On ape-love and metanoia

As a priest, technically a Catholic one, people ask me my thoughts on homosexuality. I defer to a time before the start of my discipleship. A man came to the seminary to be confessed to (I was the confessor here, that’s how it worked at this seminary) and I asked him, as normal, what sins I should abrogate on his part. He said homosexuality. I asked why and he said no reason. So I told him about a subjective experience in which one Elias Rivkinfish visited his childhood home immediately following his step-dad’s death. It was a long, quiet car ride with his half-sister Margo, but not a bad one. Grieving allowed for them to enjoy the silence between. The sight of a scarecrow right outside Cleveland city limits reminded Elias of his step-father, who was not one to smile much, so it was not because of any special characteristic, but rather, that in his grave, he existed just as much as this crucified sack of hay. No more or less.

After the funeral, mom still not present, Elias came into the house. Emptied of liquor and upholstery, he quietly hoped that the estate had ransacked my bedroom as well. The squeak of old stairs going up told him today nostalgia would not spare him. It was exactly as it was, as if he’d visited in a dream. Dust like amber on the Bowling for Soup poster that hung above the cabinet where he kept old notebooks. Elias rifled through, giving himself a mental five to indulge.

Mostly homework. 9th grade still felt recent. Elias scanned his planner for scribbles like hieroglyphs of cast-off insecurities. But nothing revelatory. He opted for a drawer deeper down to find 6th grade. Same thing but more doodles in the margins. Elias wondered why he ever stopped drawing. He recalled that he was pretty good. Like this one of Luke from Chemistry, he’d even portrayed his Roman nose with a certain verisimilitude. Elias wondered how he was doing. He rifled a page below.

Dear Luke, I think you are cute and I want to be your boyfriend. I know your parents say you can’t date yet but they like me and I think they would let us be boyfriends. You remind me of the guy in 102 Dalmatians. I remember when your mom took us to see it you said he was very cool and handsome.

On the other side of this letter was a drawing of Elias and Luke smiling and holding hands with a crude Dalmatian dog beside them and a cartoon sun shining down from the corner of the page. Elias himself had a fiancee and no attraction to men whatsoever, so he had a hard time believing that he was gay as a little boy and then supposedly grew out of it. He wondered if memories could be implanted without suggestion. Maybe this was actually Margo’s classmate; she used to be something of a tomboy.