It was around the time you first sent me a message with a visceral, knee jerk reaction from your reading of Schulman’s “Gentrification of the Mind” when Kevin, teary and exasperated, told me he couldn’t handle being my only source of support regarding my family’s rejection. We were just married, but the worst of what they would throw at me hadn’t even started yet. He told how much it hurt too to be the locus of so much of my pain, for so long, that he couldn’t un-embroil himself from any of the brutal judgments and inconsiderations my parents and brother made about and toward us every given week.

Your message wasn’t an invitation to confide, but it felt like one. I had no one else who would listen and who would not also blame all of these urgent, pressing, overwhelming crises on my “hyper-sensitivity.”

When I wrote to you about my exclusion from the garden of Eden, that was my first moment of articulation. Estrangement is a complicated process comprised of thousands of unrelated small moments, and I wasn’t able to understand the meaning of the collection of them until I relayed them to you.

It was a revelation.

That became the cycle: I’d end up sending you an essay and come to understand one more piece of the whole story, and I would bring that back to Kevin. He and I would heal a bit, build up our defense where we just found out was weak, and then we would grow.

It was so important to me to be able to talk to you and to listen to you, G—. I will sometimes go back over an old conversation of ours online, confounded at having written the truest sentences I’d ever constructed but having absolutely no idea where they came from.

The finale of that novel I was writing to you saw my realization that all my pain stemmed from one thought. You leaned in at the end of the table as I listed to you every role I’ve played in my life – the faggot son, brother, grandson, employee, friend, best friend — and asked me if I agreed, if I thought myself a faggot, too.

And I did, G—. I absolutely did.

Who else can make that big reveal other than the man who helped me realize I was those roles to other people in the first place?

I lost everything after marrying Kevin: the family that believed it owed me nothing by virtue of who I am; every friend who was more offended by my self defense than my being attacked; the job that abused me for being gay; and a roommate who took all the decorations of our now- unfurnished apartment.

There were a lot of things you didn’t see over the last 7 months that are only now just abating: the searing pain I felt when Kevin would gently touch me the first months after the wedding; the near-catatonic depressive episodes that left me in bed for weeks; my angry bursts that left plates shattered against the wall and me sobbing on the floor; the homophobia-induced demolition of my sex drive; a complete inability to make conversation with anyone except you, J—, T—, C—, and Kevin; how I took up hiking in the afternoons because I couldn’t trust myself to be alone around the kitchen knives.

We were under such vicious and constant attack for getting married that the space we shared with you and J— became our sole safety and refuge.

During the total disintegration of my life, of everything I had worked to build and of virtually every relationship that gave me meaning, you both became something so deeply profound and crucial for me and for both of Kevin and I as a couple, too. I was drawn to you from the first moment we met, and I grew to love you for the impossibility of what you did for me — for seeing the root of all of this and giving me the tools to tear it out myself.

My marriage would’ve collapsed within the first couple months without you guys supporting us through it.

A couple weeks ago, I cut off my family for a little while, and it’s been helping.

I feel like I’ve just arrived to the party. Today, I woke up in Brooklyn, as Kevin kissed my face on the way to his office in Manhattan. My dad texted me, but I let myself ignore it and its simmering anger.

Instead, I talked to C— on the phone about a job interview he just had yesterday that might keep him in DC for a while yet. I grabbed a bagel at a coffee shop, and, as I was eating it at a table, I sketched out a new idea for a poem I want to write.

I was okay finally, and, better yet actually, I was pretty happy.

I’m walking through the world with dignity for the first time. Back home, Kevin and I are slowly making our apartment look lived-in with our own things after five years of living together. We’re starting to plan for a future we didn’t know existed a couple months ago, and it was very recently I started to think that maybe a part of all this emotional turmoil is that I’ve become an isolated, suburban housewife who’s a bit too wrapped up in her day-time soaps.

We’re ~finally~ building our marriage around things that are not perpetual trauma and loss — something we would never have been able to do if the four of us had not become friends.

You both saved our lives.

This story was always going to end a different way until I met you.

*****

This essay adapted from a message to my best friend.