Nobody knows about my sexuality, so I'm safe with that.
I'm not feminine, I dress like every single guy in this school to fit in. Men being seen with anything feminine and women being seen with anything masculine makes you look "disgusting".
Being gay is disgusting.
I learned that the hard way.
A touch of the lightest of makeup can earn you the ugliest black eye and bruises that not even makeup can cover. In South Korea, being LGBTQ+ is out of the question. In fact, my school had the highest suicide rate. 17 have already committed suicide in 6 months and more than half of them were out. I knew one of them.
She was quiet, the kid that always sat in the back if the class. Smart, but didn't like to talk unless it was about her favorite thing to do.
She loved the piano.
You would be awestruck on how smoothly and delicately her dainty fingers glided across the old piano in the choir room. She was always the first one in school, always the last one out. All that time was playing piano.
When she was accused of being a lesbian, everyone who used to stay behind the closed choir room door admiring the lovely sounds snarled and pushed her into lockers and shoved her down to the floor. They even went as far as to break her fingers.
She was absolutely devastated, and she could no longer take it.
The poor soul sung as she played the piano inside the choir room, tears running down her face as the pain in her fingers grew intensely. She managed to play everything beautifully. She smiled to herself and she wiped the tears away from her beaten face.
That was the last time we all heard that piano make a sound.
No one enters the choir room anymore. It's very dark and plus, you can still hear that lovely song she sung that day for the last time.
I miss her. Even if I've only talked to her a few times. I go to her grave and wipe all of the homophobic slurs that are written in red off. When I have enough money I bring her roses.
She was a beautiful person.
Both on the outside, and the inside.
