fangirlingatthreeam:

Everyone has these amazing Love, Simon stories. The theater applauds. People stand up and cheer. People shout out loud. My experience was…nothing like that.

I live in a conservative town. We were on spring break. There are max 8 people in the theater. During the movie, everyone was silent. All you could hear were the girls behind me crying and laughing, the quiet gasps from the male and female couple in front of me, my friends whispered words under their breath, and my own quiet sobbing into my glove. The movie ends. The credits roll. We all get out of our seats. Someone holds the door for me, I hold it for someone else. We all make eye contact with each other at some point and we come to an unspoken agreement. They weren’t there, I wasn’t there, we saw no one we knew. Except we all knew each other, I knew everyone’s names and they knew mine. But the fear in their eyes, that gave way to understanding, acceptance, agreement and camaraderie, made us all silently promise in that split second of eye contact to take a vow of silence. We held the door for each other. Nodded at each other. We walked away to our respective cars. We said nothing.

I haven’t given away any of their names. I haven’t asked them about it either. But a couple of them I’ve seen since. One, a person I have never talked to in my life, saw me and we nodded at each other in recognition. It’s no empowering story. It isn’t loud or great or revolutionary. But I have some new people watching my back. And I’m watching theirs. Because in the end, we are all the same, with the same secret. And even in such a conservative town, we are not alone.