We didn’t have much money when we were little. Once, my brother stole money from my mother’s purse and went on a shopping spree that eventually cost us lunch money for almost a week. He bought lots of peanuts for some reason. I distinctly remember watching the other kids at school eat their wafers and chocolate bars while I only had one apple and a watering mouth. I know now that it was the healthier choice, but you know how envious kids can get. When the teacher wanted to know why I had only one apple for lunch, I told her the truth: we were out of money.

To my astonishment today, I didn’t blame my brother for it. At that time, I perceived it as a form of cruelty perpetrated on us by our parents. They must’ve had money stashed away in some hiding place, money they wanted to keep for themselves. We couldn’t be that poor. To my innocent mind, it was the grandmother’s fault because she was the one who took care of the family’s finances. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford that new game console, they just didn’t want us to have it. We had to wear the same jacket two years in a row while the other kids got new ones every year. I wore pants knitted by my mother, which I hated because they felt heavy and made me look bulkier.

People in school were mean for no reason. I was bullied throughout middle-school and high-school, that is, ever since I became aware of the fact that I had an ego that suffered when it was deprecated. Older kids made fun of me because I was chubby and studied a lot. Because I was a geek and spent time making mud pies. Some of my classmates derided my inability to run during physical education classes, which I avoided to the best of my abilities. I even had my parents bribe the family doctor to give me a special dispensation for those classes. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it, but my grandparents had convinced me that if I forced myself to do something, such as intense physical activity, something would burst inside me and I would die.

Once, I developed my own alphabet and wrote stuff using that. Kids in school made fun of that as well. I kept a diary and brought it to school every once in a while to draft and develop my thoughts. They stole it from my backpack and read it out loud to the others while I cringed with embarrassment. I had written about my first gay crush, who was an older student and a volleyball player. And for all this, the only explanation I could find at that time was that my classmates were inherently evil and that they hated my guts. So I tried to avoid them, get out of class before the bell rang, spend my weekends alone playing stupid online games. My father’s colleagues from work made jokes about my parents feeding me yeast, which made me look bloated like a balloon. My cousin’s grandma once told me I had the head and the ears of a mule. I was called a sissy by random people, on the street, in school, and everywhere I made an appearance.

Casual acts of verbal and physical cruelty were at the order of the day, to the point where even things such as “you shouldn’t sit outside because it’s cold,” took on the tinge of personal attacks. Why couldn’t they just accept the way I was? When my parents went away, I went to live in the city with an old lady (and a cat) who reprimanded me for my slowness and told me to suck it up and act like a man. These acts happened so often that I came to actually give credence to them and reach the conclusion that there was something inherently wrong with me. I didn’t deserve to have friends because I was so obnoxious. With this, there also came the belief that, eventually, somebody was going to accept me for who I was and save me from myself. The only thing to do, I thought, was to find that person and steer clear of all those haters who told me I wasn’t good enough. They were the ones who needed rehabilitation, not I. I was the innocent one.

Since then, I’ve made peace with it, with them, because the resentment consumed me. It still does, especially when I get rejected by someone and I am reminded once again of my own fallibility. It is in those moments that I begin contemplating the idea that perhaps my bullies were right after all. Maybe I am unlikeable just like they told me. Whenever I feel like I disappointed my students, by making an error or by not explaining a concept in the best possible manner, the feeling returns. Why am I even trying? Am I really that stupid to believe that I could actually do it? Yet, whenever this happens, I do my best to develop new ways of halting the stream of negative thoughts at their nascent stages. And it’s not by looking at myself in the mirror while repeating out loud that I am beautiful, that I deserve to be loved, that I am human and make mistakes. I do it by being frank about my fallibility up front so that people around me can identify my mishaps and perhaps forgive me for them, exercise empathy, nurture affection, or just ignore them.

As you can imagine, it takes a tremendous mental effort to do this, and at times panic settles in, and my body starts sending signals of encroaching danger where there is none. I had a severe episode on a Saturday morning in class when I felt I couldn’t go on teaching and had to excuse myself and go to the bathroom because I was afraid I was going to soil my underwear and pants in front of my students. I was out of breath and felt as if my knees were going to topple and I was going to fall over my desk. My heart was racing, and I was sweating profusely. That day, I taught for six hours in this pitiful state, taking frequent trips to the bathroom because I was drinking water like there was no tomorrow, and to this day I still can’t fathom what kept me going, or what, to my despair, was the thing that triggered it. The fear returns every once in a while, but I’ve learned to live with it, and now it no longer bothers me that much.

A similar episode occurred while I was driving the car with my parents in it, on our way to Romania. Our GPS got lost, and my reaction was way out of proportion. My blood pressure swiftly dropped. I couldn’t focus on the road, and I felt my senses receding to the back of my mind while I was desperately trying to focus on my breath. Luckily, I had not entirely lost my ability to make decisions and told my dad I needed to pull over because I was feeling unwell. The moment I did that, and I took a sip of water, I lost consciousness.

I woke up to a beeping sound, which in fact was only in my head, and to my parents’ dumbfound faces. I exchanged seats with my father, and just minutes later, after I had checked whether we were on the right motorway, I lost consciousness again. When I woke up, we were back on the side of the road, and there was that beeping sound still. Reality came back in chunks. First the sky through the windshield, then my mom and dad’s glassy eyes, their voices asking me whether they should call an ambulance. Then the realness of the situation: I had lost contact with reality a second time that day. My chest felt heavy, and my breath was labored as if no matter how much air I sucked into my lungs it just wasn’t enough. What scared me most, though, was the fact that I had uncovered in me this ability to explore, albeit unknowingly, this dark space that was beyond my control, and which ran dangerously close to death.

That summer, once we got to my grandparents’ place, I did a complete medical check-up. Blood tests came back clean. A cardiologist looked closely at my heart, literally, and concluded, somewhat to my chagrin, there was nothing wrong with it, except for the fact that it was slightly, almost imperceptibly, enlarged. I had hoped they could see my heartbreaks, but there was nothing there. Perhaps heartbreaks only make your heart bigger, able to accommodate even more people. Or more heartbreaks. I checked my blood pressure on a daily basis, and it stayed within the prescribed limits. My body was healthy, and all the tests corroborated that conclusion. The verdict was somewhat underwhelming: it was all in mind. My bullies were gone, only to be replaced by a bullying mind, which waged war on my body on a daily basis.

I tried meditation and mindfulness to dissuade my mind from going into a fully-fledged war with my body. My back ached from all those deep breaths I took. There was an urgency to the attacks which confounded me because I felt as if they went against my nature. I had been, throughout my life, a very calm person, so why was I experiencing them? Then, when all else failed, I tried medicating them. My doctor prescribed benzodiazepines, which I took, on doctor’s orders, one hour before my classes, so that the effects of the pills would be clearly discernible from the thrum of my irrational fears by the time I got to class. I panicked when I got on crowded trains, which was almost always the case, and I got lightheaded when I was about to go on a date. I resorted to the pack of pills, whose presence was somewhat reassuring, even when I was about to go out with my friends. My anxiety subsided the way an earthquake would, and I was able to enjoy life once again. I was back to my good old zen self.

The pills emptied me of whatever negative feelings I had. They slowed me down. Reality washed over me in a constant but calming stream, a rivulet really, and everything felt manageable. Whenever I made a mistake in class, I stopped, corrected myself, and apologized. I couldn’t care less about my slips. Yet, in time, I began being increasingly aware of the fact that the pills deprived me of whatever mechanisms I might have developed to work around my issues. They were not a way to do that, the tablets only numbed my feelings, which was akin to me avoiding my bullies in high-school when I asked my teachers to let me out the class before the bell rang. The solution was always the pill. When I couldn’t sleep because of all that constant worrying and dreading, my hand quickly reached for the pills, boxes of which I kept all over the house. I put one tablet in the pockets of every jacket I had, just in case.

I realized that matters were getting out of hand when I had gone out with a friend of mine, and he kept complaining about the humidity ruining his hair, and I was about to lash out at him and tell him that I was on benzodiazepines because I couldn’t deal with reality and he worried about his fucking hair?! I didn’t do it, but just the thought of wounding his ego in that way helped me understand that the medication was beginning to legitimize a side of me I wasn’t ready to call my own: the one that admitted defeat. The part of me which admitted to being unable to work without the pills’ helping hands. The side of me that had given up on trying to recover the calmness with which I had prided myself in the past. It was only a matter of time until I would resort to that chemical succor even for the most basic human functions, such as going to the supermarket or talking to neighbors.

Now, I don’t mean to say that medication is the easy way out of a time-consuming and challenging problem. When it comes to specific mental health issues medication is vital. That is, it saves lives. It helps people lead wholesome lives and prevents them from identifying fully with their affliction. You’re not your depression. Your anxiety does not define who you are. Yet, I believe it is also essential to realize that, in time, it could lead to a defeatist outlook on life, at least when it comes to anxiety disorders. Where do we draw the line between what we do and what medication makes us do? Does it affect our capacity to make decisions? Can we claim full authorship on a decision made while under medication?

Most of us probably know this, but medication does not go to the source of our problems, it only takes care of the symptoms. It sweeps things under the carpet where we can’t notice them, which can be a good strategy, especially when you have a full-time job, or you have to raise children who do not seem to understand your mood swings. It goes without saying that most people don’t understand mood swings because if they can just stop feeling depressed, then you can do it as well. You just have to be happy, embrace positive thinking, and start singing Bob Marley. It also goes without saying that this kind of advice is likely to make things worse because it implies that if one can do something, then all of us should be able to do it.

Over the past year, while dealing with my anxiety and panic attacks, I have also tried to identify as best as I could moments in my life that have led me to where I am today, but that’s always a difficult task. Most of the times the things you think have left a mark on you are not the source of your problems. It might be something else entirely. The abuse that was not perceived as abuse when it was perpetrated on you. Family issues, an alcoholic father, an opprobrious uncle, or a cousin whose sexual appetites were too developed for his age. It can be any number of things, and there is no right or wrong answer in this equation.

I always return to my bullies, which might be my easy way out. It might be that I’m giving them too much credit where there is little credit to offer, or where there is none. I also keep having the nagging sensation that my lingering on the high-school episode might be merely an obsession I have developed over the years and that it might be high time to just let it go. My bully-narrative does fall in line with the current craze for tales of redeeming à la Oprah Winfrey. We’re all looking, it seems, for a traumatic past that would explain why we are the way we are today, to be able to say that, yes, we’ve suffered, but we’ve managed to overcome that. Just look at how far we’ve come. And perhaps I’m vilifying my bullies the way I belittled my family when I felt like they weren’t giving me the things I wanted. I need them to be evil to justify the damage I seem to be doing to myself or to be able to say that the image I have of myself is beyond recovery because of that.

It’s astonishingly easy to vilify those who hurt us, or those who do things we perceive as hurtful. It’s as if we’re hardwired to do so, trained to expect instant gratification even when the rules of the game do not even mention it or are vague with regards to that. The slightest offense, such as reading a text without replying to it right away, triggers waves of resentment. Not getting a like on Facebook from a specific person is often interpreted as an indication of a friendship turning cold. Each gesture, even the most unconscious, is thus soaked with intentions that are, in most cases, detrimental to our mental wellbeing, deprecating to our egos, disrespectful of our investments, be them emotional or physical. The road from peace to fully-fledged war is a slippery slope.

This summer I met a guy I really liked, and it all seemed to work well between us. We both love books and reading, and so we always had something to talk about, albeit our tastes in literature were diverse. He likes Italo Calvino, while I find him cold and distant at times (though the guy swears that it’s not so). I love Faulkner and other authors he has never read, and probably never will. But that never got in between us. The first time we went out we had drinks at a bar in Piazza Vittorio Veneto, and we instantly liked each other. We discussed Camus that time, and in no time we got to touching hands and looking at each other with dreamy eyes. After we had drinks, we bought beers and went to his place and listened to music late into the night. We talked about Virginia Woolf and, of course, we kissed (and…did some other stuff as well; I won’t go into details). Then it was time to go because it was getting late, and he accompanied me downstairs, and we kissed by the main entrance knowing that there were surveillance cameras. We felt rebellious because, I think, we had uncovered something in each other we both liked. I took a rented bike and rushed to the train station all sweaty from the pedaling and the unusually warm night. But I felt happy.

We decided to meet again, and when I went to pick him up from his apartment, I immediately noticed something was off. We had drinks at a different bar, and we grabbed something to eat, and then we took a long walk on the banks of the river Po at night. And we had THE talk. He liked me a lot, but he was unsure about it, because he had felt the same way about his ex, and it was happening all over again, and he didn’t know how to deal with it. He was happy about seeing me, but then he saw me and felt doubt creeping in. I felt humiliated and embarrassed and told him I was going to go because the discussion made me uncomfortable, and it reminded me of other such dates, which had not worked out and they only made me feel bad about myself. Yet, he told me to stay and talk things through. We did discuss things through, and his doubts seemed to recede. My doubts did the same. I have always been of the conviction that whatever issues we might encounter in such cases there was a way out, a compromise that would make things work.

We met, repeatedly, and then he had to go back to the south for the summer holidays. We talked, every day, exchanged ideas about books and writing because he is also a writer in the making. He got jealous when I commented on other guys’ pictures on Facebook, and he told me so. I was happy with that because, finally, there was a guy who likes me the way I am. Then the ominous silences began until I couldn’t take it any longer and demanded an explanation. He told me he changed his mind and gave full swing to his doubts. He was no longer interested in pursuing whatever we had because he never really liked me in the first place. I’m an exciting guy but physically not that attractive, and so he had decided we could stay friends.

I tried crying but couldn’t. Tears never came quickly to me. A friend suggested I took a shower because showers made him cry when the situation required it. I tried writing but couldn’t. I walked around my grandparents’ back garden trying desperately to muster the energy to scream, to be furious, to kick things, punch holes through the walls. I turned the music to full volume hoping that in that way I wouldn’t be able to hear my thoughts. What did I expect? Why had I trusted this guy who was, ultimately, just like everybody else? I should have known better! I tried reading James Baldwin to calm down, but nothing helped. The heaviness in my chest returned, the shortness of breath, the lightheadedness. And all I wanted to do was tell this guy that he was a douchebag. I felt betrayed, sad, and alone, and most of all, I saw my old fears confirmed. My bullies had been right after all.

I didn’t tell the guy any of that stuff. Resorting to negative feelings, I had come to know, was akin to reaching for the pills. A quick way out that would have closed the door behind me forever. And I didn’t want that. Deep down I hoped he would take his words back and we would get back together. So I kept all that resentment to myself. Then, when we met after the summer something was definitely off. He kept squinting at me as if he couldn’t understand what I was talking about. He was overdoing his gestures, he laughed theatrically and somewhat nervously. He was intent on showing me that we had lost whatever spark there was between us. To this day we still exchange texts every once in a while. A couple of days ago he sent me a picture of the cover of a book which had made him think of me, and that makes me happy.

Yet, my initial reaction was to vilify him. I wanted him to sense my resentment and feel sorry for hurting me. I wanted him to feel sorry for himself. And although I thought of him in this way at that time, now I realize that it was only a deviation from how I honestly feel about him. I still experience that warmth in my chest I felt the first day we met when I think of him. He may feel differently about this whole situation, yet I choose to stay true to my feelings. I will most likely never know how he felt. I only hope we worked things out, in the best way, for both of us. Resentment returns, of course, and often when I see him on dating sites, I get jealous and imagine him going out with all those guys. But that feeling is only a feeling that is not mine to have. He made his choices. I made mine.

And that’s that.

I saw his best friend today, on my way to class, and I was reminded of him. The same friend in front of whom he had kissed me once when we met on the street, back when things were still going well, and I was full of hopes, and I couldn’t look at other guys. And a wave of bitterness washed over me. And I took a walk. I often doubt myself, yet I refuse to believe there’s something wrong with me. I’m sure he had his reasons.

A reading by the author:

I used to play with dolls when I was little. And they were always somebody else’s dolls because boys should not play with dolls. When mother or grandmother caught me in the act playing with them I was told, in a half-scornful, half-playful tone that made me cringe with shame, that my pee-pee would magically detach itself from my body. Imagine the dread of a boy child being told he would have to live with the stump of his dick for the rest of his life. When caught in the act I would make the dolls fight because that was what boys do. They make women fight over them.

To begin with, we didn’t have many toys to play with because my family thought of them as a waste of money. We were encouraged to do something else instead. Play with sticks and pretend they are horses. Play outside, for god’s sake, use your imagination. Take the cow for a walk if you have too much time on your hands. Pick some beans. Do your homework. And whenever we admonished our parents for their heartless refusal to buy cool new toys we were consoled and told that, in a distant past (one I have not, up to this day, managed to salvage from the wreck of my childhood memories), we had plenty of toys. We had been so lucky back then, mother would say, as opposed to other children who had had nothing. Allegedly, we even had this fantastic toy bus that had horses riding the wind on the top of it. Fucking horses on the roof of a toy bus. And I was drawn, as if by a magnet, to that image of the toy bus, and imagined how cool it must have been to have that bus to play with. Literally, we must have been the coolest kids on the block. To this day I do not know what color that toy bus was. I often think it was just a figment of my parents’ imagination. The toy they would have liked us to have but never got to actually buying it.

All of those toys got lost due to my parents’ negligence when we moved to grandparents’ house at the countryside. They were all on the moving truck when a thief decided to kidnap them and keep them for himself. The thief’s only ransom was, I believe, the innocent suffering of my brother and I. We were infuriated back then by the thief’s cunning and cruelty and imagined him to be the very incarnation of evil. Because of him, we had been cursed to make do without those toys. And we did our best. We scavenged for toys in the garbage dump behind our house. We played with discarded lighters from a local bar and marveled at the mechanism that made the fire burst and die out. We broke bear bottles by throwing them against the trees. We lit fires and threw pressurized spray tubes in the flames and watched them explode. One time we gathered around a burning plastic barrel and watched it collapse within itself as the fire melted the gray plastic. Then one of the kids pierced it with a tree branch and as the branch flexed it threw molten plastic on my face, around my mouth, leaving red burn marks. As I flew in terror from the still burning barrel I was more afraid of my mother than of the stinging pain. The marks lingered for a couple of days then disappeared.

We climbed trees and ate crab apples. We looked for my uncle’s porn magazines under his bed. My brother started smoking and did his best to mask the smell. We ran away from home to bathe in a nearby river because everybody was doing it. But mostly, I played with dolls. I loved the blonde hair they had and the chemical symmetry of their bodies, their plastic immobility, the limited number of movements their bodies could perform. They had breasts but no nipples and I was totally fine with that. The space between their legs so devoid of any gender signals as if whoever made them stubbornly refused to give them that, afraid that it might corrupt the minds of innocent children. Their septic bodies refused to cater to any kind of sexually charged gaze. Yet, back then, I believe, we were entirely conscious of that absence. At least I felt there was something missing but was too afraid to say it out loud. I was also aware of the missing nipples. I knew perfectly well that girls had nipples too. But despite that knowledge of the missing nipples and genitalia, we were somewhat content with the surface gender markings. The dolls taught us well that it was all about what was on the outside. Womanhood meant having long blonde hair, breasts that protruded only slightly through the diaphanous dresses they wore. Women wore bright colors, they had lipstick-red lips, they had ponytails, they had tea in the afternoon. It was all about their bearing as it was all a bottom-up approach: you put all these characteristics together and what you get in the end is a woman. The technique worked for men as well.

The dolls were not mine because it would have been a sacrilege to have them around the house. I dreaded my brother’s mockery, I feared my mother’s scornful tone. And so I befriended girls instead of boys. They did not laugh at my body, they did not tell me my head was like a giant pumpkin. They seemed to be okay with it. And they had dolls to play with. My best friend was a girl. She was a distant cousin of ours from the city who only came around to spend the summer with her grandparents, who were our neighbors. We played Sailor Moon together and built tents and made mud pies imagining we were making cheese. We watched Art Attack on a German TV channel and tried to use the tricks we were taught by the show’s presenter. And at times, when we were on the rope swing in the backyard, we realized (at least I did) how common our interests were. Sometimes I think that the people who saw us playing together must have imagined us getting married at one point. At other times, considering her parents’ blatant skepticism when they saw me stopping by to ask her out to play, I think those same people also feared that I wasn’t fit for the husband-job thing. I wasn’t, for, now, obvious reasons.

We did get married. My brother performed the ceremony on a summer evening under a cherry tree. We had picked flowers and we had a white gown made out of curtains, and, for some unclear reason, when the ceremony was over I was so ashamed of myself, as if I had trampled over some sort of sacred ground that was off-limits to us children. I was a boy and she was a girl and in this dichotomy the future is always easily foreseeable. All stories ended in that way, with the happily-ever-after that comes with marriage, and there was nothing we could do about it but play our parts. Yet, as time went on I failed to develop any kind of sexual interest either in her or the girls I played with. While the other guys in my alleged group of friends started talking about the pubic hair of girls (for some sick reason, always better when “parted in the middle”), I stuck to my dolls and books. I simply thought that my time would come at one point, and I would wake up one morning unable to think of anything else except the pubic hair of girls, always best when parted in the middle. (I almost laugh as I write this and it’s the kind of laughter that nestles in my chest whenever I hear bullshit. This is all true.)

To drown my post-marital shame I put the gown-wannabe over my head and pretended I was the bride, fooling around. That was not the only time I pretended to be a woman. When I was alone and had nothing else to do I used to go through my mother’s wardrobe and put on her dresses and high heels. I would look at myself in the mirror, sing and laugh, walk in my mother’s shoes, put my hands on my hips the way women did in movies. I put lipstick on because that was the only thing my mother had in terms of make-up. I put all those elements together and for a moment I was a woman, catering to the male gaze in my own childish ways. I imagined myself on stage until at one point, in high-school, I literally was on a stage, blinded by stage lights, wearing women’s clothes. It was a play, of course, but perhaps, deep in the well of my solitude, there was a moment when the boy who was my husband on stage seemed to me more than the empty shell of memorized lines. (He was very cute, by the way, and he was a dancer.) I can still hear the burst of laughter coming from the audience when I entered the stage wearing this huge dress, all glittery and lace, and volume. My voice sounded so removed and distant when it came out through the speakers. But I knew my part well. Put all those elements together, and you’re a woman.

After the show, the girl who had applied the make-up told me, as innocently as she could, that she had forgotten the make-up remover. I washed my face as best as I could but the eyeliner and the powders she had applied were all waterproof and so I had to ride the bus back home with clear traces on my face. I noticed the stares people were giving me but for some reason I chose to ignore them. I was not going to have my big night ruined by them. I floated, crossed my legs while sitting, and dreamily watched the moving world through the windows of the bus. You’re wearing make-up, a man told me later that night, and the words seemed to freeze on the spot, as if the asymmetry of my appearance (a boy wearing make-up) took too much space in his head and he needed to cease all motor functions. I felt powerful. Not because of the make-up, but rather because I had had the courage to get on stage like that. Or perhaps I’m saying this last bit simply because I was ashamed of it, or because I’m still ashamed of it. Boys don’t play with dolls. Boys don’t wear make-up. And when I look at the photo that was taken backstage before the show (me wearing that huge nineteenth-century dress, standing next to my high-school English teacher) I still feel the uncomfortable giddiness triggered by the laughter in the audience. Perhaps that is how acts of courage feel like. You tell me.

In another show, in a different setting and on a different stage, I wore a wig that fell off in the middle of an important scene (when I was confronting the man who was supposed to strangle me in my sickbed). The make-up was minimal but the role fit like a glove, or rather unlike my wig. I was a damsel in distress and there were only two men in the play, both of them helpless and useless. One of them was my absent husband, who was most likely having extramarital sex (I don’t blame him, I was a chubby high-school kid wearing make-up after all), while the other one was my supposed killer. I shot the latter in the end, with a gun I held hidden in the folds of my bathrobe. Imagine the kind of treatment the husband must have gotten upon his return. [wink]

Then I got married again. Somewhere off stage that is, because the play began only where the happily-ever-after started, the honeymoon. Yet, this time I had to play the loving husband and, well, it didn’t go that well, as you can imagine. In the play I was supposed to be this womanizer whose ex-girlfriends showed up at the cabin in the woods where the honeymoon was supposed to happen. Then a woman in labor showed up (the baby was not mine, go figure) and another man, and then some other people I cannot recall right now and it all ended with a big party (and me ironing shirts while Frank Sinatra’s Love and Marriage was playing in the background). It was a comedy, but even in a comedy I could not play the part of the loving husband. I had no attraction towards my wife and I guess that is why marriages fail to work. I tried putting the elements together but the loving husband failed to materialize. I faked it till the end but the faking was transparent, so much so that after the show, when we were given feedback by the jury one of them told me I looked gay. (He even made the voice and the hand thing that were supposed to be the kind of gestures a gay guy makes.) I felt ashamed of myself. Put a failed loving husband together and what you get is a gay man.

It was not the only time I felt ashamed of myself. Once, during a trip in high-school a guy on the bus told me I acted like a girl. You are so girly, he told me and his companions laughed. I only wished to make myself small and disappear from the face of the earth. On another occasion, and in a period in which I had become enamored with Duncan James (the hunk from the English boyband Blue), a classmate loudly commented in front of the whole class on my habit of staring at pictures of him. You like those boys, don’t you, they’re very good-looking, he scorned me. I went all red in the face and told him to leave me alone. I told him they sang beautifully, because in situations like these that was my only exit. Pretend you love the art behind the beautiful face, pretend you admire the work, never the person. Pretend, pretend, pretend. It’s so easy, do it like I do it and before you know it you’ll be a real man. This is what you do: you scratch your balls, you put your hands in your pockets like this, you place your feet like this, firmly into the ground as if the ground beneath your feet belongs to you.

There’s a tiny recorder in your head, taking all of this in, and the words wrap around you the way a rubber band wraps around your finger until it goes blue.

A boy doesn’t talk like that. A boy doesn’t walk like that. A boy shouldn’t like flowers. A boy doesn’t hold his hands like that. Why can’t you just like girls? Have you at least tried it? As if liking girls is just a matter of how you like them. Tall, short, blondes, brunettes, spicy, sweet, take your pick, just don’t stray outside the chalk lines or the lines in the sand. I felt as if I was in one of those video games where there is only one exit and the other doors are closed; as if somewhere along the game I had not made that one thing which would open the door to the next level. I had not collected all the diamonds and the coins and I was stuck there, thinking of restarting the game. Or just quitting the game and be done with it. Because what happens when you are told that you are off, that your body does not correspond with your bearing, is akin to being told that you do not deserve your body, that you’re wasting it in view of something that only goes on in your mind, and is therefore wrong, crazy, sinful, stubborn, a vice, damaging.

Other men should make you sick. Their smell should be repulsive. The very thought of it. You’re in the army now.

Start recording, you’re told. And you listen. Because you want to belong, to be a part of something, to have friends, to be liked. Until your mind becomes a catalogue of gestures and postures. Keep the tone of your voice in check, lower the pitch, baby, let your manliness sing in the ears of your interlocutors, make the world shudder with sexual anticipation at the sound of your voice. Make women wet with your gait. Push your chest forward, spread your legs when you’re on the bus, and when you become impatient with something show them that you are impatient by shaking your feet. Puff, show your jealousy, show them who you are. And somewhere deep within your guts a part of yourself is slowly starving akin to a worker on hunger strike.

This circus training goes a very long way. You become aware of it even in the circles of people who are supposed to understand this, who are supposed to fight alongside you. A couple of days ago, I was asked, rather nonchalantly, by a guy on a dating app, whether I am manly. He’s manly too, he says, but, don’t get him wrong, he has nothing against effeminate guys, in fact, he has a lot of effeminate gay friends (does that ring a bell?). He can’t stand being seen with effeminate guys because that would be akin to wearing yourself on your sleeve and there’s a world of wrongness behind that. He doesn’t exactly say that but that’s exactly what he’s saying. I don’t really understand him, but maybe I do. Maybe I want to tell him that his preference for manly men (whatever that means) is simply a cover-up for the fact that he is uncomfortable with his own homosexuality. There are only so many ways in which a man can wear his make-up. I don’t tell him this, because he’s cute, because I’ve fucked up for so many times that I don’t want to do it again, because he likes my profile. Because, because, because. Because I’m not usually a magnet for guys as cute as him.

He is not alone in this. There’s a long stream of guys who advertise their manliness either by flexing their biceps or by saying it out loud. Manly guy for manly guys. I’m just a simple guy. I’m just a normal guy looking for other normal guys, which is secret code for straight-acting/straight-looking guys, therefore not gay, because being gay is unruly, it’s the drawing a child makes, the one in which people’s heads are too big. I want to tell them, honey baby, you like dick, and no straight-act you put on is going to change that. But I say nothing because sometimes I’m afraid of dying alone. I make brownies instead.

For once, just let it go.

I am feminine, though at times I take pride with myself when other people tell me that they would have never thought I was gay. I hide well, I want to tell them but I don’t. I might move my hands a certain way, with the elegance one rarely sees in other men. I have feminine traits. My doctor once told me I have feminine hips. And no matter what I do, no matter how much I work out, no matter how much muscle mass I put on, there are certain things I cannot change. I have my mother’s face, which at times resembles that of porcelain dolls. As I write this I feel the urge to tone it down and add “but not that much” every time I say I am feminine. And perhaps that is the problem. Perhaps the problem is with all these adjectives.

These are my hands. I can only move them this way. This is the way I speak. These are my hips. This is my face.

Reader, my life’s the beginning of that song you know you’re not going to like, or listen to again. There’s something wrong with the rhythm, the drums, the voice of the singer.

For months, one of my neighbors has been painstakingly digging in his backyard. I watch him as he does that almost every day while having my morning coffee and smoke on the back balcony. I go out on the balcony for a smoke during the day and he’s still there, digging, sweating away, intent on building something. Sometimes he gets help from an older guy, white hair, skin sagging around his nipples. Sometimes the neighbor is accompanied by a younger guy, maybe in his mid-twenties, with a ponytail and tattoos on his pecs. At times, another younger guy joins them, a trio of sweating tan bodies pulling out the guts of the dirt. Then, after all those months of hard work, a blue pool fills the hole in the ground, the water sending streams of shimmering light against the white walls of the house. There’s music and bathing suits, a shower is installed close to the outer fence, and then the younger guys are working out, pumping iron by the pool. I watch them through the thin curtain of my cigarette smoke and through the holes in the shrubs that surround their backyard, their world so perfect that it’s almost magnetic. I can’t take my eyes off them and imagine myself living inside that world, not pumping iron, but reading by the pool, my own world suddenly embedded into the world I’m reading about. One of them picks up a pink plastic ball and passes it around, then picks up the phone and talks to somebody I can’t hear from where I’m standing. He’s making plans for the following Sunday, for the following week, and there’s a laziness in his voice I want to inhabit, a distractedness to the world outside, a whiteness of tone and movement akin to that of tennis players caught in the concentration of the game. I don’t want him to stop talking and for a moment I wish I were the person at the other end of the line, be a part of that world, the kingdom of normal boys and men. And there have been moments in my life when I felt like I had crossed that border into that other kingdom, like I had been offered passage into a world where I was permitted to contemplate the artifacts displayed there: that manly laziness of boys, the husk in their voices, their smells, their habits, the thin blue veins on their hands, the hair on their legs, the intangible ease with which they moved through the air, the felt presence-absence they left behind wherever they went. Sometimes, when I was lucky enough the breath of these normal boys and men came as close as my ears and neck, their arms made a circle around my body, the sweat of their hands mingled with my very own. But then, when my stay was long overdue and they started to sense my difference I was quietly pushed back into my own kingdom, reminded of who I was, subtly, akin to the way in which the first rays of sun appeared in the morning. And again I would look through a fence or through a window, through shrubs meant to offer privacy, the way I looked at the boys lounging by the pool, and an envious rage would wash over me, one in which I often feel as if my entire life has been a joke because no matter what I do I will still perceive myself as an alien to that world of normal boys.

B is a divorcee – he’s been switching kingdoms often – ten years older than me, and I’ve met him on a gay dating app. Something strange happens on dating apps and sites, a momentary feeling that rarely gets to be reconstructed at a later date, or in real life. It’s like planets are aligned in the very instant that two profiles come together. You like the instant caught within that profile pic, and he likes the instant you’re caught in. And you work with that, and there are so many blank fields that need to be filled in, and you put in everything you’ve got, all of your dreams and expectations, the whole range of future actions you believe are going to make you feel happy. B’s profile does not have a face pic because he’s afraid he might be discovered by his kids, a boy and a girl whose ages I cannot recall at the moment, sixteen or seventeen and twenty-something, in that age group nevertheless, not significantly younger than me. He told me about his kids in one of our statistically long chats, the kids who weren’t supposed to be kids because they had not been planned. One of them, at least, wasn’t planned, because, come on, you can’t possibly have an unwanted kid twice. B was eighteen when he and his then future wife had unprotected sex and, surprise, she got pregnant. Things happened afterwards, they got married as was expected of them, he found a job, they had their second child. Then, at one point while in the army, I can’t rightly place that specific moment on the timeline of his life, B had his first “gay experience” when one of his fellow soldiers masturbated him under the shower and apparently they both liked it. I’m being told all of these things during one of our runs together. The words in which they are told are simple enough, the sentences are short because we are running and one wouldn’t want to waste breath on such seemingly unimportant matters. Yet, it isn’t the first time I’m being told that he’s got kids, he mentioned it before, but I’ve forgotten it, and when I ask him whether he’s ever felt the need to have kids, I’m being told the story again, in detail. What triggered the whole discourse again was the sight of a father giving his toddler a ride on the bicycle. The saccharine emotion oozing from the scene is suddenly too much for me because we’re already past the six kilometers mark and fatigue is settling in like a familiar face appearing in the crowd. So I want to scoff at the father and the toddler, make a joke about the somehow good-looking father brimming with masculinity, and ask B about wanting kids.

I already have kids, he says in between breaths. And then I remember the rest of his story and try to make it my own, find my own little spot inside this story, because I like this guy, so mature and somehow balanced, protective like a father picking up his kids from school. I want to wear his feelings while I’m in his company, I want to taste the sudden revelation that he must have had that time under the shower with the fellow soldier, feel the bulbous burning of that realization at the tip of my stomach, a sensation that resembles the excitement of a dull knife sharpened and finally put to the test. I need this. I want to feel emotions other than my own, or at least an approximation of them, an experience different than the one I undergo while reading books. And there’s a point during our run when everything else starts to fade away and suddenly there’s just the two of us running and he’s asking me to go ahead because he wants to look at my ass while running. The comment is made loud enough but somehow I’m not afraid of others overhearing. He even touches my ass when I tell him that I keep my keys in the small pocket on my lower back. I even make a joke about the “chastity belt” or something like that. I sound stupid and cheesy but all this is so new to me that I just want to do it for the sake of it, I’m not going to let my mind throw obstacles in this one.

We went running on our first date, albeit that doesn’t sound like an ideal date, or a date for that matter. One is supposed to look good on a date, put their best on display, and not wear running pants and sweat like a horse (not to mention the smell of sweat and all that). One Sunday morning he sends me a message on that dating app telling me we should go running together right then and there. He’s going to pick me up. I give him my address and we decide on where to go running. I pick one of the biggest parks in the area and begin doing warm up while waiting for him to show up. Of course, I’m freaking out, but I’m also thinking that running is my element and if he can deal with my sweaty stinky self he can deal with the rest. When I step into the car I somehow feel comfortable. He’s got a beard, he’s older than me, and he’s wearing the kind of running tights that I’m wearing, the ones I almost refused to put on thinking that I might be showing off. I do love my legs sometimes, running somehow makes them desirable. He notices my foreign accent but is unable to identify it, and no more words are spent on that. I’m always reluctant about telling people about my nationality. On dating apps and sites I get a smiley face whenever I tell people about the fact that I’m Romanian. A smiley face and then an awkward silence. And when I ask them whether they’re uncomfortable – Italian people are often uncomfortable in the presence of Romanians, can’t imagine why – they tell me that they’re not, but the awkward silence continues nonetheless and the discussion quiets down to white noise. B apparently doesn’t care about my nationality. Later on he will tell me he thought I might be German or Polish, Eastern European, but never Romanian.

When we finally started running we both seemed to be out of step. I have long legs and as such I take long steps when I’m running, but B is shorter than me and I feel like I’m bouncing too high while he’s too grounded, his legs too short to keep up. Soon, however, I forget about it and we manage to find a middle ground. When we get to talking, while still running, he tells me my nose resembles the beak of a parrot, then he tells me that he’s joking. But I know my nose is like that, so he can’t be joking. Then he starts pointing out spots in between the bushes and the trees where we could stop and hide from the other people in the park. The grass leading to those spots has been stepped on repeatedly and so secret paths took shape. Others had gone there to hide before us. I choose to ignore his pointing and keep running, and I’m starting to resent his invitation to go for a run with him. I can’t focus because of him, I lose my tempo, I lose my breath because he’s talking and I need to reply. The run feels sloppy and uncontrolled as if we’re just little boys playing around in the field. Yet, strangely enough, by the time we get to the car after a ten kilometer run, I feel strangely energetic. I could still run a few kilometers, and he tells me he could do the same. He does this while waving his bulge in front of my face, he’s touching it with a gesture that seems embarrassingly immature, and then his crotch is practically in my face as I bend to do my post-workout stretch. In the car his hand is all over me as he’s telling me we should meet again, do something else maybe. I put my hand over his as he’s squeezing my knee, and then I don’t do it anymore because I’m all sweaty and I’m afraid of soaking the passenger seat and seatbelt. He notices my hesitation and doesn’t put his hand of my knee again. I, on the other hand, notice his untrimmed fingernails, the hands that have too much skin on them, the hairs on them oddly harsh and sparse, the little freckles covering his arms. For a moment I’m disgusted by the whole thing: his hands, the way he waved his bulge at me, his hand on my knee, me still sweating profusely. And then one little question pops up in my mind, a question I’m so familiar with that every time I hear it I feel like running again, running away from everything, running until everything hurts, until there’s nothing but the pain. Why are you doing this to yourself? You know you don’t like it, yes, you know you hate it, but still, you keep doing it. And for a long moment while he’s driving and talking about the drawbacks of meeting people online, about the limitations of that system, I agree with that little voice in my head. I want to go back home, I want to close the doors to my room and never come out. I imagine myself reading long into the night, refusing to eat and sleep. I feel like he’s after me, after something buried deep inside of me, something I’d prefer to keep hidden from others. My integrity, I wonder.

After I take a shower I find one of his texts on my cellphone. He’s telling me about my hesitancy when it came to touching in the car. He noticed that and interpreted it as a sign of me not liking him, but a fierceness comes over me when I read that, that calm fierceness that comes over me during debates at the university. I tell him it’s not true, I like him very much, it’s just that I’m a little bit shy. I was hesitant simply because I thought that he didn’t like me. When I tell him this it feels as if I’m at war with that little voice in my head. I’m not going to let this chance pass me by, this might be my only chance at happiness, backpedaling is not an option, I need to do this. And the voice yields and joins my fierceness to form one firmer voice, one that convinces B that I’m telling the truth, that I am, in fact, shy and unexperienced. We decide to meet again the next day after dinner to have a drink in the city. He promises to take me to one of his favorite places.

The day we’re supposed to meet is also the day in which two of my best friends are leaving for the United States and we all have dinner at the place of a common friend. But while we’re eating I keep thinking about B and I tell my friends that I might have to leave at one point. They tell me about drinks later and one of them suggests I invite B to have drinks with us. I don’t say no but the negation is so obvious to me that it’s almost nauseating to think about it. I imagine B talking to my friends and I imagine the looks on my friends’ faces when they realize B is not the kind of person they imagined me with. B doesn’t read books. When I tell him I sometimes manage to read an entire book in one day he tells me I’m too smart for him. B has no preferences when it comes to music, in fact, he listens to the kind of Italian music most Italians despise because of its excessive sentimentality. B works in a jewelry store and, as fabulous as that may sound, he is actually in charge with the logistics department of the store. B has the fashion sense of an eighteen-year-old who likes high sneakers and t-shirts in washed out colors. He has the haircut of an eighteen-year-old. B complains about having to wear long pants at work during the summer. B is simple. He’s never heard of Heidegger and I’m willing to grant him that because sometimes he looks at me with a pair of eyes that are no longer those of the sneaker-loving eighteen-year-old, and I feel like swimming in the denseness of that look, make him proud of me. Yet, I tell my friends I might join them later on for drinks, half-expecting things might get a little bit too uncomfortable with B and we’ll call it a night early.

There’s excitement, of course, in not telling my friends who B really is. It’s something that I can call my own, that secret of having somebody, a long shadow looming just behind my eyes, the silver lining behind the days my friends know I spend in solitude. A similar excitement washes over me whenever I tell my parents I’m going for a run with B. They don’t know who B is, and whenever I tell them his name without saying anything else it feels as if I’m drawing a line in the sand. This is where your knowledge of him stops, the knowledge of my secret life. My parents don’t ask too many questions but when it comes to referring to B my father hesitates and doesn’t use his name. He’s just a guy, a friend of mine. It feels like I’m wielding a real sword in front of their very eyes but they are convinced it is merely a toy sword. Whatever I do feels like child’s play.

When he picks me up by car there’s shyness in his look as if we’ve just met. He wants to look at me but then he doesn’t. This exchange of looks goes on until we both get settled in the car, until the windows of the car turn familiar and protective. When that happens he reaches out, touches my knee, reaches for my hand and holds it, places my hand on his knee when he needs to switch gears, and sometimes, when he gets bold enough he even places my hand on his crotch and presses it there. He’s taking me to one of his favorite places in the city, he doesn’t say which but by the way it looks I already know where he’s taking me. We go up some steep hills and then we’re in the parking lot of a huge church that reigns supreme over the smoggy atmosphere of the city now as small and as distant as a rug under our feet, a tapestry of streets and lights unwinding under the dark sky. The parking lot is full of people, couple holding hands, admiring the breathtaking view. I know the place, I had been there before, but I act as if it’s all new to me, faking wonder at the panorama. We go around the church and he touches me every once in a while and every time he does that I become suddenly aware of the people around us and feel as if a knotted rope is tightening around my stomach making me rigid and distant. In the dark he stands up on the railing at the edge of the path and kisses me from above.

Then we are in the car again and we’re not taking the same road back, at one point he takes a different turn and there’s no more life around us except the occasional headlights of cars coming from the opposite direction. I want to ask him where we’re going but I don’t say anything because deep down I know he’s looking for a place in the dark where we could sit quietly in the car without being seen. He’s turning on a gravel path somewhere and when the he turns off the engine and the lights we’re surrounded by a totalitarian, darkened silence. The next thing I know is he’s pulling me on his side of the car, his hands sliding over my lower back and into the back of my pants. Then he’s telling me to unbuckle my belt because I’m so beautiful and he needs to feel my ass, and he’s kissing me, and I go limp. He’s asking me to feel his erection and I do. He unbuttons his pants and the sound that his pants make while he’s moving inside them is deafening in the silence, stronger than our rising breaths. He’s pulling me and pushing my head downwards towards his crotch and midway I think that maybe that’s not what he wants me to do, it’s just in my imagination, he doesn’t want me to go down on him. Yet his dick is out and waiting and the push doesn’t slacken and his belly is moving rapidly up and down and that’s exactly what he wants me to do. When I do it a sigh escapes from his mouth, a sigh of recognition, of efforts finally repaid. ‘You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to’, he’s telling me while still holding my head in place. I’m sitting in a very uncomfortable position, my left hand propped against the rough carpet of the car floor, and with every passing car I imagine one of them stopping, imagine a pair of policemen peering inside the car, their luminous flashlights morphing into crude moralizing eyes. I was making a list of possible explanations, mentally practicing my innocent tone of voice. What was I doing with my head in that man’s lap? What were we doing out there in the woods, in the dark? The best answer I could come up with was that we were just friends looking at the stars, you know, less light pollution out there in the woods. No cars stopped but each and every one of them seemed to slow down in the vicinity of the spot where we had decided to look at the night sky. He did not finish or, at least, I did not finish him. At one point he had asked me where I would like him to finish but I just pretended I did not hear or understand the question. He had given me the choice of backing off, so I took it, feigning innocence.

On our way back he asked me whether I still had an account on the dating app that had brought us together and whether I was seeing other guys. I told him I had not cancelled my account, as he had done, and that I was not seeing other guys. Although he denied it when I confronted him on the spot, the seemingly innocent question was meant to signal his desire to cut my ties with the local gay community. He didn’t want me to see other guys and the only way to make sure I was not going to see other guys in the near future was to cancel my account. I did it the moment I got home that night because here was a man who was showing signs of jealousy, which to my mind it felt as if the heaven of relationships was finally opening its gates for me as well. If I couldn’t get into the world of normal boys and men I could, at least, get a ride into the world of normal gay boys and men.

It all felt like an elaborate way of eloping. I told my parents I was going out with some friends and they didn’t ask questions. B would pick me up and drive around to all kinds of places. Once, when he had a free day from work, we even tried having lunch together on the shores of a river we never got to in the end because the parking spot he had envisioned was occupied by a prostitute. So we took a different road through woods and unpaved streets until we found a quiet little place by a water stream clogged with garbage. In the clearing where he had parked his car a discarded armchair reigned supreme, royal almost in the lush greenery. The whole scenery seemed surreal, what with the discarded washing machine and armchair. We ate bananas and buffalo milk mozzarella because that was what we had bought from the supermarket, where, out of a surge of emotion he had leaned into me and the two teenage girls behind us in the line laughed and whispered something to each other. For some strange reason that I never got to find out he didn’t want me to see him eat, supposedly because I would find his way of eating bizarre. I found it even more bizarre to even fathom disliking somebody’s way of eating. And then he started touching me again and telling me to follow him and touch his erection. Though the scenery looked pristine enough, and untouched by human hands except the discarded objects, I felt as if we were being watched and I needed to disconnect from the outside world in order to be with him. Once we got back into the car he pushed his pants down exposing his erection, so much more real this time in daylight, and he was pulling me once again, pushing my head down. Only minutes later there was a sudden jolt in his thighs and he wasn’t pulling me anymore but pushing me away, quickly, his hands no longer on my head but on the gear switch, on the car keys turning the ignition. When I lift my head from his lap I see another car a few feet away from us, just above us on the small hill outlining the path to the clearing. I can’t see whether it’s a man or a woman driving the car because I know I won’t be able to unsee that person’s face so I don’t look long enough to make out any distinctive features. I don’t see the color of the car. From the corner of my eye I see the person’s head moving backwards and turning from us as the car is backing away in order to make space for our car. I look down at the dark carpet, at my hands and feet and laugh nervously. B’s dick is still out while he’s driving. I don’t look back at the other car. I don’t want to remember it though, even now, after all this time, I can still feel its ominous presence at the edge of that clearing in the woods. What was that person thinking when he or she saw us?

It should have been thrilling, right? I believe most of us have heard this story before, you know, people in love (or not) eloping to get a few moments of privacy far from the prying eyes of a world that stubbornly refuses to understand them. Young boys sneaking in through windows at night to kiss that special girl, young daughters rebelling against the suburban feel of a family life they come to despise in time. The things people do for love, for friendship, for the things that other people can’t understand, or can’t accept. Yet, in a heterosexual world, there’s a dismissive finality to that eloping: the mother ultimately understands the daughter’s rebelliousness because maybe at one point in her life she had went through the same; the father, too, thinks back of the silly things that he used to do for the girl he liked; all parties in this story are secretly aware that things can’t possibly go too far off the grid. It will end somehow, and if that end turns to failure that failure is still prescribed within a knightly code. The girl or the boy just didn’t listen and look at how things turned out in the end. Let that be a lesson to you all. I don’t think we, gay people, have been afforded the same kind of dismissive finality. Our kind of eloping doesn’t feel like escaping a rigid set of rules of good breeding but a mode of escaping from the world. Maybe parents in the future will nod knowingly when their gay son’s life turns into a lesson to other gay sons and daughters. What’s our failure, what’s the karma in our case should we fail to listen to our parents and elope from a suffocating code? We can’t get pregnant, so no unwanted children, no shows like Sixteen and Pregnant for us gay guys. In some places we can’t even get married, so no suffocating marriages we cannot get out of, and there’s no peer pressure regarding that. No arranged marriages. Disease? Well, for a very long time, especially throughout the eighties when the AIDS crisis struck the gay community in particular, it was thought that disease was a punishment for a lifestyle that was allegedly unnatural. And then again straight people have STDs as well, so no difference there. Wouldn’t be easier to think that somehow, deep down, unlike straight people, we have liberated ourselves from the repercussions of transgressing? Bear with me here a while longer as I make my case.

A few months back, when I went to conference in Southern Italy, I shared the apartment with a German guy who was there for the same conference. I did not come out to him explicitly but I believe that at one point he got the idea, and throughout our stay there we had the chance to talk about a lot of things. When we got to talking about relationships, specifically, about his relationship with a girl he kept mentioning, I asked him about what was the thing that made him fall in love with that girl. What was the thing that made their relationship work? I cannot recall his exact phrasing of the matter but I distinctly remember him telling me that his “significant other” made him feel “replenished”. ‘That’s so heteronormative’, I replied. Of course, he asked me to elaborate. It was his description of the relationship with his significant other that bothered me most, mostly because it was so totalizing, it engulfed like a hungry whale what must have been, undoubtedly, a whole set of complexities that stood at the basis of that replenishment. More specifically, how do you quantify that replenishment? How do I know it when I feel replenished? And most people, when they don’t know how to answer such questions, simply say “you’ll know it when it happens”. Or not. You can’t possibly find something when you don’t know the features that make it that something. You can search aimlessly, and eventually find something, but that doesn’t mean it’s the thing that you were looking for in the first place. And most descriptions of straight relationships that I’ve heard are made in this way, so grandiose that they can only make me green with envy. Because look at me, unable to find that thing that would replenish me. How am I supposed to find that replenishment as a single gay guy? Does it mean I am defective? Incomplete?

Yes, that’s exactly what it means. But not because I’m single, or because any future relationship will fail to be replenishing by any kind of standards, gay or otherwise. It’s because we’ll constantly feel the need to run, to switch gears, because every person out there will bear, at the top of their skulls, the eyes of prison guardians. Because we’ll constantly feel that we’re not eloping from a set of rules that are meant to be broken anyway because everyone has already broken them once, but rather from the world itself. I’ll never be able to describe my relationship in such grandiose terms. “We’re pushed by the world to dark spaces,” says the narrator of Jonathan Corcoran’s short story Through the Still Hours, “filthy bathrooms, and secret lookouts. We feel dirty always, but then at a certain point, when we become familiar with these dark terrains, we begin to like the feeling. We claim the dark spaces and the secret corridors as our own. These acts become at first an outlet, and then an addiction: an instant erection upon pulling into a highway rest stop.” (54-55) We’re not able to comfort each other in public not because we don’t feel anything for each other but rather because we care too much about your feelings. At most, we’ll get a nervous chuckle from you when we tell you we feel differently, that we’ve always felt different, and that what we’re going through is not just a phase. Yes, I haven’t met the right girl for me because I’ve never imagined my “significant other” being a girl. And I don’t think that’s a failure of my imagination. You see, this might be our punishment, our scarlet letter sewn not to clothes easily discarded – god knows we gay gays can’t show up in a place wearing the same thing twice – but directly to our skin. To look through the fence at something that has been denied to us. Straight relationships are like advertising, they create needs where there were no needs beforehand, offer solutions to problems that were not there before. There’s a scientific arrogance in them.

So, when you walk into one of those “dark places”, be careful, two gay guys might be hiding from the world in there, kissing, holding hands, sucking each other off.