Not • Big Thief

She was your neighbour until this day, but back then she was more than that. You grew up incredibly close, you had been best friends for as long as you could remember. Every childhood memory was with her, until that day, at least. You always played outside in the big yard of her house, you rarely went to your own, she never liked it there. She always said your house seemed cold. So you were always at her place, looking up at the clouds or playing something - whatever it was, all that mattered was that it was with her. You liked her, liked her a lot, but you were too young to categorize the feeling, not that it mattered, at least not to you. Soon enough, though, you found out it did matter. Your parents were never fond of the relationship between you two, they didn’t like that you were always holding hands, a little too close for their liking. But they let it be, Ellie’s parents always calmed their worry, which worked, yeah, but only until that day.

You were five years old when you came running home from the house across the street, just before dinner. When you entered your house, your mother walked toward you with a little smile. “Sweetheart, what do you have there?” she hummed as she helped you out of your coat “Flowers” you answered proudly “Ellie picked them and gave them to me. She said that she likes me and…” your giggles stopped you from finishing in one sentence “she kissed my cheek.” In all your giggles you didn’t see your mother’s smile falter. That night they sent you to bed without any food. That night your cries filled the air, that night the fire lapped up the creek. They forbade you to talk to her, they said she was dangerous, unsafe for you. And every time you broke their new rule, you went to bed without food.

Years of yearning for her followed - years when you just wanted your favourite person back, years in which you bled blood to let go. Then came the year of your energy reeling, the year of slow realisation, understanding your parents’ actions. Last came the years of disgust for people like her - years in which you lost yourself, became shallow, years in which everything started to feel wrong but you couldn’t say… no, admit why. You stopped talking to her completely, but she never took her eyes off you. Her gaze still read every of your breaths of confusion, it felt like she knew you perfectly. Sometime in middle school she started to change, just when your nameless grave sealed. She officially came out, she began to look like it. And you, you were stuck in hate, in a life where everything felt so wrong and yet you didn’t know… no, admit what it was.

Now, in senior year, she had reached her final form, and so had you. She was a full‑on masc lesbian in her prime: tattoos, muscle-Ts, girls, man‑spreading, charm, that one gaze, muscles. And then there was you, living a warm illusion: popular, perfect boyfriend, feminine, flawless makeup, fake, empty.

Some boy of your school rented a whole club for everyone in your school over sixteen. That included you and Ellie, so you were both there. She was having fun in some seating area, obviously having snuck in alcohol or whatever. But honestly, you weren’t any better, almost everyone had. You were with your girlfriends, popular girls, of course, all fake, just as fake as you. Though they didn’t feel that off‑putting wrongness, when kissing their boyfriends. But you had grown used to the feeling, you thought it was normal any other explanation would be unacceptable.

Your eyes flicked up to see who had just come in, as you heard the crack from the door of the bathroom you had just escaped into. You froze as your eyes met her foggy‑green ones, locking for a second. She quietly walked to the sink next to you, snapping you out of your trance. As you kept rummaging through the mess of your purse to touch up the lines on your face, her voice finally broke through the muffled music from the party outside. “Stop trying to figure out what it is, {{user}}, you know it exactly.”