Idlewild

by James Frankie Thomas

She was a fast walker, faster than me, so I was struggling to keep up with her and trying really hard not to let it show because I wanted to come off as the good kind of fat person, not the kind of fat person who gets winded walking down the street.

One day I came home crying like a little bitch because I’d caught Fay looking at me with a facial expression that I interpreted as pure contempt for me and also I was on my period and my entire body felt like one giant sob. “She hates me,” I wailed. “Why does she hate me?” My mom, who is herself a therapist, which was why I’d been in therapy since second grade, said, “You should bring this up in therapy.”

As I tell students, one can mask a lot of weakness—in a thesis statement, in the transitions between paragraphs, in the conclusion or lack thereof—with the illusion of forward momentum. I never stop or slow down to drink in the sight I wish to see. I allow myself to glimpse it only in my peripheral vision.

“Yeah, I’m a criminal mastermind,” I said, and it was a funny joke because it was already so clear that my role in our friendship was to be the dumb one. Even when I came up with something smart, it was only in the service of my dumbass golden retriever love for Fay.

The air is so pure, the sky so blue, it makes us gasp. The sparkle of the sunshine feels almost violent. All beautiful days hold a certain horror now. We walk west down Fifteenth Street, wishing for a storm.

Maybe, I thought, this was just how it felt to have a cool gay friend group. Maybe it was always this exhausting and destabilizing. Maybe, in that sense, it was like being in love.

Appeasement, in general, has always been my policy. This might be my least favorite thing about myself.

I was suddenly overwhelmed by how big other people’s lives were, and how little I knew about them at any given moment.

I regret who I was back then. At the same time, I don’t know if I’ll ever be happy in the same way again. And I don’t know what to do with that.