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

Reality isn’t dramatic but the mind is; the Church accommodates itself accordingly to mental physiology rather than to the anatomy of the real.

Despite my fears and my aching loneliness, I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood for New York or Paris or love.

(It’s the particular curse of the adolescence that it’s events are never adequate to the feelings they inspire, that no unadorned retelling of those events can suggest the feelings).

The medical smell, that Lysol smell of homosexuality, was staining the air again as the rubber-wheeled metal cart of drugs and disinfectants rolled silently by. I longed to open the window, to go away for an hour and come back to a room free of that odor, the smell of shame.

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.

This corridor was a sort of catch basin for the domesticity trickling down around me. The smells. The irritations. The complicated lives of absolutely everyone.

But what made me frantic was the fear that no one was behind the door. [...] nothing, an unlit room devoid of everything but a ticking clock and a refrigerator that groans and goes dead, groans and goes dead.

I didn’t knock very loudly because I didn’t want to break his concentration or rhythm; the only question was, had I calibrated my knock so as to indicate my presence but not to annoy him?