Status Updates From A Boy's Own Story (The Edmu...

Nothing I did or said among the other boys came to me naturally. As a result, in every encounter, even the most glancing, I had to be a performer, for at all times I was aware I was impersonating a human being.

I didn’t want him to like men, just me, not even as a man but me as a discarnate ardor, pure willingness in his naïve, manly, exquisitely untested arms.

I’d decided to take the very futility I so often felt, the vacant hum, the sense of subsisting outside whatever was vibrant and to equate precisely this secular emptiness with the sacred void, to make of my shame a jewel, to call my poverty wealth.

It seemed to me then that beauty is the highest good, the one thing we all want to be or have or, failing that, destroy and that all the world’s virtues are nothing but the world’s spleen and deceit.

For I could thrive in the expressive, inhuman realm of nature or the expressive, human realm of books—both worlds so exalted, so guileless—but I felt imperiled by the hidden designs other people were drawing around me.

I carried the plots and atmosphere of fiction about with me and tried to cram random events into those ready molds. But no, truthfully, the relationship was more reciprocal, less rigorous—life sang art’s songs, but art also took the noise life gave and picked it out as a tune (the cocktail pianist obliging the humming drunk)