I lay awake at night sometimes, thinking about the elephant in the metaphorical closet. It sat there quietly, for years, staring endlessly into a darkness I shut inside myself, the door I always closed when I had enough talk. Because I didn’t talk—I found it easier to sit and look out the window some days than to go outside myself; sometimes hearing was all I needed as I lived inside the words of others. I watched as the parade traveled by—a bystander in my own narrative.
I still think about it now, a heavy weight on my heart, crushing my chest.
She ignored the sign for years, but eventually my mother asked about the friend I conjured up that kept itself just outside of her reach. She didn’t so much ask me as she asked my sister about it while sitting in a Wal-Mart parking lot on a day I was too far outside her reach to care. It turned out she liked the elephant. She crafted another seat at the table of her home, stretching her heart even further than I ever thought possible.
But my family is an outlier.
And I remember the Before.
An unspoken Taboo, students walked the halls in the schools of my youth, an unspoken don’t ask, don’t tell policy crushed under the weight of unrealistic expectations. My generation didn’t talk about it much, too absorbed in the grades and the sports and the words and the silence. They carried their own skeletons in their own closets; but, from what I could tell, none of them looked quite like mine. The door was too narrow for the elephant to squeeze through. No safe space existed for us to talk about the zoo we convinced ourselves was trapped inside of us—not until we had already made it out.
But this next generation is different.
They’re defiant in a way I envy even as an adult—unapologetic, wearing their hearts on their sleeves, the doors of their closets cracked or blown wide-open.
Students, themselves, always mention the elephant off-handedly—flippantly, even. As if I can ignore my own sitting quietly in the corner of the classroom. A nervous hand shakes as they push back their hair, “Elephant.” A defensive comment here, “Elephant.” A stuttered conversation there, “Elephant.” It becomes a routine. A mantra. Eventually, a small group forms halfway through the year, every year, visiting infrequently after school to chat or to tell me the latest updates on their life.
We, a menagerie in the making, don’t ask each other what we all know.
I become the one-woman rumor mill—that is, if the mill never produced anything of worth and took in every straggling piece flowing in like cheap trash.
In fact, I become a one-woman rumor dumpster, where rumors go to die.
Rumors don’t grow in my garden, because I don’t feed them. Instead, tidbits of who-dated-who, the latest trends, who wants to try out for a sport, and off-handed remarks about other classrooms land on my desk in the quiet hours before school, during lunch, after the last bell rings. But they never leave.
And Joshua—oh, Joshua.
Coming back into the school halfway through the year, he already had a reputation for his quirks and quick temper. He didn’t seem to have many friends, though it never stopped him from talking. Teachers would tell me to watch out for his behavior–that he was a loose cannon some days, or listless and apathetic on others.
“He doesn’t do his work,” one told me.
“I can’t stand his attitude,” another warned.
And the kids?
The kids talked, too.
He surely made a name for himself in small-town Oklahoma, where red dirt roads ran through the county lines like veins in the heartland of the country. He wore high heels to school, the clipped staccato of his boots clicking against the tile up and down the halls. He would wear eyeshadow and eyeliner as a fashion statement—not unlike the troubled scene days I recognized from my own youth. He would wear his hair long. Decorated himself. Held his head high. Thought everyone would pick a fight.
He wore his stripes on the outside, unhindered by the bars of his cage.
I remember the first week he entered my class—my fifth period was a mix of thirty-five students with thirty-five different needs. The class, a circus of juggling accommodations with structure and interests, exhausted me before I even had a chance to catch a breath.
On the first day of Joshua’s return, we worked on a simple personal narrative, one requiring students to write about a time they felt judged by their appearance. This class usually took the full period to finish their work, and many struggled through the process with a few bumps and bruises by the end. I didn’t know what to expect from Joshua; every new student I treat like a blank slate, a do-over they have a chance to change.
Joshua, much to the shock of other teachers, strapped down and got to work.
It wasn’t until much later I realized why.
I sat at my desk looking over their work, scribbling comments in the margin, my own reactions to their very personal stories. These were the stories students felt vulnerable enough to share, skeletons in their own closets, sometimes buried and sometimes close to the surface. And Joshua had written a very personal account of his experience with bullying, explaining—on his own terms—the reason for his suspension due to fighting the previous year. My eyebrows furrowed as I reread his account—about a slur thrown his way, the judgment of his peers based on his looks—and slumped in my chair.
This was a kid whose actions were shaped by the judgment of those whom surrounded him.
Judgment against the closet he no longer closed.
And he tried to gauge my reaction, testing boundaries he thought were there.
We always did. The queer kids, the ones with closed doors and shuttered windows, never really outgrow the fear of rejection, not even into adulthood. We shrunk ourselves to fit the mold of the expectations placed on us from an early age, trying to trick ourselves into thinking it’s enough to just be—walking on eggshells around other people, hoping they won’t mind the elephant they might run into, that peaceful giant.
It’s hard—impossible—to live that way.
Joshua is only one of many.
The students who felt comfortable enough—safe enough—would mention their new beaus, their likes or dislikes, their tigers or zebras or elephants like mine. I could tell, in their pleading stares tucked away behind polite conversation, they wondered the same about me. They wondered if I had my own animal to contend with, my own exotic pet, tucked away somewhere they couldn’t see.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” I laughed at one question and answered no.
“Are you dating anyone?” To which I answered yes.
Then, the memorable, if not hilarious: “Do you like girls?”
And I feel a sudden absence. Wind through the lungs. A thunder. A stampede of feet trudging through mud, knocking down ribs landing like tombstones in their wake. My heart stutters to a standstill, because suddenly I am exposed and I am vulnerable.
But I remember.
Joshua always came by after school to do his math homework. CheyAnne would gush about a new novel she read. Kristen handed in short stories written with queer leads. Cameron wrote poetry about other girls. Thank you notes scattered the floor of my desk—Nik. Tiffany. Cecil. Leftovers from endless conversations, no picket fences or barbed wired to stand obstacle to safety in one room Outside.
I see beauty in a freedom I never experienced growing up, and I am not jealous. They leave me and I see them in their own parade, not a bystander in a narrative of their own creation but instead a main character in the middle of the silver screen. My own closet is a place I have come to call home rather than cage, and I am not angry. I grow flowers in the windowsill I have punched out of the wall, now open to the world, and I am happy.
Content.
Free.
Because my elephant no longer sleeps in the room.
This is an edited version of “The Elephant”, which was first published in Boundaries Not Included: (OSU WP 2019). If you would like to purchase the full e-book version, which contains stories and poetry from other Oklahoma educators, you can find that here.