The Long Road to Laramie

You are both safe now.

It was so many years ago and so many things happened
in just a few days that one emotion seemed to blend into another,
it was a hospital chaplain’s conference in Denver and Matthew Shepard
had been killed a few years before, so the queer chaplains attending
chartered a bus and we went on a pilgrimage to Laramie, some of us
Out and the rest sneaking on the bus so they wouldn’t lose their jobs.

This same trip was also the last time I saw one of the first loves
of my life, he lived in Colorado now and was a teacher there. Over a
nice dinner, we talked about the Columbine shooting and how being
a kid in school would change forever. The love we once shared
went unspoken.

So anyway we went to Laramie, and we stood next to the fence where
they crucified Matt, and we cried, and felt that feeling you feel when there
is no safe place left to hide, and remember that he was a tiny guy
against bigger bullies, and isn’t that always the way, and it never takes
long for you to be right about something I was thinking

When my cell phone started ringing and ringing the next morning,
another insecure bully had walked into a school about two
miles from the hospital where I worked in California and started
shooting, so I booked a plane ticket in the taxi while chaplains prayed for me and got back in time to hug the nurses I worked with pale with sadness
and the chaplain colleague who had to tell Mom and Dad
that their beautiful fifteen-year-old boy was dead.

And now I am watching the Episcopalians on Youtube
make a shrine to Matt at the Washington National Cathedral
and I wonder who really needs that pilgrimage, that
holy water of past grief that I cannot name and that
I have stopped trying to heal.

It was so many years ago, and so many things happened.

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