Were my parents always afraid of me? 

They adored me, that’s for sure. I entertained, delighted and even thrilled them a little. Eager to not only prove myself but try it all, I made them proud with achievements: Honor Society, Student Council, Cheerleading, Basketball, AP Classes, Choir, Junior Miss Boise — you get the idea.

But I was also so tender. Constantly expressing my affection for them both.  They lit up at the sight of me. I loved them sincerely. But also like it was my job. The love between them seemed so sparse. Someone had to fill in.

I’m sure my 9 siblings would protest, but I considered myself their favorite.

Still, sometimes when I said something a little too out there, they gave me this look. This kind of what are you, exactly gaze with their mouths hanging open. 

I would just shrug. I didn’t know. I only knew I wanted to be everything.

My dad used to shake his head and call me too big for my britches. He told me I was born in the wrong era. That I was meant to be a flower child. 

You’re telling me, I’d always think.

When I was 19, I wanted to shave my head and walk around the world. I made the mistake of telling my mother. First, she told me that was just ridiculous. She may have been right. I was a poor planner. But then she burst into tears,

“I just feel like you’re trying to ruin your beauty!” she sputtered. 

The familiar guilt took me.

I caved, cut my hair to my chin and transferred from a state to a liberal arts college instead.

So if I was such an ambitious, free spirit — if everyone around me knew it, my parents and most of all myself, then how, how, how did I later find myself on the conservative path I swore all my life I would never walk down? About to be married at 22.  

Maybe the fear others had of me finally got inside of me too. Or maybe it was there all along and I was compensating. It’s hard to say. 

I lived like I was limitless, and the living broke my heart.

I met her in the first days of my freshman year in college. We had the same birthday.  It was the first time I’d really left home.

Jane was the oblivious sun. If eroticism is defined by life force, Jane was the erotic personified. The first time I saw her she had just finished practicing soccer with the Utah State Women’s team. She was wearing shiny blue Umbro shorts and a white ribbed tank top that clung to her tiny, muscled body. I thought wifebeaters, which is what we called them before we knew better,  only came in men’s sizes. How did she find one to fit her smallness and everything else that she was? 

Her hair was pulled up as tightly back as it could go. Her top knot revealed the olive toned angles of her gorgeous, small face. Her features were fine, sharp even, except for a blunt nose. There was no fuss about her. There was no body fat either. She was all energy, all burning brightness, utterly un-self-aware of the world as it swam around her, even though it ordered itself as if she was the sun, and all else was meant to orbit her brightness. She was the sun. Jane was the most oblivious sun. She burned only for herself.

And I have always preferred risking blindness by staring right into the sun. Just like my drives home in my Dad’s red Toyota truck as a teenager. I loved then, as I do now, the way staring into the sun sucks the rest of the world and its realities away from me. I love being pulled toward the center of source and life, not caring what dies around me. I could not take my eyes off her. She was in line in our college cafeteria. All else was ugly and dull, humming with the stifling dailiness of a grocery store. Her posture was naturally upright. Her head as alert and comical as a squirrel. Her facial expressions, which were many and emphatic, seemed miraculously unprocessed by thought or pretense. I had never seen a force so complete unto itself. So unobstructed by any sense of “should” or “should not”. To be natural is to be holy. To be holy is to be art. Jane taught me the meaning of art and holiness the moment I saw her. 

I didn’t think for a second about her gender. She was alive. She was gorgeous. I was a moth. She was a flame. I would know her. It all happened in an instant. The ancientness and infatuation colliding in that poorly lit cafeteria where I felt both far from and at the beginning of myself. Anything was possible.