Letter to My Faceless Future

Of hope, harm, and realistic aspirations.

I imagine events. Being seduced while washing dishes, going to our child’s dance recital or basketball game, vacationing in some snowy place snuggled up inside some warm cabin in the woods.

Those are the things that get me through my hardships, when the voices in my head tell me to give up the fight. When my parents turn their faces in shame at their daughter the dyke, or when the loneliness is so heavy on my being I don’t feel as if getting out of bed is worth the effort.

But that is it. Just events. The faces are blurred beyond recognition. It’s as if they don’t even exist. My future wife stands before me in visions. Do you have blonde hair or black? Are you thin or fat? Short or tall? 

All I know is that your beauty is incomparable. Perhaps others may not think the same, but I will be blind to your every imperfection. Your messy bun, your bloodshot eyes, your chapped lips… like crown jewels on your face. And your gray hairs, which remain soft after so many years of stress and hardship and rearing our children, are like strands of pure silver draped across your crown.

I know all of this, and yet your face remains a blind spot in my mind, as do our children’s faces.

When I dream at night I place myself in some foreign land. I forge a future from the little I know of the world at my young, inexperienced age and become the leading role in some mundane production that only someone like me would pay to see. I enjoy the normality that makes these fantasies what they are.

Slow dancing late at night when neither of us can sleep, adopting a retired Greyhound (like I've always desired), handing our little girl or boy a dandelion and saying “Blow away the white fluff. Throw the stem over your shoulder. Make a wish”.

It is all so simple and beautiful. 

At that thought, the dread creeps in. The doubt. These fantasies, however simple, seem even less likely than me becoming the owner of some extravagant mansion and earning more money than a king.

And then, a voice presses into my brain, leaving bruises. She is realism. 

A gay person like you could never achieve that beautiful normality. And if by some perfect miracle you and your wife were able to adopt a child, it would simply be cruel to raise her, wouldn’t it? Can you not imagine the voice of a soft-spoken elementary school vice principal on the telephone, imploring you to pick up your wailing, bruised child who was knocked over onto the hard, hot pavement at recess because she has two mothers?

Can’t you imagine an urgent message from the hospital regarding your teenager’s admittance into the emergency room after he was beaten mercilessly by a group of malicious teenagers with a bit more muscle than him?

I blink back tears at these morbid situations  Futures that could very well be a reality. Would Greyhounds or late-night slow dancing glue our broken souls back together? Would the wish from a dandelion heal my wounded kin?

I wish I could take out that realist that lives inside me. I wish I could grasp her throat and throw her to the ground. I wish I could take out a blade and slice her to pieces.

People cannot harm thoughts, but thoughts can tear people apart.

I cannot cut my realist’s skin, but I can cut my own. My better judgement begs and pleads on her knees, shaking. She rarely speaks to me, and when she does, her words are almost too pitifully weak to hear. “Please, please don’t do this. Don’t do this.”

I feel the hesitation of a first time murderer. Who am I hurting by doing this? The realist laughs bitterly, and sighs. She speaks more often than she should, and she is so ear-splittingly loud.

“It doesn’t matter.”

I’m hurting myself to escape the faceless future that I always long for, thinking, in my blind despair, that the little beads of crimson blood that rise from the superficial wounds are vessels in which I can hide my every unrealistically happy, stupid little hope.

The scars try to assure me they are locked inside forever, but I know better. I know that dreams are mischievous escape artists. 

They dance around like hyperactive children in my lungs and escape from my mouth, bouncing off my quickened breaths when I see a gorgeous girl before me. 

They slide over my lips and off the creases of my smile when I reach the frenzied peak of pleasure, as I’m too lost in my fantasies to notice. 

They follow the lull of bubbly love songs through the darkness of my skull to the openings of my ears and hang off of my lobes, dropping to the floor and nestling into the carpet like missing earrings.

The realist shakes my shoulder, yells obscenities, trying to get my attention, but my dreams move in such a soothing way that the chaos of my worried mind is muted, if only for a short while. If only I were deaf. If only I were blind. If only my only bodily sense was hope.

My scars would become open wounds from which only light would pour, staining the darkness and shame of bitter assumptions regarding my hungry heart and secrets I’m forced to keep under wraps. They would illuminate and encompass all the aspirations of a faceless future that I’m so afraid to indulge in, even within the confines of my imagination.

Perhaps the faces of my wife and children are muddled by that fear. Maybe those clear little details are beacons in the night on a stormy sea. Maybe her bloodshot eyes are bolts of scarlet lightning that strike the ground, much too close for comfort, warning me to keep my happiness alive and my wits about me. Perhaps the silver hairs that frame her blurred face are the shimmering, delicate strands of a constantly withering faith in myself that I grasp at so desperately, suspended above a lake of shadows that threaten me with the promise of eternal sadness. They are my only saviors from myself.

Perhaps they are meant to be faceless, those human beings, so like angels in my mind’s eye, that will one day become my reason for living. The small details I now have the privilege of seeing in my dreams, like the curls protruding from my little boy’s currently colorless hair or the snorting laughter of my artistic teenage daughter, serving as an incentive to keep going. 

Someday, a day so far out of my reach but exciting even now, their faces will be my reward. The colors of their hair, a shimmering trophy in a glass case that I will polish day by day. The hues of their skin, medals that I will wear around my neck with pride wherever I may go. Their innocent questions and boundless curiosity, stitches closing all of my wounds. My wife’s wisdom, the needle that guides the stitches over and under the surface of my skin. I will be theirs, and they will be mine.

Realism will have long since died by then, the remembrance of her angry face blurred by the firm embrace of time. When hopes and dreams become reality, bitter realism has nowhere to hide.

I still pick up dandelions, and on them, wish for better days. That is indication enough that I have not yet given up. Even as my dreams cling to those weak little white parasails that float on the cold Autumn winds, the seeds they carry will travel to the ends of the earth until they finally hit the ground…

And I will be there to see them grow.