I didn’t like heat, so I was born on the coldest day of June. I was an hour late and missed the rain. It rained the next morning, and I’ve missed it ever since.

I was born where summer winds collide to level homes on open plains. Where trucks chase after storms, and the boldest of us died beside the road. The creeks were dry, or the bridge was underwater, and people baked or froze in their homes. Tornadoes felled the trees; ice downed power lines.

People called it flat, but there were mountains near my home: large red rocks, cacti, crags, and valleys. You fell on your back once, into the cacti, and my dad picked spines from your skin. Watch your step at Baldy Point. The drop is long, and the rocks slip.

I was born somewhere I had to leave. Your bedroom smelled of your mother’s cigarettes. I slept in a chair I shared with Meemaw’s ghost. I wanted to see my mom, so I was a night owl from the start. I watched her sleep and the TV flashed bright, blue. Some old murder case reenacted for the cameras, a recent cop chase marketed to suburbia. That was the life we wanted, right?

I used to wake up sweating when the air conditioner broke. I used to cut my hair like a boy; dressed like a boy. I played basketball by the reservoir with boys, and I played tee-ball with boys. I wasn’t any good. Everyone thought I was a faggot but they rolled with it.

I knew what murder was and I knew my grandpa had been murdered and I knew it happened all the time. I didn’t want to be murdered, but I wanted to be cut apart. My spirit would seep out between my ribs and find another home. It was quiet at home and I wanted a quiet death and I was nine years old and bored.

I wanted to love, but I wanted to love like a girl, I wanted to love like how I imagined my mom could love. Like how I dimly remembered her love when I was three or four years old and we sat on my floor and she illustrated a little book about my fascination with the planets. She would have been twenty-two. She was addicted but she was trying.

I wanted to look like the girls in my class, we were newly pubescent and I felt wrong all the time. I was on my knees in front of toilets and experimenting with kitchen knives and scissors and razor blades removed from their safeties. I cut myself between the ribs because that was where I felt it most, that was where I knew everything was meant to come out. It was a nightly habit. I wanted to be unrecognizable.

I tried a lot of things to feel normal. I wrapped my hand around his cock when he told me to and let him finish on top of me. I was a gay-baiting friend who was pretending to be a fag because I didn’t know what I was and I owed it to him and I don’t think it made me feel any better. I laid in his bed next to him and didn’t sleep much.

I came out to you once, do you remember? I was fourteen and said I was something bordering a girl. You took it in stride, but I didn’t, and I buried a lot of things for a lot of years. But you've heard all this before, haven't you?

It’s been nine years, but now there’s a cut on my finger, where I accidentally jammed a scissor blade into skin. I was trying to use it as a corkscrew. The bottle of wine wasn’t coming uncorked, and I wanted the wine. Eventually I gave up and pushed in the cork’s remaining shreds, and I drank some very corky wine.

I wake up and I have classes now, and I have work to do, and I exist in the world. Today I answered some emails for the first time in a while, and I sat at a café, and I did all the work I had meant to do. I have about ninety pages of reading to do tomorrow, and some more emails to send, and some court decisions to dig into, and some lectures to watch.

A lot of this summer has been very grey. Sometimes when I’m upset I’m worse at seeing color. Everything feels too still, and I miss movement; but that’s just because I don’t have a car and you have to drive to see anything here. The St. Louis Urbanists' Confluence is having a meeting in a few days and I might go. They’ve been building public benches out of cinderblocks and wooden planks.

There are times when the storms pick up here, when the temperature drops ten or twenty degrees out of nowhere, and the wind rushes in, and the rain is so hard I mistake it for ice. A branch fell a few inches from my head while I was walking home yesterday. I look up at the clouds—towering, mutating, casting every color of light—and I’m reminded of home. I’m not so far from home.

I’ve realized a couple of things over the last year. I’m a morning person, even if I hate the act of waking up. Wherever I find work is a sort of home, but home doesn’t really exist. Every home I’ve had is dead and buried, and I’m tired of burials. I need seventeen hours of work per day or else I’ll sleep seventeen hours per day. My brain is deeply infected with an unfulfilled Protestant work ethic.

Is it normal to feel shame? How often do you feel shame? How much shame do you feel? I don’t know my mom’s name. My dad doesn’t know mine. Sometimes I wear the wrong clothes because they make life simple. My mom has cancer and I haven’t called her since March. My grandma hears nothing from me. My grandpa is dying and he hears nothing.

I’m young and home, so I’m slated to die, like the storm chasers before me. My high school can keep the plaques. If I’m thought of in the future, and you can’t shake how you used to see me, then I ask forgiveness for the faggot and nothing more. If I don’t die in this heat, I’ll return to somewhere colder, and I’ll stay there until I tire of the cold.

You said everything you needed to say, but I wasn’t listening. Can you repeat it again, but louder this time, and into the camera?