was all the way out. I knew I was in love with her. Once I knew it was inarguably true, it felt compelled to be acknowledged by us both. It was just the truth, and the truth would always want to undo and escape the boxes it had been wrongly taped inside.

A week later, on a Friday morning, in text messages I told her, “I love you. I don’t want there to be any confusion. I love you. I am in love with you.” She loved me back. 

Sometime that evening, the panic set in for us both. We were out to ourselves and to one another, and that kind of out could not coexist in the context of our normal lives. That weekend, we swung wildly back and forth, one moment embracing one another emotionally, and the next promising to ignore these feelings and recommit to our marriages and to our status as friends. The swings were too much for her. She couldn’t hold the tension in her head. To resolve it, she chose to keep the life she had. In the middle of a weekday, when we were all at work, she could no longer bear the secret. It was the truth, and it wanted out. She told her husband as he was at home from his lunch break. I called someone to cover my classroom and drove home to tell mine. In a message, I told him, “I need you to meet me at home. I have something hard I need to tell you. I’m physically fine.” I wasn’t though. 

To try to rescue the marriages, she and I promised not to speak to one another. She deleted me on Facebook. I unfollowed her on Instagram. 

I was completely beside myself. There was a physical weight and sensation to my emotional pain. I called my mother and told her everything. I called my brother and my sister-in-law and told them. I cried in the night, hyperventilating when I awoke and realized the finality of the loss. It went on like this for three weeks. Then we both cracked. 

We had shared music on Spotify. To feel that she was still alive in the world, I’d watch my friend’s list on my computer. When she would turn her music on in the day, I would see and have some small insight as to how she was feeling. It wasn’t long before I started clicking on her song to get her attention, “I’m here. I’m listening to what you’re listening to.” Then, I’d play, “Hey Soul Sister” or Adele’s “Hello.” When she played it back for me, I knew she was with me. 

So, I began playing love songs. I played things like, “I’ll Always Love You” and “The Scientist.” She played them, too. The desire to know about her life, how she was doing, was overwhelming. I searched for song titles that would do the job of inquiring. I asked how she was with Cheap Trick’s track, “How are you?” She answered with X Ambassadors’ “Unsteady.” The Avett Brothers said on my behalf, “Do you love him?” and she replied with, “Nothing Compares 2 U.” There was a lag of at least 3 or 4 minutes between each song title, and it often became confusing as to what response went with what song. I was so desperate to communicate that I made a chart to keep track of our responses. It ended up spanning more than four pages. 

Inevitably, the ambiguity of talking in song titles with a three or four-minute lag led me to send an early morning text message that started with a tentative, “Is this okay?” Again, we tried to close up this box. We spent the day talking about how we must move on, how we would miss one another. When I knew I had to go back to my old life and we were out of “a few minutes more,” she said there was one last thing she had to tell me. She wanted to share the words to a poem, but my kids jumped into my car a half a minute too early. She told me she would tell me the next day. It would be our last message to one another. 

Sure enough, first thing the following morning she sent me the words of writer and minister Jan Richardson’s “A Blessing for the Brokenhearted:” 

Let us agree 
For now
That we will not say
The breaking 
Makes us stronger
Or that it is better 
To have this pain
Than to have done without this love

It was supposed to be the end of it, but neither of us could manage the last word. The messages turned into calls, and the calls turned to seeing one another on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain. In her car, as the water poured against the concrete steps of the shore, we stopped denying how the truth of our feelings for one another would redefine all of our lives. We spent the afternoon talking about the choice. At the end, we both came out of her backseat. A group of teenage boys saw and laughed. We straightened our postures and clothes. She smirked defiantly at them. I smirked at her. 

And, that was it. I was out.  

-Meg Lea

Meg is a LGBTQIA+ woman living in New Orleans, Louisiana. She works as a professional writer, photographer, and teacher. Her writing stays primarily in the genres of poetry and creative nonfiction. Although she has been a writer for as long as she can remember, she’s just recently begun submitting her creative work for publication.