Gay Girl, Good God by Jackie Hill Perry

Author:Jackie Hill Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion/Christian Life/Relationships
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

2008–2014

I don’t know how it feels to be a woman anymore.” I had spent time in the mirror and noticed the girlishness was gone. My eyelashes were still long enough to hide under. But they could not keep the hardness in my eyes from scaring away the pretty that used to peek through. Heck, it even scared me. Who was this person looking back at me? They looked familiar. I knew I’d seen that nose before. And those eyes, those “Don’t hurt me or I’ll break inside of myself again” eyes. I’d seen them on my mama and daddy’s face, but this person couldn’t possibly have their blood. They had a daughter. But what stood, staring at me, wasn’t the girl I’d seen in family pictures. Or was she, still?

A year before I moved to LA, and one day after the Holy Spirit moved inside of me, I was doing the painful work of breaking up with my girlfriend. Her tears were too loud to listen to without regret. I heard her wipe her face. After breathing out the pain, the confusion of it all parted her mouth to ask me, “Why? Why are you doing this?” It made sense for her to ask it. She knew how much I loved her, how childish my face got when she was around, with a different kind of blushing that only colored the way my eyes spread out while leaving my cheeks unblemished. She’d never seen it in person, but she knew my heart by name.

To leave her, us, our love, made no sense apart from the divine doing of God. She was both my woman and my idol. An unqualified god without an ounce of deity. She was the eye Jesus said to gouge out and the right hand He commanded me to cut off (Matthew 5:29–30). Though it was as painful as the extreme act of removing a part of the body, it was better for me to lose her than to lose my soul.

“I just . . . gotta live for God now,” I said with a tear-broken voice, ending us and what felt like my own undoing. A new identity was to come after I hung up. I thought about the mirror and how I’d forgotten what I looked like. How the person I saw in front of me did not look like my mama or the daughter she raised. In seeing God the night before, I also wanted to see where the girl in me had gone and if she could ever come back. Being a woman was something I no longer knew how to be, but the real question was, had I ever known?

A week had passed since becoming new, but outwardly not many knew the difference. I didn’t own anything you’d buy in women’s sections nor did I really want to. But I wore what I had until I could afford to buy what would honor what I was. Starting small, I bought a real bra.

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