Page 55 of Ezekiel
“Who ever said anything about leaving you?” His eyes met mine in question.
“Well, isn’t that the plan?” I scoffed.
“Not in the slightest. The plan is to leave Zion,” he clarified, though it clarified nothing at all to me.
“But Zion is my home,” I whispered, in complete juxtaposition of my previous tone and attitude.
“Zion has been your home. Mine, too. But it doesn’t have to be.” His own voice had softened, the earlier vitriol that spiked his words having dulled down now.
“But why? Why now? How did this even happen?” I asked, my arms flopping to my sides uselessly as I tried to make sense of all of this information. It all felt so scrambled to me. I couldn’t make sense of it.
“What do you mean?” he sighed. “I feel like I’ve answered that question several times now.” I could hear the exhaustion in his voice. It mirrored my own frustrated tiredness from this tirade. I flopped back down onto the sofa, holding my head in my hands.
“Make it make sense to me. What happened? When was the moment you went from loving your home to wanting to leave?” I asked. He sat down beside me, his hands still ticking agitatedly in his lap.
“I told you how we all came into kink,” he began, and I nodded, looking down at my own hands in my lap. “That’s a big part of it, but it’s not how it began. To be honest, Talia, I’m not sure I can say that Zion ever felt like home to me.”
“Even with your family? Growing up?” I asked, my heart nearly crying out to understand how this could all be true.
“Yes, even with my family in my younger days. This place never felt like home, because I never felt like… well, like me. There was always something wrong with me. It wasn’t until I left the quote-unquote safety of Zion that I discovered not only the truth about Zion, but I discovered the truth about myself.”
I tamped down the burgeoning questions that slipped to the tip of my tongue without warning. I had said I wanted to know how it had begun. Now I needed to listen.
“This place never felt right, and when I left, it made things all the more clear for me. The more I learned about the world outside of Zion, the more obvious the truth became. I found a world where women are strong, and have their own lives. A world where men don’t own women like property. A community where consent matters and respect is earned and valued by every single human being.” He paused then, and my eyes lifted to find his.
“Was there some moment, though? Some grand thing that happened that tipped the scales for you?” I asked quietly.
“No. It wasn’t like that. I can’t say the same for my brothers, but for me, it was more like a journey that reached its pinnacle when I discovered Abditory. But it wasn’t really about kink. Sure, that was the setting that tipped the scales, as you put it, but it wasn’t some revelation. It was everything in my life leading up to finding the truth about myself and the truth about the life that I want,” he explained.
“And what is it you want in life? What is that truth?” I pushed, feeling the frustration of our argument die down and in its place, a hopelessness and a longing settled deep into my heart. A realization that perhaps we did not want the same things in life. If that were true, how could we survive together? Just over a week together, and already the foundation of a relationship I felt we were making, seemed to be on the verge of being torn asunder.
“Freedom,” he spoke fervently, taking my hand in his. “I want a life where I don’t have to be something I’m not. Where I can be me, with all my quirks and issues, without worrying about what my father thinks, or what the church thinks. I want a life where I can find someone to love the way we both want to be loved. Not how some leader of a fucked up church tells me to love.”
I couldn’t deny the pang of heartbreak that pierced my heart at his words. He wanted to find a new kind of love. As in, not me.
“That’s what you want?” I whispered.
“It is. I want a life where I can enjoy the things I enjoy without judgment. Where I don’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not. It’s exhausting, Talia, keeping up the mask that I am forced to wear just to survive in this hellhole.” His words broke me. Tore at me until the life I had begun to imagine with him was nothing more than a pile of shredded remains of the dream that had just blossomed in my mind.
“I’m listening,” I reassured him, squeezing his hand and pretending like his words weren’t killing me with each syllable.
“I want a life where I can find happiness. True happiness, away from this place. I never want to be the Ezekiel that my father wants me to be. I don’t want to be an Elder, or even a member of this church. I don’t want to live here and follow the rules that they have set forth. I want to love unabashedly and without reservation. I want to love myself,” he huffed. “Completely without fear of being judged or ridiculed or punished. And I can’t have that here. That’s not how things are here. It’s just not.”
“If that’s what you want,” I said after a long pause of thought, “I will not stand in your way.” Each word I forced through a litany of voices screaming in my head to do whatever it took to keep him. But I could not keep him here, if he did not want to be here. I just didn’t understand how we could share all the things we had shared and he still wanted to leave this place. To leave me.
“The sadness in your eyes is killing me, Talia,” he spoke just as quietly as I had. I simply shrugged, not knowing what to say. What did he expect?
“Tell me what you’re thinking?” he implored, tugging further at the connection that we had.
“I don’t know,” I muttered, looking down at my hands again.
“Try. Please?” he begged. There was something there, in his voice, that pulled at me, giving me hope and despair in equal measure.
“It’s been only just over a week, Zeke. And already, the thought of keeping you from the life you want, from the dream that you have for yourself — it kills me,” I whispered, working adamantly to piece my thoughts together in a way that made at least the smallest modicum of sense.
“Why do you think you’d keep me from the life I want?” he asked.
“Because this is my home. This is where my family is. And I love it here. But you don’t,” I stated simply. In the end, that’s what it was: simple.
