My parents stared at me accusingly. This was the worst moment of my life, and the very people caused it I should be able to lean on in these kinds of situations.

"What did you say!?" my mother shouted at me.

I felt the huge kitchen pulsating around me as my field of vision shrunk slowly like even the world wanted to stop existing outside this circle of shame. I used all my power to fight against bursting into tears, but even with that, if I couldn't get strength from holding Sanyi's hand, it would've been a long lost battle.

"I..." I swallowed. "I'm... a lesbian."

Sanyi reassuringly stroked my shoulder. I was a fool to hope our mother would handle the news half as well as he did. Our dad? He just sat stoically at the table, placing himself out of the conversation. At least he didn't seem disgusted or dismissive anymore.

"What do you mean by you are a lesbian?" my mom screamed with haphazard breathing. Her eyes were so full of burning hatred, that I hadn't seen from her even during our wildest arguments. "My daughter won't be a fag."

"Mom," Sanyi tried to calm her down.

"Son, you are staying out of this! You'll get yours later for holding this back from me."

"No, Mom!" my brother said firmly. "Your daughter is your daughter. The same girl you gave life to twenty years ago."

"No. This child in front of me is just a deranged teen. My daughter won't be a fag, you understand?"

My attention was switching back and forth between them, and for the first time in my life, I couldn't say a thing. This wasn't me. This really wasn't me. Surrendering to my mother's anger without a fight? I long forgot the memory of the last time I did that. Surrendering. But this wasn't in the faintest similar to any other fights. You can have disagreements with your mother, but when the source of it is your very self, that she should accept unconditionally, that kills you inside. Sucks the life out, and leaves you paralyzed, while you watch two of the most important people in your life biting each other's heads off.

"Your daughter is not a 'fag'!" my brother resisted. "She's a young woman who loves other women instead of men. Get over it!"

"Don't dare to defend this aberration to me!"

I glanced at Dad, maybe as a cry for help, but I don't know what I was expecting. To see him standing up to my mother for the first time in my life?

I was squeezing Sanyi's hand harder and harder, but even that started to lose its effectiveness. I felt small drops of tears gathering in the corner of my eyes.

"Mom, please, don't do this," I begged.

"Do not talk to me! Do not dare to talk until you forget this insanity! What did I do to deserve you becoming so disgusting?"

"I am not disgusting, Mom. I'm a lesbian."

She stepped closer and slapped me. In a single moment, the whole room froze. She had always been strict but never went as far as hitting either of us. It wasn't hard, physically I barely felt it, still, it was a hundred times more painful than anything else in my life.

After he managed to overcome the first shock, Sanyi jumped between us.

"Mom, now you went too far!"

"I was the one who went too far? Tell that to your fag sister!"

My tears started to rain like a tropical storm. Sanyi embraced my shoulder and walked me to the door.

"You are gonna regret these words, mom!" He looked back before we left the room. "You are gonna regret this, and I hope for all of our sake it won't be too late."

I shot up from my bed like a catapult. My hair, my pillow, my blanket all were wet from my sweat, and I had heavy breathing like I was in the middle of a five klick run. This goddamn memory again! I would have a hard time remembering the last time I had dreamed about my coming out, but when I did, it always had this effect on me.

It's not that I didn't understand why the most hurtful memory of my life decided to crawl to the surface once again. Then I had to confess the truth to two very important people of my life, and now I was planning to do something similar. My mom received the news in the worst possible way, but she was an awfully conservative old woman at the time. Now I was about to confess the same thing to a twenty-eight-year-old girl, so I was hoping for a much better reception. Adri, this wonderful, dreamlike girl with whom I fell deeply in love. Yes. The greatest love of my life, who - just like my mother - felt repulsed by lesbians. Well, it might not have been a coincidence that the memories of that nightmarish afternoon two years ago came back after all.

I surveyed the moonlit room around me. My bunkmates, fortunately, didn't wake up, so I got away without explaining why I looked like someone who had seen a ghost. I crawled out of bed, into my slippers, and stumbled toward the bathroom. As soon as I closed the door behind me, the coldness of the hall immediately froze me to the bone. Damn army and its barely heated buildings.

According to the calendar, we were in the late autumn of 2006, according to the looks of pretty much everything in this goddamn hall, it couldn't have been any later than 1976. It felt like the time had stopped at this base 30 years ago because it didn't look even a tiny little bit different than how my father described it from the time of his conscription. Cheap quality, atrocious looking floor tiles, hospital-style wall painting, decaying wood windows and yes, the aforementioned heating or more like the lack of it.

As I was floundering drowsily to the ladies' room, I couldn't help but wonder about the absurdity of my situation. Me, the eternal rebel, undisciplined chick in the army. Bad comedies tend to start like that, but to be fair, sometimes I felt my life was exactly that. A bad comedy that makes someone, somewhere far away laugh.

What was Örs, my ex-boyfriend thinking, when he invited me to join the military? And even more, what was I thinking, when I accepted the offer? Okay, that latter one isn't that much of a mystery. I needed a job, and it's not like I was drowning in the possibilities. For some reason, not many companies want to give high-paying jobs to a 22-year-old girl with a low-grade high school diploma, and a questionable reputation as a sales clerk.

At the time I lived in my brother's garage, and as nice as he and Marcsi - his wife - were, even their hospitality had its limits. And I probably won't tell you a huge secret when I say, the five square meters, plywood walled corner I called home the last two years wasn't that much similar to the penthouse of my dreams. Of course, it was either this or moving back to my parents, which would've been easy. I 'only' should've admitted that my 'lesboness' was merely a teenage whim on my part. Well, even if it was that, I wouldn't have played with the idea of accepting the offer.

Of course, Idid accept another offer, otherwise, I wouldn't have been here now. I still smile when I imagine the look on my face when my ex presented me this idea in the local GP's waiting room.

"Well, Fanny, you know, if you are serious about getting a job, there are possibilities," he explained.

"What do you mean?" I asked after a loud sneeze.

"We always hire."

"What? The military? Do I really look that much lesbian to you?"

"Geez, don't tell me you took that as a personal offense!"

"What? No. It's a bit stereotypical to think a lesbian is into every boyish thing, but whatever."

"A lesbian? No. But the girl who was unwilling to wear the 'too girly' prom dress until she was threatened with repeating the senior year, might," he said with a grin.

I must have given him a terrifying look because he decided to drop this thought.

"A lot of women work for us, and none of them are lesbian... Well, one of them might, but she isn't even a soldier. Believe me, there is nothing unusual about it anymore. Lots of women chose to be soldiers regardless of their sexualities. This is just a job just like anything else."

Why would I have believed a word he said? He was the last guy I tried to have a straight relationship with, so I had a good reason to believe he still had his dignity hurt about it. It's not like, our breaking up came as a surprise to him. I've told him from the very first second that I considered this an experiment.

The night of our unexpected reunion I thought a lot about the offer, but as I still wasn't exactly the main candidate of several different well-paying CEO positions, I decided to call him and accept the offer. I was young and needed the money. Yeah, I'm aware how ex-porn reality-starish it sounds. If I had to have a job where it was compulsory to wear a uniform, the woodland colored beat the slutty schoolgirl one. As low as I was around this time, I seriously considered picking the latter up in a strip club, so signing up for the military wasn't that bad after all.

I've been tomboyish enough in my whole life to not get intimidated by such masculine challenges, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a relief when the recruitment office offered me a personnel NCO position. That meant the comfort of an office and the burden of the paperwork, but a drowning girl shouldn't complain about the color of the lifebelt, should she? Of course, there was this little thing about me of hating authorities and running my mouth when every sane person would have long shut up, but those things can't possibly mean trouble in the military, right?

So a mere ten months after I signed that paper, here I was clumsily stumbling around the empty halls of the military base of Szentendre and wondering, it might have been better if my dignity had won that night instead of the stupid urges like eating and living under a somewhat own roof. Everybody says it's better to have lovesickness than being sick without love, but I wouldn't have had either if I'd never met this wonderful girl who became my world in a mere five weeks.

After I finished on the toilet, and washed my hands, on my way out I took a look at the mirror. It was a mistake.

"Fanny Burka, you're uglier than a zombie," I grumbled to my reflection, that at the moment had very few similarities to an actual human being.

I left the bathroom, and scuffled back to our room, groping the wall all the way along. Just as when I left, nobody had woken up when I got back either. It was no surprise. We had a really exhausting day, even for me, who played basketball until two years ago. And the majority of the others didn't even watch sports, let alone do any. On the way to my bed, I stopped for a moment and looked at Adri, who was deep in dreamland territory.

Her maroon curls framed her angelic face while she slept with this beautiful eternal peace. It would've been hard to tell if I felt this undying love for her because she actually was the most wonderful woman I've ever met, or because she was just a strong crush, who also happened to be a forbidden fruit to me. I let out a painful sigh then lumbered to my bed and collapsed on it. Out of the exhaustion, I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. In my dreams, Adri jumped into my arms when I came out to her, and told she's been in love with me ever since we met. What a beautiful and naive dream it was...