I am pansexual. I have known since I was fifteen, though I could never name the moment I realized it. It was simply there, older than my words for it. How could I not love women? They are the most beautiful beings on this earth.
My family is religious, and homophobic in the way only devout love can be, my mother most of all. I wear the hijab. I am the pride of a house I love with my whole heart. So I carry a quiet grief for the life I will never live, and the love I will never share. I dream of it. I crave it under my skin: the tenderness, the freedom, the grace of being fully seen.
It isn't only women. I find men beautiful too. I am drawn to people of every kind, people I will never be allowed to touch. I am quite feminine myself, and I am moved by femininity wherever it lives, in girls and in boys who wear it openly. Once, on a dating app, there was a boy, lean and gorgeous, as if out of my dreams, and I knew what I wanted until it stood in front of me. Then I panicked and vanished. I hope he has forgiven me.
Now there is a man in my life, and he is only a boyfriend until he is ready to ask my father for my hand. I did not accept him out of love, not yet. I accepted him because he met my list: he is tall and kind, a nerd like me, devout without being extreme, and most of all, he is not fast to anger, I have never once seen him angry. He listens. He is a good man. My parents know of him. But most importantly, He knows.
My closest friends have always known, and when he joined our circle I did not stop the jokes about it, because that circle was the only place my queer heart could breathe. Since we began a different relationship, I have stopped speaking of it, but he still does joke about it often. I cannot tell whether he believes it is real, and I cannot bring myself to ask. He is religious. Shouldn't it matter to him?
And there is something I will never ask of him. I am drawn to those who yield, to softness that surrenders, submits, and that is not a thing one expects of a religious straight typical man. So I will keep it folded away, and I will never know the intimacy I crave most. When I picture the nights that wait for me after the wedding, I see myself stepping into a role I'm not sure I'll ever enjoy, and wondering what might have been.
Because I know one secret hour would become many. Because I am forbidding myself. Because what if nothing after it feels real. So I'll stick to wondering, reminiscing, pondering.
I love my family. I love how my father holds me and tells me he is proud, how my mother brags about me, how my uncles sing my praises, how my cousins look up to me. I have felt what it is to disappoint them, to lie and hide, and it was my own private hell. So for all that love, flawed and heavy as it is, I lay my true self down.
I am only another queer soul, building a life inside a closet they locked themselves in.