queerHeart: Faith. Sexuality. Community.

When Mrs. Beta’s class of fourth-graders spill into the room like a bag of marbles burst open, Chi feels the buzzing of her stomach settle into a watchful softness. The sanctuary – that’s what Chi likes to think of it as – hazes with that honeyed kind of mid-afternoon light. It filters in from the west-facing windows that squint out on the dusty ruins of the school playground, and the light is dusty too. It bobs and sways like a million little fireflies in the sanctuary. It brushes past the laminated posters detailing instruments by their family names – wind, strings and percussion – and hovers over boxes of plastic recorders that glint like technicolor treasure dredged up from the depths of the sea.

But that’s not the light that has Chi’s milky insides quivering with a hum that is a little frightening but mostly wonderful. This other-kind-of-light glows in between the fireflies, draws Chi’s shoulders back down from her ears, and smooths away the serious grief from her eyes. Which says a lot.

It takes the sweetest kind of light to make you forget, even just for a little while, the twisted-up words someone needled into your heart during fractions lesson. It’s already a frustrating-enough topic for Chi, who has a difficult time with math. But having her friend, who is also her biggest bully, decide that Chi is stuck-up because of how Chi brushed her blonde hair back over her shoulders a certain way and then snickers about it to nearby classmates, makes Chi’s challenge of figuring out what twelve-eights should be converted to seem a lot like an ant being expected to move a gallon of dog turds. And divide those turds out into whatever the hell twelve-eights really is.

Chi’s gaze follows the other-light over the plastic tubs of tambourines, mallets and miniature xylophones neatly stacked against one wall to the woman waiting by the ebony Baldwin baby-grand, a sleek piano with more than a little exhaustion dulling its edges from years of juvenile use. Rose tinges along Chi’s cheeks, and the watchfulness in her stomach shifts in pleasure. The other-light radiates from the woman’s curled turquoise eyes like sunlight over a forest lake. It beckons Chi forward, to a place where even the simplest movements of her being, like shifting her hair back over her shoulder, are not seen as threatening.

That beckoning in the woman’s eyes calls out over the clamor of children, sweet as birdsong through a copse of trees. It takes a few moments for the clamor to solidify into silence, but only one child has been blushing at Ms. Tau from the beginning. Chi loves Ms. Tau’s whimsy voice, her waterfall of chestnut curls that trickle down her back, where Chi believes the woman hides her pearled wings from the undeserving public, and her chest.

This part of a grown female’s body has always been Chi’s favorite to think about, in many of her fantasies of a world without clothes where everyone at school can walk about naked and Chi can finally appreciate their more hidden parts in delicious movement and light. It’s not strange to her that the idea of exploring a female’s bare contours and hidden spaces brings a deeper, more luscious thrill than imagining doing so with a man. Chi did have a crush on a boy once. But it never growled and paced with the same confident desire, the protective intensity that Chi has felt of late when wondering what it would be like to be alone with her music teacher. To pull near to her, sometime imagining Chi a little older herself, and kiss the woman’s mouth, drawing out sounds other than the ones she teaches in class. The woman would melt in Chi’s arms, let Chi peel off her clothing and hold her sweet breasts.

Chi has no idea yet what sex is said to be like, but her body knows. It knows lovemaking is a fusion of hunger and joy, of what it really could mean for her to be known by someone who knows just what to see when seeing someone. How she wants to know her someone that way too. How they’d kiss and sigh and fall deeper still against each other. Alone together in a sanctuary of honey-light, brushing fingers over each other’s skin like jeweled instruments. Breathing light in, music drifting out. Safe and sound.

Just like this.