Idaho Knows

My mom snapped the photo of me in front of the residence hall at the Christian college where I soon would begin my freshman year. Arms awkwardly behind my back, I stand frozen, eyes wide like a deer caught in the headlights of the oncoming year rushing toward me. Time, I would later discover, swerves for no one, is as firm as the front bumper of a Mack truck.

I lugged my luggage up to the fifth floor and found my room thanks to sign placed on the door by my Resident Assistant. Mine was the first room on the right when you entered the hallway immediately through the thick emergency fire doors that had to “Remain Closed at All Times” and squealed loudly every time they shut like air released from a balloon or the great gasp of a ship upon closure of its cargo hold before a transatlantic journey.

As if my RA knew we may need a map for the trip, he tore pages out of an atlas, wrote a name on each, and taped them to the portals of our rooms. It would appear I was headed to Idaho—a place very difficult to reach by sea. I had never been to Idaho or any place really besides my basement at home and wherever the television there took me. I wondered what it felt like to live in Garden Valley or Gooding or Warm Lake.

On the women’s floors in my residence hall, the RAs were a bit more industrious. They laminated the door signs and added a dry erase marker so that people could leave messages for each other. This was particularly helpful in our pre-cell phone age so folks could note where they were eating dinner that night or what time they planned to head over to the library. But my RA didn’t laminate Idaho. It was merely a sign, the marker of a destination—“Andy” sleeps here.

But I didn’t always sleep. I fretted a lot. I worked double-time on studies and attempting to fit in. I attended every floor meeting, participated in every floor event—even the “sister” floor gatherings where I had to invite a woman to go with me to a dinner or the movies or the rodeo. I pretended to be one of the guys and hid my gayness so as to not get bucked off the great steed of heterosexuality that everyone else rode with such seeming ease.

I praised God that I didn’t get assigned a room on the third floor where the sophomores showed up nude to their first floor meeting, conducted their business au naturel, christened Three East the “naked floor”. What would it have been like to see naked men wandering the halls every day, leaning on my door-frame for a casual conversation? No matter how hard you try, some things can’t be hidden.

And so it was that four months into the semester I found myself standing outside my door talking to a classmate. Further down the hall a sophomore stepped out of his room in just his boxers. I marveled at his freedom, the way he lived so comfortably in his skin. In my marveling, my gaze remained too long on his body and when his eyes met mine I knew time had betrayed me. In five seconds I had blown months of effort—traveled from Fairfield to Atomic City in the blink of an eye.

The next morning, when I closed my door to head to chapel, I saw it there in large black letters. It spanned Glenns Ferry over Bellevue to slightly beyond Lost River. FAGGOT. A single word screaming across Idaho. Six letters like a sixteen wheeler barreling toward me. How long had it been there? Did everyone see it as they walked past?

Here it was—FAGGOT—at the start of the hallway for all to cast eyes upon. And I couldn’t deny it. I was a fag or faggot or homosexual or queer. Any route would have gotten you to the same end.

I took Idaho off my door; quietly tucked it away in my book bag. Prayed that no one would ask why we were one state shy of a union.

In time, we each went our separate ways—the man in his boxers, my floor mates, me. We landed where we landed and no one remembers those events of long ago—no one except me who has a word written across his heart, a word as big as Idaho, a word that continues to take shape within me like a Polaroid that becomes clearer with the shaking.

I circle something unseen, the way the sun orbits a bigger body, a greater force. Straight lines do not exist in nature, everything bends, turns in its own way. We must learn to ride the edges, find them narrow, a funnel to the center—an altar, a heart. ~ AJ Saur