The Ones Who Walk Away by Erica Peterson

in 13 short movements

1.

I’m sleeping on the blow-up mattress tonight; it’s my little brother’s turn to sleep on the uncomfortable, but still preferred, Murphy bed. We switch off every day of the vacation. While he sleeps, I scroll through my phone on the so-far-quarter-deflated mattress, knowing my back will reach the floor by morning. Ocean waves pulse beyond the sliding door, and my mind rebels from its lulling, holding off sleep. A long-awaited fork in the road that is my life is fast approaching, and I can feel it getting closer. This is not a typical coming-of-age moment, as I am several years past the generally accepted range for coming-of-age stories. I can feel two halves of my soul moving further from each other, both demanding an answer to the central question I can’t ignore much longer: Stay, or go? Church, or self?

Through the heaviness of this indecision and uncertainty, I toss and turn and sweat in physical discomfort, too. Our uncle has wedged a baseball bat behind the door again so intruders can’t slip in under cover of darkness, which means the room is nearly unbearably hot. After he goes to sleep most nights, my brother and I remove the baseball bat and slide the door wide, let the salty sea air blow over us, cool us, rock us to sleep.

2.

There’s a story called “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin. In the allegory, a perfect town exists called Omelas, but this perfect city exists only because a single child is kept under torture, constantly and continuously. The prosperity of the city and its people depend upon the child’s suffering. Most citizens who learn of the disgusting secret and see it with their own eyes eventually reconcile the horror—they choose to ignore it or forget; some, though, choose to walk away from Omelas and never return. None attempt to save the child.

As to what the ones who walk away from Omelas are walking towards, the story does not specify. The narrator concedes, though, that “they seem to know where they are going.”

3.

Beyond the glass doors an inch from my mattress, there is a porch, and beyond that, a beaten sandy shore and waves. I sometimes walk outside at night to look at the ocean under the moon. Usually, a line of lights from faraway boats dots the far-right side of the horizon, but most of the sea below and sky above are black. They’re blacker than my mind knows how to hold.

I lean over the railing and imagine myself transported to the horizon’s edge. I will my mind to picture my body at that fixed point in utter darkness, bobbing in large swells above fathomless depths, staring back at the glittering shore. The ritual fills me with awe and terror that I come back to again and again. I feel a pull, like the tug of the moon on the tides, to recreate this feeling of nearing danger in me as often as I can. I will need it when it is gone, though I can’t yet explain to myself why that is.

4.

I haven’t told my family yet that I am dating women, though they have known for years that I struggle with so-called same-sex attraction. They believe I will go my whole life without acting on it, which until recently, I also believed. I still attend church every week, though my mixture of apathy and revulsion and grief grows steadily with each service.

The rhetoric around gay members of the church gets worse and louder every year, like a dead horse being beaten continually. Many in my church call me and people like me brave for staying in my container; others call me coward for yearning to leave and condemn me for “wanting to sin,” for wanting intimacy and love in my life, or as they see it, lusting for gay sex. They believe what I call love is only a show, a sham, covering up something disgusting. Threatened with being separated from my family forever (a core Mormon doctrine), I make the true cowardly choice and stay, let inertia take me into the next years and decade of my life, bury me in the swells and the tide. Friends and church leaders who have watched me grow up profess they love me but hate the sin of my existence. At its best, their love feels like tolerance. If that is love, then I’m not sure I want it.

5.

When I wake in the morning, I hear that a new Taylor Swift album has dropped. I haven’t been particularly invested in her music in a couple years, but I see via headlines that this album is nothing like what she has written before: folklore. It is by far her softest album, and it is also the first time in any album that she says fuck. I love it instantly.

While listening, I carve out a seat in the warm sand and drape a towel inside of it. Another towel on top of me blots out the sun and flutters in the cool salt air. My headphones block out the world, the waves. When I listen to my favorite song on the album, “peace,” I imagine two different people singing to me, or two entities: the woman who will love me someday, and the church that used to love me. Both ask me the same question, repeated over and over in the chorus: Would it be enough if they could never give me peace?

6.

Even if I choose to walk away from Omelas, I will still be traveling on the Road to Omelas. I never want to become one of those ex-Mormons whose new focus becomes tearing down their old temples. Some temples deserve to be torn down—even Jesus knew this—but I know that this will never be my path.

The bleeding secret at the center of my Omelas is that it is not paradise for everyone. I can choose to marry a man and remain in paradise, but I know in my heart of hearts that I would be unhappy. I can choose to marry a woman and be happy, but then I would be cast off and condemned. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. I don’t want to walk this road at all; I want to walk along a different road instead. It seems there is no other road, though, only this one road, going toward or away from Omelas. This, or that; one, or the other.

7.

So, with one foot in Omelas and one foot on the Road to Omelas, I split my soul into halves. The tear is not clean; it is uneven, bloody, and incomplete. The last rip will be painful, when it comes, though it will also bring relief. Neither side brings me any peace, not in this divided state, but I cannot get myself to commit to either half until I am certain there will be peace waiting at the end.

I listen to peace on repeat all morning. I feel like I am running, not toward a destination or a finish line, but to a deadline. I don’t have to choose which direction to walk today, or tomorrow, or the next, but I do have to take that first step one day. I can’t continue to be torn in two jagged-edged halves without dying first. I think maybe something always must die in order for something else to be born.

8.

Later that week, or maybe the same day, or maybe a year later, on a different beach vacation, I approach my extended family, lounging in beach chairs, watching the sun begin its slow descent before being swallowed up by the waves. I know that if I stay quiet about my plans, my family can continue living in their perfect, self-contained community. But they won’t know me.

Just a few days before, I told a favorite aunt that I was going to date women, secretly, once I moved away. I would navigate the waters on my own before introducing anyone else to my cascading ocean waves and roiling black sands. My aunt encouraged me to reconsider. Her oldest son was the “black sheep” of their family, and when he broke from the fold, she and he discussed it every step of the way. She said they needed it to happen while he was still living at home, or she might have lost him for good. So, I ask her to sit with me when I tell my parents.

9.

When the time comes to confess, I don’t allow myself a moment to reconsider. I have to jump off my boat of safety and dive into the waves headfirst. Later, I will wonder where I found the courage.

I tell the whole semicircle of my aunts and uncles that I plan to date women; that I have no plans to leave the church (not yet, anyway, though I keep this to myself), but that I know this choice will make me happy, and that I hope they will support me. When I am done, my mom and my dad and most of my uncles and all my aunts and even a family friend who is nearby insist on hugging me, one by one. One of my uncles quietly slips away amidst my confession and retreats to our rental without a word. I knew he wouldn’t approve, but it stings.

That night, he still wedges the baseball bat behind the sliding door to keep out intruders. My brother and I leave it; the sweltering heat isn’t so bad.

10.

I take a long walk one day, maybe the same day or maybe the next, at least a mile down the beach, and then at least a mile back. A wide, floppy hat protects my face from the sun. I keep one headphone in my ear facing other beachgoers and keep the other ear free to hear the ocean. The sand squishes between my toes and the water hits me with a fresh wave of cold every ten seconds or so. As in the song, there may be robbers to the east, and there may be clowns to the west, but I am here, right here, neither on the Road to Omelas or within the city or on any other road—for the time being.

11.

That summer and for many tormented years before, I operated on the assumption that I should choose the path that will bring me peace. The church proclaims that they are the truest and only keepers of real and lasting peace, but I haven’t tasted it yet. I feel deep in my gut that if I were with a woman, I would feel peace. I fear, though, staring out at the moonlit waters and listening to the rhythmic pulsing of the night-black waves, that it will be a semblance of peace and not the real thing. This is what I have been taught, anyway: any non-church path brings only false peace from a false god.

The ocean is a wild, untamable thing. My heart flutters when it sees it, self recognizing self. I’d rather be Icarus, plummeting with molten wax and stumps of feathers falling off my broken back, laughing as I tumble to the sea, than trapped in a golden tower I cannot leave. I don’t believe whichever God created me did so only for me to be shackled by their followers.

12.

This song, this album, forces me to realize that peace will be at neither end of the long Road to Omelas. This realization gives me a sense of assuredness that I have been lacking. My coming decision hinges on this new point. Which path, given that peace is off the table, is enough, by the rest of its merits?

Though I am starting to date women, I can’t take any more steps without ripping myself fully in half. I can’t choose either path without completely abandoning the other half of myself, still rooted in the other place, unable to move, or unwilling to.

Deep in me, in the sacred place where I know things without knowing how I know them, I already know the path I will walk. I have always known, always felt this knowing, buried beneath the venom my church fed me while I was not yet weaned.

13.

Two or three or four or fifty years later, I hold hands with my lover while we walk in her city; we walk down new roads together, down 19th Street and Locust and Oak Street. We are headed to breakfast at Mildred’s on a Saturday in early summer. Even if she could never give me peace, this walk alone, this hand in mine, would be enough. The Road to Omelas is nowhere in sight, though I still feel its paving beneath my feet on occasion. Even walking toward something new, I am still walking away from something else.

Our footsteps set the tempo, and a familiar song treads a familiar fiery path through the sea that is my heart. I know many in the church can’t imagine what false peace I could possibly find here, but that doesn’t matter. I know where I am going.

Image Source: Yashima via Flickr Creative Commons