Histories are lurking everywhere: under the bed, along the contours of my brother’s eyes, in the shadow your hair casts on your face. Family histories, bodily histories. (Have you felt at home in either?) New cartographies that lay in disharmony upon the old, charting tangled paths with no clear course. Histories that echo like smacks, that glow like the specters in x-rays and ultrasounds. Histories that were not, and will not be, welcome in my home. Histories that crumble its foundation just the same.

I have become accustomed to sending missives in blank envelopes, and have learned to love no response. Coming out is just that: a letter addressed to Santa Claus, or some imaginary President. A letter whose only real response is hope, and its best case scenario is uninterruption. So many of us spend so many years avoiding those questions of identity that are borne of ether, and dodging disclosure of information we don’t have, or don’t want. Fitting, then, that the years following prove to be a series of ambushes, sleeper cell constellations of guerilla information that fatten our dossiers. Disclosure is then forced and malformed, somewhere between truth serum and tourette’s syndrome. Then we’re doomed to repeat the history we never wanted.

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