Boy Underground

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

We all have to go from not knowing to knowing.

“You saved my life.” “Oh,” he said. “That’s a pretty nice way to look at it. See, I was thinking I almost got you killed.”

“It’s weird how you can only do life while you’re doing it.”

“Well. Life is really hard,” he said. He still had not opened his eyes. “I won’t argue with that.” “But we do it every day. We don’t even think about it. We just do it. But then if you get out of life for too long . . . if you get sick, or you have to go into hiding like I did . . . then you think about doing life every day, and it just seems impossible. It’s just too scary. It’s like you look at a simple thing like going to school, and you think, ‘How did I ever do that?’ Life is so hard that you can’t stop practicing for a minute or you’ll forget how you used to do something so hard. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Well, he can have the faggots,” my father said. My father. Not stupid, immature eighteen-year-old Terrence. My own father said that to me.

It struck me as a childlike way to look at the world. Twisting it around in your mind until it reached a shape you could live with, so as not to have to examine too many of your own beliefs too deeply.

let’s just say it’s very common to want to know how everything will be resolved. We have all these situations in our lives that have not yet wrapped up, and we want to know how they will end. It can drive us crazy, wanting to know. But life will always be incomplete. Our situations with people and things will always be in progress. By the time you find out where your friend lives now, there will be other situations in your life to trouble you, and you will be dying to know how they will resolve. But then you will always be dying to know something. And dying is not much of a way to live.”

Practice accepting that things are incomplete. Practice accepting that the answer at the moment is that you don’t know.”