You Should Be So Lucky

by Cat Sebastian

Eddie can look at the words printed on the page and at Mark’s perfect penmanship and know that he isn’t alone.

There’s something so comforting in the ability to be wordlessly petty with someone, in knowing that as soon as you have a closed door between the two of you and the rest of the world, you can share all your least attractive thoughts.

He’s a mess, but you get to be as old as me and you realize damn near everyone goes through a time when they’re a mess. Problem is that most people who haven’t had it happen to them yet think it’s virtue and clean living keeping them out of the gutter.”

the urgency—the sense that his own failure was chasing him—only let up when he started sharing a bed and a breakfast table with a man whose implicit faith in Mark’s worth was unshakable, bedrock-solid.

I know some things are just bad. I’m not saying things happen for a reason—I hate that. I’m saying that things happen. And it doesn’t have to mean anything except what it means to you. Nobody else gets to decide.”

When the world has decided that people are supposed to be a certain way, but you’re living proof to the contrary, then hiding your differences is just helping everybody else erase who you are.

Eddie isn’t sure it’s possible to explain unconditional parental love to someone who may never have received it,