Revival

I

I heard your cries before I saw you, a secondhand cacophony from multiple iPhone speakers. When one of your grandmas tried to show me a video, I waved the screen away. “IRL! IRL!” I repeated under my breath. You were a welcomed interruption to the banal discourse in that waiting area – a conversation about coffee bean production, accolades of Springsteen on Broadway, and a silent leafing through last month’s InStyle. One of your grandpas methodically Purelled his hands and hovered near the entrance. All I could see through the rectangular slits was a leftover Christmas wreath over a row of printers. Your dad emerged wearing fatherhood the same way drag queens wear makeup – flawlessly. He announced your name and, although it did indeed begin with the letter B, I was relieved he didn’t say “Brandon” because, if he had, I would’ve hated you.

II

When your parents told me about you and your to-be existence, I reacted with inaction. I shot a look over to your grandma and saw nothing. No shock, no screams. Just a cheeky grin. And then I understood – this is my surprise. Your parents had just returned from a holiday in Italy where your mom had to pose for Instagram photos with glasses of wine to keep up appearances, because apparently women can’t go to Italy and not drink wine. They had all known and I was the outlier. They had known when I was inpatient at the NYU psych ward for almost two weeks. They had sat across the table from me in the dining area and kept you to themselves. I couldn’t call this betrayal or a lie or some thoughtless decision. But I could call it pressure to stay alive.

III

I’ve traced my follies with precision only to see the shape of love. Was it always deformed or had memory taken its toll? I can recall instances in college of having the word gifted and withdrawn within the same breath, of turning off my phone and wandering for hours in the silent Ohio woods, or using a thumbtack to drawing a five point star under my bellybutton. How easy was it for me to tell all my girlfriends that, when I died, it would be by none other then my own hand, how the notion soothed me? There’s a freedom to suicidality that goes away once you’ve been stabilized, once you realize that it was never freedom to die.

IV

I heard your cries before I saw you lying on your mother’s breast. I hugged your dad, kissed your mom, and grazed your hand with mine. Your uncle cried, yet I couldn’t. I had spent two years in and out of hospitals for my tears and fits and attempts and now was not the time. You didn’t have my attackers name, and for that I was grateful. The thought of trauma tainting you devastated me. Later that day, you opened your eyes for the first time in my arms and I couldn’t look away. Once settled, your mom would go on to post a photo of the two of you on Instagram saying how you redefined the meaning of love for her and your dad. For me, the love I felt when we saw one another was recognizable. Love at nineteen and twenty-two and twenty-five is all the same. But, unlike the love that’d inhabited me before, yours was whole, a revival, a needed interruption to the stillness in us all.

 

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Annette Covrigaru is a gay/bigender American-Israeli writer based in Brooklyn, NY. They were a Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices nonfiction fellow and writer-in-residence in 2014 and 2017, respectively. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gravel, Cosmonauts Avenue, Hobart, and The HBO Inspiration Room, among others, and is collected at www.annettecovrigaru.com.

“Revival” was originally published on Entropy

Artwork by Vivian Martinez

Wednesday, April 17th 2019