Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World (Aristotle and Dante, #2)

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

“I’m already home. I’m with you.”

“But isn’t it wrong to be gay? Everybody seems to think so.” “Not everybody. That’s a cheap and mean morality. Your aunt Ophelia took the words I don’t belong and wrote them on her heart. It took her a long time to take those words and throw them out of her body. She threw out those words one letter at a time. She wanted to know why. She wanted to change—but she couldn’t.

“That’s it, then,” she said. “You and Dante are going to map out a new world.” “And we’re going to get a lot of things wrong and we’re going to have to keep it all a secret, aren’t we?” “I’m sorry that the world is what it is. But you’ll learn how to survive—and you’ll have to create a space where you’re safe and learn to trust the right people.

“We’ll never be Mexican enough. We’ll never be American enough. And we’ll never be straight enough.” “Yup,” I said, “and you can bet your ass that, somewhere down the road, we won’t be gay enough.”

I wondered what that was like, to be able to kiss someone you liked any time you wanted. In front of everybody. I would never know what that would be like. Not ever.

I want to say the universe brought us together. And maybe it did. Maybe I just wanted to believe that. I didn’t know much about the universe or God. But I did know this: It was as if I’d known him all my life. Dante said he’d been waiting for me.

The problem is this: I think about you all the time, about how it might feel to watch you stand in front of me and you would take your clothes off and say: This is me. And I would take my clothes off and say: This is me. And we would touch. And it would feel like I’d never touched anybody or anything, like I’d never really known what touch was until I felt your hands on my skin. I keep picturing my finger running over your lips over and over again. I try not to think about these things. I don’t want to think about them. But the thoughts are so incredibly beautiful to me. And I’m asking myself why the entire world believes that these thoughts—my thoughts—are so ugly. I know you don’t have the answers to my questions. But I think you ask those questions too. I

We didn’t talk. This was the quietest moment I had ever been in. Even my busy brain—it was quiet. So quiet that I felt that I was in a church. And the thought entered my head that my love for Dante was holy, not because I was holy but because what I felt for him was pure.

We walked out of the restaurant toward the gallery. “You know something, Ari? It’s hard for me to walk beside you and keep from wanting to hold your hand.” “Pretend you’re holding it in your head.” “It’s not fair. Look,” he said, pointing his chin at a boy and a girl who were walking ahead of us holding hands. We watched them as they stopped and kissed, smiled at each other, then continued walking, hand in hand. “It’s not fucking fair.” I didn’t know what to say. He was right—and so what? Most of the rest of the world didn’t see things the way we did. The world would look at that boy and that girl and smile and think, How sweet. If the world saw me and Dante doing the same thing, the world would grimace and think, Disgusting.

The world is not a safe place for us. There are cartographers who came and made a map of the world as they saw it. They did not leave a place for us to write our names on that map. But here we are, we’re in it, this world that does not want us, a world that will never love us, a world that would choose to destroy us rather than make a space for us even though there is more than enough room. There is no room for us because it has already been decided that exile is our only choice. I have been reading the definition for that word and I don’t want that word to live inside me.

If we’re lucky. If we’re very lucky, the universe will send us the people we need to survive.

If Dante were a girl and I were not gay, I would be imagining a future for us. But there was no imagining a future. Because the world we lived in censored our imaginations and limited what was possible and what wasn’t possible. There was no future for Ari and Dante.