Andrea Gibson
Orlando
When the first responders entered the Pulse Nightclub after the massacre in Orlando, they walked through the horrific scene of bodies and called out, "If you are alive, raise your hands."
I was sleeping in a hotel in the Midwest at the time, but I imagine in that exact moment, my hand twitched in my sleep.
Some unconscious part of me aware that I had a pulse
that I was alive.
The next day, I woke to the news that an assault rifle had fired 202 bullets to a gay bar on Latin Night in one of the worst massacres in US history. The massacre of people who did not leave the dance floor when they heard gunshots because they thought they were just the beats of a song.
Everyone around me spent that day grieving and every tear tasted like someone's dance sweat drying in the morgue.
Later that night, I was performing for an audience that had spent two hours in line waiting to get through the bag checks and metal detectors.
On stage, I couldn't keep my hand from covering my heart. I kept scouring the club for the fastest route to every exit. I knew the person working security was in a text war and wasn't keeping his eyes on the door. I knew there was a man in the fifth row picking at the seams of a duffel bag. Every few seconds, I died. The balcony for the glint of whatever might aim to tear the bodies of the spirits of the boys holding hands or the girls with hair cut short as my temper
when rage is a decimal I can actually get to. When I not just grieve, sick and ruined, watching history not be history, but in the music not be music. Knowing someone having the best night of her whole life said, "This is my favorite song," and then a rifle lifted over a bathroom stall and emptied a magazine into the kidneys of a grown man texting, "Mommy I'm going to die," his hand prints in blood on the wall reaching for people
dying in the fetal position. People
covered in their friend's blood, sobbing too hard to hide from their own deaths.
People
outside pushing bandannas into bullet wounds. It's true,
what they say about the gays being so fashionable. Their ghosts never go out of style. Even life, it's like funeral practice.
Half of us are already dead to our families before we die. Half of us on our knees trying to crawl into the family photo that night on stage. I kept remembering being fifteen at Disneyland, wearing my best friend's hoodie like it was my boyfriend's class ring. How many years it took me to just touch her face. How many years I spent praying my heart could play dead to the threat was gone to the world changed till history was history, but history just keeps coming for the high, shooting up bodies, kids drumming up reasons to have metal detectors at poetry readings with the poems. They're just unanswered calls to people who claim their God, their apathy, is unwilling to accept the charges. Dear God, how broke do you have to be to not buy people, time to get out the fucking door when the song goes to hell, when this world drunk on hate decides blood is wine and drinks its fill in the only place they ever thought was safe and the only place they thought they did not have to hide in, the only place they were wanted because, because of who they loved
and how they loved
and how they loved
till someone walked to the bodies and asked who was still alive. And hardly anyone put their hand up.