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We are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves. As a child, I told myself amazing stories of fast cars, starships and transforming alien robots. I would sit for hours in the driver’s seat of my dad’s car imagining my life as a grown man when I could drive for myself; when I would be married and successful and happy. That was before I learned that having a stutter was an affliction and being gay was a curse and the life I imagined would never be mine.
December 2013
I love my M3, I really do, but today our twenty-year relationship is being tested and the Beast is letting me down. The engine has been running for more than five minutes and I’m still not dead. Far from it.
It’s all Dad’s fault. He had to build a bloody aircraft hangar at the back of his garden rather than a garage like any normal person. Forget his helicopter, this hangar could accommodate a small fleet of flying machines, which means my battle with life is not going well. I didn’t have the foresight to bring a hose or duct tape to direct the exhaust fumes efficiently into the M3’s interior.
If Colonel Samantha Carter, Stargate SG-1’s resident genius, were sitting next to me, she’d see these practicalities as a mathematical equation. “Given the hangar’s dimensions and the dispersal rate of carbon monoxide along with the limited fuel supply and the necessary concentration needed to kill a human, I’m sorry, sir, I don’t see this working.”
Sam would be able to devise a clever television tech-tech solution to make it work, but I know I can’t. I reach out, turn the key and kill the engine. In the silence, I begin to laugh. I am laughing because I can’t even kill myself properly. I am laughing from embarrassment and from the relief of knowing no one is ever going to know about this. I resign myself to the fact that I am a thirty-five-year-old, gay, stuttering mess of a man, and that I’m alive.
Still.
I decide to begin telling myself a new story, one about a life where I could allow myself to stutter and be gay because they are both part of me. A life where I could love and be loved in return in the arms of a man, because we all deserve that basic human connection. My bond with a race car had saved me, and I was determined to honour it by living the life I would choose for myself. A life where I could feel the joy of just one more drive, because driving is what feeds my soul and this M3 is the queen of my heart, then, now and until I draw my last breath.
This is our story.