In Silence

Six people showed up. The ones who ‘knew’ him. I recognised Gerald’s family from photos, though I couldn’t understand why they would attend. When Gerald came out, his father’s response was a hard slap across the face and an order to get out of the house and never return. As for the rest of his family, he’d never mentioned it and I knew better than to ask.

We’d been together for three years when Gerald knocked on my apartment door, a wreck of tears and exhaustion. He’d walked for hours in the rain, carrying whatever he could throw into a box. His lip was split, his face pale and crusty. He’d collapsed into my arms. I’d held him all night, clutching him to my chest as he wept for the life he would never have again.

I watched the internment from a distance as the family of strangers gathered. A copper nameplate in a wall and an old photo the only remains of my beautiful Gerald. Straining to hear the eulogy, I heard words like ‘misguided’ and ‘salvation’ amongst a stream of unintelligible weeps from the mourners.

To the world, Gerald and I were just friends. He’d wanted it that way. As much as my heart pleaded to hold his hand in public, or under the guise of a dimly lit cinema, I knew better. Newspapers were filled with hate crimes: more gay men beaten to death for daring to hold hands in a straight man’s world. More candlelight vigils brutalised. More God Hates Fags protests in Sydney. We didn’t want to be headlines.
So, we were friends. My love for him was never uttered outside the thinly veiled safety of our apartment. He never met my friends or family. I never met his. Gerald hadn’t heard from them since that day. I didn’t even know how they found out he had died. Or if they knew the circumstances.

Cricket bats. Hateful slurs. Blood. Crushed skull. I had barely survived the attack myself; a limp and a walking stick permanent reminders of that night.

I saw the family bow their heads, his mother wailing for the son she threw away. She acted how I felt. But I could never show anyone my pain. I could never cry for him in public. Nobody even knew I existed. I wanted to go to them, shout that I loved him, tell them about our life together.

But I didn’t.

The family slowly disappeared among a sea of headstones. Wiping my eyes, I approached his grave and shook my head. They’d chosen a photo of Gerald as a young deacon at the church. They couldn’t even remember him for who he was: kind, intelligent, playful, passionate. The stories I could tell of my beautiful Gerald.

As I knelt before him, pressing my lips to Gerald’s nameplate, I sobbed. I grieved for my lost love. I grieved for a love lived in silence.
“No more.” I whispered. “No more silence.”