Sasquatch to the Moon

41: What Could I Do?

"You listen to me." Dad points his finger, shaking, red in the face, clearly holding himself back. "You listen to me and you do as you're told. This has gone on too long. Look at you. You speak with an American accent and you swear like one of them. You are not the boy I raised you to be and that man I raised is sure as hell not the one telling me he's sleeping with another man."

I back into the door, stopping moving for a quick second, dropping my head back against the wood.

This is it, huh?

"No," I say up at the ceiling.

"What did you say?"

"No."

"I'm not letting my son rot in hell because he wanted to make a scene and go around being violated by other men."

I sigh, unhooking my teeth idly, notching them back into position. Honestly I'm not even sure they know I'm missing them. I unhook them again, tongue dragging along my upper jaw. I click them back in, then unhook, remembering the way he smiles at me when he sees I don't have them in, the way he likes it when I'm confident about it, the way he managed to make me feel alright that I don't have them, the way that feeling warmed me up on the inside all the way to the tip top of my head. I click them back in.

"I don't care about heaven and hell," I mutter under my breath. "If you must know, I'd much rather burn forever in hell knowing I loved him as strongly as I could in life than go to heaven pretending I never did." I click the teeth out again, knowing I'm wearing out the retainer but it might be time to retire it completely, might be time to move on, to stop hiding from that. "That's the thing, though, I don't even know if it's real."

"Of course it's real."

"No, no," I sigh. "No I have no proof of it, you have no proof of it. What I do have proof of, though, is that I love him, is that people like me are real and normal. So make your choice here, are you more afraid of hell than losing me?" I run my hand through my hair, scratching the back of my head, kind of glad I don't look like them. I was never happy with that as a kid, I was the one that got all the recessive genes, the nose nobody had seen before, the different eye shape, the different skin tone. I hated it because it alienated me. Now, I couldn't be happier with the way I look. "Are you more afraid of some unproven God, some book of fables, some unproven location full of lava and fire, then letting me walk out that door and never come back to this house, never show up to another family gathering, not be invited to my wedding, not have me pay my respects at your funerals, letting me leave? Tell me what you're picking."

"You can't just- you can't just have us make that decision, that's preposterous, that's-" Mom splutters.

I slide down the wall, sitting on the floor. "I'll wait. I'll wait as long as I have to, but I'm either walking out of here today and going home with a family or I'm walking out of here today and going home without one. You keep me or you keep your beliefs about me."

"We can't make that decision, there's ways to have both you and-"

"Not with the way I've been treated," I shake my head, knitting my fingers together. "You don't get to make me leave parts of me at home when I come here any more. You know, I might even come out down the line, and then somewhere on that path, someone in this town might come to the realization that the Rex family doesn't see Håkon anymore because he was gay. You know they don't look upon homophobia fondly in this country. You know you'd get blacklisted from things if someone found out you were too cowardly to change your beliefs to allow for your son to still be yours." I narrow my eyes up at them, unhooking, rehooking, unhooking, rehooking. "Or, on the other hand, you might get to final judgement and they might look at you and send you right to hell, right alongside me, because how dare you allow your son to be gay? That's a sin, of course." I tap my head back against the wood, letting them sit there at the table and watch me go through this whole maddening process I've been through far too many times. "You might get to judgement and they might pin the blame on you that you didn't force me to choose being with a woman."