A couple weeks back, I sat up in a bar and pondered on the concept of loss as I listened to my date collect memories from a family member's funeral he'd recently attended. Before anyone screams, no, it wasn’t the first topic he reached for, and I honestly wasn’t even upset about it. Sometimes conversations just end up in strange places. 
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I remember expressing condolences and adding that unfortunately, though I seldom struggle to connect with people over topics and trauma, this just happened to be one of those subjects I had yet to experience for myself. Grandparents were top of mind since that seems to be a pretty universal rite of passage for anyone who’s seen death before, but all of mine are still alive. All but my mother’s dad, who passed at an incredibly late age, and who I wasn’t ever really close to. I wrapped my answer neatly, noting the lack in any first-hand experience, but I’d like to run that back now and correct myself if that’s okay. 
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The truth is I have experienced loss, and quite a bit of it if I'm being honest. 
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I lost my parents when I came out, what a total bitch that was. I remember hearing from a lot of people that they’d eventually “come around” but almost three years later, their same homophobic and deeply conditional love was the ultimate reason I decided to step away. I lost my sister, not too long after, when she couldn’t make sense of the distance and eventually graduated to her own version of my villianizing. She’s had a wedding and a baby, and I’m sure a whole lot more since last we spoke, but her too I was forced to give up. 

And listen, I’d never sit here and write about this as the complete victim of some great and evil wrongdoing –of course things were tense leading up these breaks. At the time, I was anything but happy with how our relationships were unfolding, and despite my best attempts to communicate things amicably, I know sure as hell I wasn’t always kind.  
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Certainly doesn’t mean things hurt any less. 

But as of late, I’ve been coming to terms with processing the loss of everyone else in my family. Every blood relative, that is. And the truth is, as much as I can neatly track the events that led to the distancing between my nuclear family and I, for my extended family I’m afraid I just can’t say the same. For starters there’s hundreds of them. Eighteen siblings on my mom’s side, and three on my dad’s but with a close young grandmother from a large family of nine –most of whom are still alive, had children and grandchildren of their own, etc etc. On my mom’s side alone, three generations have zoomed by, and many a great grandchild has greeted my relic of a grandmother who –I should add– even at her late age of 96, still asks the nurses to purchase a ticket to New York City, where she is to visit her grandson Emiliano. Devastating every time I hear it. 

Needless to say, there’s an entire army I’m laying down to rest. And I guess what hurts the most is that I’m not entirely sure I can even pinpoint the moment when things started spiraling out of hand. Maybe it was the time I visited and one of my drunken cousins confessed he couldn’t feel anything but disgust for queer people, specifically gay men, right in the middle of a late night cookout. We grew up together and I hadn’t seen him in years. Or maybe it was the time I spent an entire night talking to one of my mom’s sisters about the pain and grief that had caused me to ultimately step away from my parents. We’d talked for hours and watched the sun come up together. Yet despite every tear and trauma shared, she somehow still found it in her to  call me selfish for picking myself the following morning, in front of everyone at breakfast.

Whatever the case, it culminated with a visit to my hometown, Monterrey a little over a year ago –right at the end of my Mexico hiatus. What started as a small birthday get-together my aunts had decided to throw, ended up scaling to an overflowed party full of family members looking for an excuse to gather and drink. And all of the sudden it was like I was back in first grade. Sitting between my aunts, the men grilling off to the side, and feeling like I just didn’t belong. Funny enough, I did see that coming this time. As soon as I got word that my gathering had exponentially grown in potential attendees, I convinced everyone (myself included) that the only thing I wanted for that birthday was a home-made carrot cake. That way, when the party kicked off, I’d be tucked away in the kitchen with the neat excuse that the baking was keeping me busy. And it almost worked. 

I baked for nearly four hours, dodging what I knew would either be conversations I'd be excluded from with the women, or unbelievably dated conversation about all women with the men. Yet as much as past experience helped me avoid those untimely moments, nothing could’ve prepared me for the part that followed next. 

Nobody asked, nobody pushed, no one said anything unfit or insulting. Even when I knew so many of them wanted to. I'd been living in the country for months, making no effort to conceal the extent of my at-the-time partner and our undeniably queer life... They had to know. Yet still, it remained unspoken. Swept under the rug like so many other topics that marginalized communities insist on concealing from the light. Instead, they sang. I brought out the cake with the naive intention of quietly placing it on the table, and quickly learned I'd been trapped at the center of their birthday chorus.

Now, why does that sound like the most uneventful thing in the world? I imagine it would be for anyone else. But me? I had never felt more exposed and analyzed by so many different family members in a single moment. The old, the young, the dated, and even the mentally unwell. All of them looking at me, with their quiet prejudice and hushed remarks. And the worst part is, I didn’t need them to say what I already knew they all thought of me.

I sobbed in my boyfriend’s car that night. I don’t think I’d ever cried in front of him before.  

The thing about growing up queer in the midst of an intolerant world is that people have already made up their mind about you. In place of a basic introduction, we receive every ounce of pent up prejudice, and remain buried in the dark like a seed that's been condemned to never feel the warmth of light. In so many ways we'll never be seen for who we are, and at least for me, this event marked that devastating truth. It was more than I could stomach.

And just like that, my time in Mexico came to an end. After four long months of travel and self discovery, I was leaving the country more connected to culture than I’d ever felt before, but far more distant from my relatives than I’d possibly ever been.

Yet it wasn’t until a couple months later when I was back in Brooklyn and practically dying of covid, that I decided to completely disappear. I remember sitting up in bed and leaning weakly over the window with an ominous, almost resolved, sense of overwhelming defeat; I'd just broken my 104 fever for the first time in three days, and felt like death was practically sitting outside my door with the patient intention of collecting my timely final gasping breath. And of all the things that bothered me the most, was this idea that I’d been so lucky to be born into such a bountiful family, so many members, so many people, and just so much abundance of love. We had this saying about the babies in our family –that they never touched the ground because a new pair of arms was always ready to carry them next. So lucky, so loved, so blessed with so many. But I was furious. Because there were so many. So many that didn’t know me, so many that didn’t care to know me. An army of relatives ready to catch the next babe, and here I was tossed aside and forgotten. It was unbearable. The feeling that I might die and have so many gather and cry empty tears for their cousin or nephew, their brother or even their son. All of them crying over someone they didn’t know. Someone they judged, and criticized, but never someone they knew. What a complete waste of tears. Unsure if I’d make it to the next morning, I dug my social channels underground, deleting every blood relative I could possibly locate (believe you me, it took a second) in the hopes that should I go into that dark and stormy night, I might at the very least spare them the satisfaction of crying over a body they only chose to neglect in living.

And thus we arrive at my current predicament. 

I sat up in the bar that night and said I didn’t know loss but I’d like to take that back. Because I do know. Oh do I know. I know what it’s like to miss people who once gave you light, and I know how it feels to have to sink in the shadows of their absence. They may not be buried six feet underground, but they’re not with me now, that’s for sure. And I think it’s important to acknowledge it.

A fictional Isobel Stevens said it best when admitting “I don’t know how I got here, but I don’t have anyone left.”

And though I’m constantly torn between the idea that I might have done this to myself as an outcry of sorts, I’m choosing to remain certain of the reasons I did. Not to get their attention, and certainly not to get their love back. But to teach myself first, and perhaps them by extension, that love is not supposed to be conditional. You’re not supposed to feel grateful for a tainted acceptance, regardless of who it’s coming from.

In my culture we sustain that blood is thicker than water –that family prevails all. But that provides little instruction towards how we should go about upholding that. I think it creates this idea that regardless of how someone is or how they treat you, they are worthy of your love. Because family is guaranteed. Except it shouldn’t be. Not when it’s toxic, or binding, or cruel. If blood guarantees love, then what reason does family have to improve on itself or shift from old ways that mistreats others?

I’ve always said love is a choice. Because accepting someone, all of their demons, quirks, likes and dislikes…that is a choice. And it should be treated as a holistic one. You can’t pick and choose what parts of someone you love and embrace. Especially not with something as integral as sexuality. When we tell people that they can pick and choose because family is guaranteed, we welcome conditional love. And as much as it’s hurt to sustain, that there is a love I’m no longer interested in accepting. Because it’s not love.

If love has become lost on us –the complete and unquestioning, see behind walls, push beyond borders, selfless and wholehearted love that often breathes life into our very lungs, if that love is lost on us– then I’m not sure what more we have left.  

It is my choice then that I should work towards nourishing this same love I seek, and I intend on doing just that. Here’s to being relentless in our pursuit of unconditional love and here’s to embracing the unbearable losses – may they never stop teaching us.

Until next time dear friends,