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I was just a kid with the dreamer’s disease who spent too much time on his phone and read too many books and maybe even wanted a hot boyfriend to go to the farmer’s market with on Saturday mornings sometimes.
ella ☆ any pronouns liked this
Hot guys always took longer to respond than regular people.
(By the way, could we all agree to high-five whoever had invented gym shorts? They were like push-up
bras for dudes.)
What must it be like, I wondered, to look out at the world through galaxies every day instead of eyes?
The casual kind of cruelty hurt the worst, as it usually rolled off the lips of the ones we loved most. Sometimes we let our loved ones pick and pick and pick at us until suddenly there was nothing left to
save.
What are these hallowed treasures of American history you’re always referring to? Slavery? Homophobia? The KKK?
Book lovers were also fools, in a way. Everyone knew they could never find love, because all they did was compare real life to life within the page. And spoiler alert: the page always won.
These teen books were full of twee hipster characters with fantastically improbable and adorkable character traits – they all have the same birthday! they have a rare disorder that makes them allergic to love! they’re obsessed with death and attempt suicide every single day only to adorably evade death at the last minute! –
Straight romances were allowed to be deep and thoughtful and at least halfway poetic; most gay novels seemed to look like sex-fests with a few weightlifting sessions on the side.
Longing slid into his eyes and took hold of him, and I could see it so clearly: he wanted me. So much was compressed into that look, a lightning bug in a beer bottle, and for just a second, his face was on fire.
“Sometimes I explode for you,” I whispered on the grass before I could stop myself, lost in his galaxy eyes, but he didn’t say anything.
“Everyone looks at people who like both sexes as being dirty, soiled, damaged goods…one girl on Twitter said she would never date a bisexual because he would get AIDS and die.
“But I-” “Shut up,” he grunted, and then he sort of pushed me up against the wall, and I gave in to him.
“Are you my boyfriend?” I whispered, my voice like a little child’s. He was half-asleep, too, and I felt him kiss the back of my hand one last time. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “But I do know you’re the only person I wanna be alive with.”
“What else is beautiful? God, so much – right now, at least. I think it’s beautiful that we’re alive on this blue planet. I think it’s beautiful that airplanes are taking off and landing all over that planet right now, so many of them, and that children are looking out of the windows of those planes and falling in love with their lives. I think it’s beautiful that my grandpa nursed my grandma through Alzheimer’s and held her hand while she was a vegetable and told her how lucky he was to have had her. But mostly I just think you’re beautiful.” A tear fell out of my eye, and I hated it. “I like
...more
Pain will never be your friend. But with luck and time, you can learn to make it your acquaintance.”
No. I’ve loved both sexes, and been attracted to both sexes, and nobody can take that away from me with their small minds and their grabby little stupid hands.”
“None of this is even to mention the shit I’ve dealt with from being Hispanic in the Deep South – but that’s a whole different story.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Then he stood up. So did I. He smiled. He was glowing, shimmering, incandescent. And he was mine. This boy was mine.
“So what, Coley? That means nothing. I’m always gonna love you. On Christmas, on Valentine’s Day, on every day and every holiday. You know that. Nothing will ever change that.”
PS – here’s the thing I was never able to say in person, for a million reasons and one: I love you, Coley. Someday I hope we can both be free.
“There’s nothing wrong with chandeliers,”
Go redo your life. Redecorate your whole ecosystem. Create a world inside your head that is exactly as colorful as you want it to be, and then make it real. Now. While you still can.
