KEEP YOUR BIBLE: I FOUND MY QUEERNESS IN BLACK RELIGION (Temple Indigo)
I floated alone.
The sun’s Jesus piece gold sliced through the ocean’s mild oscillations. Glancing around, chin crossing over chest to shade one shoulder before the next, I surveyed the unfamiliar expanse. My face soaked up the luminary’s warmth, like bee suckling nectar. Though neither landmass nor sign of human life, neither boat nor waterworn plank could be found in the sea’s vast, I was calm. My arms stroked, legs stretched forward and back, unshackled from burden. That I was by myself in an ocean didn’t startle me. Neither did the man who plowed up through its lid.
Droplets cascaded down his whiskey brown face, high cheekbones, his chiseled chest. A skirt of bark covered his body, waist to water. The man hovered, beautiful and fierce, and looked down upon me with an unsmiling, unflinching affection.
“You. You embody masculine and feminine better than them all. The Others,” he urged, “they think they have to conquer the seven seas to find the balance you hold. But you. You know you have to find the twelve.”
I said nothing, just listened, stared at his face.
A blink later, he disappeared. The ocean was gone. Instead of treading water, I laid in an old cast iron tub that, I recognized, was in my apartment’s bathroom.
A blurry haze projected from my bedroom’s television and filled my actual eyes, now that they were open.
