Sublime

possessions stood between me and death. They didn’t protect me from death, but they created a barrier in my understanding, like many layers of bubble wrap,

At least three different smells of cologne and skin-cream struggle for primacy in here.

My parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway. My mother answered the first knock at the door of the new house, expecting a casserole. We’d painted the house Evening Fog, she told me, but the woman from across the street wanted to know why we’d painted it purple like Italians. Some people wore their difference honestly, but my

hale

What matters is that all of it, even if I didn’t know it then, brought me here, to this page, to tell you everything you’ll never know.

White boys thought the world of themselves, thought the world was themselves, and that anything otherwise was out of place, needed to be noticed or ignored.

But it wasn’t political theater for Clay’s parents—they saw a politician’s stance on gay rights as critical to the literal physical well-being of their son, who lived all alone across the country. And the people like Lennie, like Thom, who were supposed to be looking out for him—they were using him instead.

Of course Wes was a sandwich thrower. He probably opened beer bottles with his keys, took stairs two at a time, slid down banisters. Despite his smallish stature and elegant collarbone, he seemed manly to me in this particular way: that understanding of physical objects in space, and of himself in relationship to those objects.