"I’m Gay And Have Severe Anxiety " by Jennifer F

     The heat is unbearable. My thighs start sticking to the low budget leather seats adorned with small cracks and a shallow hole here and there. The smell of sickly sweet orange chicken and an ungodly amount of canola oil saturates the thick air around me. ‘Why on Earth did we decide on the food court to study in out of all places?’ I berate myself silently. It was an irritatingly sunny day in perhaps the most suburban of areas you can find in Southern California. I attended a school filled with hundreds of egotistical man babies who oppressed my very existence on a daily basis. The girls weren’t any better either. (I mean most of them were fine I just choose to fixate on the negative, you know, for the dramatization of it all). A distant, and I mean distant friend of mine plagiarized her final essay sophomore year and foolishly bragged about her feat to my entire friend group the following semester. No one could have prepared me for the chaos that ensued immediately after. Friendships were broken, a girl’s transcript was tarnished by “anonymous” information, and most importantly, I couldn’t eat my 20 gram protein bar without hearing that one girl fat shame my English teacher. However, not all was lost. Recently I’ve started talking to someone. Not like talking talking but just, talking. I wasn’t completely out of the closet yet which was simultaneously terrifying and comforting. The dirty flannels and baggy sweats weren’t fooling anyone at school but my parents remained as oblivious as always. They didn’t know the reason why I watched these low budget, terribly written shows was because they were the only source of representation I could find in a world just barely coming to terms with the fact that racial, gender, and marriage equality aren’t just some abstract concepts we like to talk about for fun. They also didn’t know I was temporarily incapable of speech when it came to a girl in English who managed to knock the wind out of me with just a smile, and many, many more. Adding on to the list of things my parents should probably never know about are the daily texts I’ve exchanged with a girl from another high school in my district who is coincidentally the reason why I’m sitting in Victoria Gardens infamous food court, alone, in anticipation.
     I don’t normally put myself out there. Especially when “out there” is full of judgement and potential food allergies I might have. But in this case there was nothing stopping me from meeting the only other girl like me I knew of in the entirety of the accursed Rancho Cucamonga. She had so much to say about everything and a mind full of wonderfully bizarre facts and opinions that I never got tired of hearing about. Not to mention, she was without a doubt the most intelligent person I knew of in my sad and desolate high school circumference. This is important to keep in mind as our finals were coming up for our sophomore year and I couldn’t have been more ill-prepared. I passively communicated my anxieties about this to her in conversation and she passively offered to...help me. I scooped up my phone that was haphazardly thrown onto my bed and clutched it for dear life. I don’t do these things. I don’t meet up with

people I’ve only met once, on their birthdays specifically, where I never said a word because Dear God She Was Pretty and I’m nowhere near qualified to speak to her. My heart was palpitating and of course I was going to say yes, I’m not stupid, but I had to restrain myself from answering in the .005 seconds my monkey brain was planning on. “Be cool”, I spoke solemnly to myself while nervously pacing around my bedroom. That same phrase is now the only thing I can hear in my mind as I wait for her in this suffocating heat. I am now full stage Panic Mode and I don’t think I’ve ever been this anxious to meet someone. Well, there is the exception of that underground indie artist I waited hours to see, so worth it. Anyways, my heart is minutes away from rupturing and leaving me sprawled over a crusty food court booth when out of nowhere she slides into the seat in front of me with full indifference on her face. I have made a grave mistake.

     Eventually I mustered up enough courage to utter a few words of gratitude and asked how on earth chemistry made any sense to her. She looked up at me and I immediately lost my composure. My throat transformed into the Sahara Desert and I could feel my face burning up. “What did you say?”, she asked in response. Deep down inside my soul I begged God to spare me from the inevitable embarrassment and end it right here in the middle of everyone’s lunch. Unsurprisingly, he did not listen to my pleas. I fumbled around inside my bag to grab a water bottle that might help the burning in my cheeks ebb away a little. I managed to get my point across and changed the subject to something more tangible, like the stack of chemistry worksheets conveniently placed on the table. The more we talked, the more I realized that this wouldn’t be the last time we meet. The sun was about to set which sent rays of golden orange cascading down into the windows that shielded us from the outside. I glanced up towards her and saw the next years unfold between us. Suddenly the food court didn’t seem like such a terrible place to spend my time in.