Based on the song If Our Love Is Wrong by Calum Scott for the #Songifc Contest.

Your life is ordinary—your family is upper middle class with a white picket fence and manicured lawn; your friends are normal, young men in the hierarchy of the social ladder who rule the sports field with an iron fist, who you watch but don't interfere when they shake down other kids for lunch money or dunk their heads in toilets; your girlfriend is normal with normal hair and normal eyes, but hair and eyes you love.

Your life is ordinary. Your life is mundane as the days blur together.

You're a Gemini. You're intelligent with an outgoing flair. Anna likes that about you; it's why she loves you. It's why she stays with you. But you're also impulsive, as you bust the tires of your dad's expensive Land Rover doing burnouts at the end of the street with Frankie howling next to you.

You don't believe in star signs. You don't believe in the planets aligning or fate or any of that voodoo shit. You think what Anna says about you two being destined to be together is bullshit.

But you're different.

At least, you think you are.

It's what you feel.

You don't feel like you're some jock like your friends. You don't feel you're the same as Frankie or Tom or Ben. You don't relate to Anna as much as she thinks. She doesn't know you like she thinks she does. You know because there are things you haven't told her. Things you can't seem to decipher yourself, like you're trying to piece together what you think is the puzzle of your life but the pieces won't fit together as hard as you try to jam them. Things you're hiding, because if the guys or Anna found out—if the world found out—it would be the collapse of everything.

You call Adelaide your home. It's known as many different things. Some know it as the City of Churches. Some know it as a murder capital of the world. There are enough churches in Adelaide to make a town in the Bible Belt of the United States look pitiful—more than five hundred of them scattered out among the city and suburbs, one edging every corner. You don't know why your home is considered a murder capital—you've lived here your whole life and haven't once felt afraid. Perhaps it's because of those murders in the 90's in that suburb ten minutes away from your house notorious enough to have a movie made about it; the murders that turned into a thinly veiled threat to children decades later that if they didn't do what they were told, they'd end up stuffed in barrels too.

You're a rugby player. You love it. You love the feel of the ball in your hands and it against your boot when you catapult it across the field. You love the feeling of pain ricocheting across your body when you slam into the defensive line in a desperate push to the try line. You love the comradery of it. You love the brotherhood of it.

You're a Gemini. You're brave and honest and true. You're susceptible to rebellion. You push when it comes to shove. You're the river that refuses to flow in the right direction.

You're a Gemini, and the Aquarian influence pushes you far to your boundaries. While you're adjustable and versatile, he's inventive. You're adventurous and courageous, he's loyal to the bone. You're spontaneous and he's unpredictable, but he's stubborn and you hate that, just as he hates your quick temper.

You're a Gemini. And you're fickle. You know this. He's knows it too.

On your sixteenth birthday, you throw a party at your house against your mother's wishes. You do it out of spite. This is, in part, a response to the divorce, messy and silent, like keeping you in the dark is somehow protecting you. One day, Dad is there and the next he's gone, banished to the other side of the world.

You don't believe in the planets aligning or fate, but you're starting to think that perhaps the world is working against you. That if there really is some kind of God above, He's screwing with you. Laughing at you. That if there really is some kind of prophecy or scripture, it's beginning to read as nothing more than the desperate scrawling of a mad man.

On your sixteenth birthday party you throw out of spite, you meet Charlie.

Sydney was built with vanity. Melbourne was built with wealth. Canberra with and for power. Adelaide was designed with morality. Good men—decent men, not convicts—who were sold land where they would live sensible, straightforward lives with sensible, straightforward wives. The elected leaders of the state would strike lines in the dirt so men would walk on the right side of virtue. There were no men who went against the grain. Those men were long struck out. Those men were nothing.

You buy a battered leather jacket from the flea market on the corner of The Parade, throw on the weathered combat boots you stole from your brother, and twist the ring on your middle finger again and again.

Charlie's hair is like a black arcing wave, flattening from the back of his head and rising up to a natural, gentle curl to the front. He has these eyes that see things you can't, pale blue like tidepools, and his muscles feel nothing like yours when you brush your hands down his arms. On the days when you feel the teetering of the Earth and the pull of the Moon too strongly, Charlie strokes your back and ties a friendship bracelet around your wrist.

Your brother warns you about fags, about not getting caught in between a cock jockey and twink, and you burn in silence across the dinner table, stabbing your baked potato disdainfully. How dare he say such things. Those people are just that: people, like you and him. You storm out when he brings up a conversation about a fag at school needing a good beating.

It's late at night. You steal your brother's car and drive until you run out of gas, the lights of the northern suburbs flashing past the windows, blinking in code.

The streets of Adelaide are lined with light poles wrapped in steel that grace the edges of the sky. They were an advancement in modernism of the city when timber supplies dwindled, light posts that twisted and crumbled between the sharp teeth of termites. The steel-wrapped guardians that stand protectively over school yard gates are painted with murals, inviting passers-by to take in the splendour of young minds and the occasional drawing of a beautifully detailed penis. These indestructible beacons of light were far from what the settlers planed for the City of Churches, yet they stand today on the sides of every street, sacred towers lighting your way home adorned with art and dicks.

Charlie drives you home after the movie. You stop past his favourite twenty-four-hour diner for pancakes. It's past your curfew by three hours. You don't care. You much prefer maple-doused, whipped cream covered circles of deliciousness with him than the constant belittling and scolding from people who claim to care at home.

Charlie takes your hand. He threads his fingers with yours, massaging your thumb with utmost delicacy. His smile is lopsided in that way that always made your heart skip a beat. He asks you what you're afraid of. You don't know how to answer. You're not afraid of anything. But he can see right through you—he can see the way your heart beats, each rhythmic pattern of every fibre of your being.

Charlie is an Aquarius. His birthday is on Valentine's Day. He strikes you as the romantic type in every way possible, down to the subtle distinction of heteronormative romance narratives—he doesn't follow them. This makes you exceptionally compatible. The way he talks about love is unlike any other explanation you've heard; you can't help but be engrossed in it. You feel butterflies in gilded cages flutter when he talks about throwing inhibitions to the wind for love when a person finds The One.

Charlie is an Aquarius. He is 780 days older than you. You know because you counted. He is three inches taller than you. You know because you measured. Charlie is an Aquarius. You are a Gemini. And the taste of his lips cannot be quantified. You learn it can be drawn out, made to linger in the chasm of your mouth.

You press your hand to the backseat window, marking the glass with your palm print as he kisses your chest, your neck, your lips. It's a feeling that sends a chill through you, but a chill that draws a sigh from your lips again and again. He proposes a condom, an invitation. You refuse. You don't want to do him. You push back his hand holding it, a clear reply he understands loud and clear.

Charlie is an Aquarius. You are a Gemini. And when he's inside of you, you feel more complete than you ever thought possible. His pale blue eyes are like small grey storms, and they don't leave yours, even as you close them every so often. You can feel his muscles contract as you run your hands down his shoulder blades and back. Your hands through his hair feels magical. He asks if you are okay when he eases deeper inside of you. It hurts, but it feels too good to be wrong. You don't tell him this. You simply kiss him in reply.

Charlie is an Aquarius. You are a Gemini. He is a part of you. He's in your skin and your bones and your DNA. He is right in what feels like a world that can be too wrong sometimes.

Australia is considered an inclusive country with our multiculturalism and "mate" culture. We're friendly, we're tolerant, we're chill and down to earth with our cricket on Sunday afternoons and the iconic VB beer tune playing in the background of Dad flipping Australia shaped patties on the barbie on Australia Day. But our carefree nature is bittersweet for people of the non-heteronormative narrative. Over the summer of 1976 and 1977, police in Victoria slap cuffs on more than a hundred men for homosexuality in a law enforcement campaign, including undercover operations of cops posing as homosexuals in a sick act of entrapment; the first Mardi Gras parade in Sydney in 1978 ended in fifty-three arrests; Queensland passed legislation banning bars from serving alcohol to "perverts, deviants, child molesters and drug users," in 1985, no doubt a direct attack on homosexuals; across the late 80's and through the 90's, the states began to decriminalise male acts of homosexuality as the transition into the 2000s began with the abolishment of the gay panic defence; in 2004, the government took a stumbling step back in excluding same-sex couples from marriage despite the legalisation of adoption for such couples across the country; it's not until 2017 that same-sex marriage is legalised after a postal vote and overwhelming public debate.

You sit in history class listening to your teacher drawl on about all this. But you linger on the tragic tale of Dr. George Duncan, a sober-looking university law lecturer at the University of Adelaide with dark rimmed glasses and lips thinned into a solemn line. He was murdered in 1972 at the nearby riverbank, an attack suspected to have been committed by police officers. You swallow a bad taste in your mouth as you read about the southern bank of the River Torrens in the heart of Adelaide that became a well-known meeting spot for gay people, a sharply dropping hill below a treeline out of sight of homes and deserted at night. A feeling of dread sets in when you read about George Duncan's tragic end—a gang of men confronted him and another man named Roger James on the southern bank near the footbridge, and were thrown into the river. Duncan drowned. Roger survived.

You sit with Charlie on a hill overlooking the River Torrens, the multicoloured lights of Adelaide Oval and the bridge across the water flashing in the night. Charlie goes to hold your hand. You ease it away as subtly as you can, but he notices. He notices everything about you. He knows everything about you—the way you bite your lower lip in thought, the way your eyes flick between each of his, the way your jaw tenses when you're worried, and the way you twist the ring on your middle finger. You can't fool Charlie anymore. He asks you what you're worried about, and you struggle to tell him. You're worried about ending up like George Duncan, drowned in a river for loving the wrong person.

In his Aquarius ways, Charlie takes your hand and looks at you deep in your eyes. He knows you're worried about saying the words people don't want to hear. He knows you're scared about how they'll take it. He presses a hand to your chest, feeling the suffocation you feel from trying to fit in. He leans in close enough to feel his breath pass your ear, and he tells you a secret: if your love is wrong, then you shouldn't be right at all. He brushes the sleeve of your battered leather jacket with his hand on its way up to cup your face, and he plants a kiss on your cheek. You let him, because perhaps you don't need the world's permission to love him. You shouldn't have to suffocate to fit in. You shouldn't need to care what people say, for you are nobody's but his. His words have landed true like an arrow meeting its mark on a bullseye.

You brush out invisible creases in your shirt as you stand at the front door of a white-washed house. You plaster on a tight smile when the door swings open. He's dressed in a blue button-down tucked into well-worn jeans. He asks if you're ready. You don't know if you are. All you know is this boy you love so dearly is worth taking any risk for.

Charlie is an Aquarius. You are a Gemini. His family is wonderful. And you are jealous of that.

Charlie walks you to the door. You don't want the night to end. You don't want to leave an embracive household with loving, accepting parents and a supportive sister to return to a distant mother, homophobic brother and a father who doesn't exist anymore. Charlie tells you things will get better, and you're not sure if he's right. But you love him, whether that love is right or not.

The school calls your mum and tells her about your inappropriate relationship with another male student. For all its plans and well-drawn lines of rectitude, Adelaide's main exports are AFL players and wine. It also leads the country in number of sex shops per capita. You know because you drive by five of them on the way to school every day. You know because Charlie sprung the idea on you to visit one to spice things up a bit, an idea that terrified you to his joking delight. The entire idea was a forgetful utopia, so drunk on middle-class idealism that it could ignore its violent beginnings. The reality is something else.

You towel your hair after a lukewarm shower in the locker room after training. You've got a big game on the weekend, and it's your first game as halfback—your position is an important one. You note your surroundings. You watch the guys circle you like vultures. You don't see the fist connecting with your cheekbone coming, nor the blow to your stomach, or the flying kick to your rib cage once you hit the tiles, nor the slamming of a size nine foot to your collarbone.

You don't remember the paramedics lifting you into the ambulance. You don't remember being wheeled into ER, through triage, and into a private room. You don't remember doctors and nurses hovering over you. You only remember George Duncan, because, deep down, you know that's who you've become.

Charlie visits you in the hospital. You watch his horrified expression deepen as you roll off the list of your injuries. He climbs into the bed next to you and you willingly ignore the agony of your shattered collarbone to rest your head on his shoulder. He brings you food, eager to save you from premade, microwaved hospital meals. A kind gesture, but you can't seem to eat with your upturned insides thanks to God's willing disciples to aid you in seeking His plans. Charlie spends his nights with you, sleeping next to you, watching over you, determined to save you from your nightmares he watches you suffer. Charlie is kind, but his kisses feel like rough penance.

Charlie is an Aquarius. You are a Gemini. And you can't do this anymore. You set him free, despite his tearful pleas.

At home, Mum comes into your room and tells you the stories of the babies she lost before you arrived. She outlines the plan she had for each of them, for you: a wife, a baby; a house in a nice suburb with a white picket fence and a big backyard. She gently brushes your hair from your face. Sometimes, she says, the best part happens after you lose faith in the design.

You are a Gemini. You believe in star signs. You believe in the planets aligning and fate. You believe that no love is wrong, for love is never wrong.

Sometimes you get beaten and battered and bruised. Sometimes the planets dance, the rivers run the wrong way and the timber curls.

Sometimes, you turn out gay.