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There’s nothing wrong with inventing a story to explain something real to yourself.

Men were created in order to destroy everything, and women were created so there would be one thing they couldn’t destroy.

How does someone know if they love someone? Edie asked.
God speaks clearly, despite not existing. So if God is love, then you are God, but God doesn’t exist—
There is nothing to learn from dying dogs.
But why are you speaking to me?
Men were created in order to destroy everything, and women were created so there would be one thing they couldn’t destroy.

Is love human? Edie had asked the dog.
No.
Can humans love? she asked, rewording the question as if shaking the eight ball once more.
Not really. Humans have needs and when their needs are met, sometimes they call it love.
But what is love?
Me.
A dog is love?
Not all dogs. Just me in particular.

Edie can’t stop herself now from the desire to try to tell Marie everything she knows about faith, faith in a soul, or faith in an overall meaning of things, or faith in friendships, faith in false continuities—and didn’t it seem certain that all these faiths were meant to be lost, torn apart, rebuilt—lost and found, lost and found,

..with time, with all of history and everything that every living being had ever seen, an experience that was surprisingly quiet and led her to take long walks through the city, usually alone..

.. but the night Edie arrived in Athens she felt an immediate reassertion of the Paraclete in her mind, a wild and almost constant whisper, and for all four months that fall and winter she felt she was in constant conversation with God..

I think it’s a matter of faith, Marie says, as Edie stares at her, expressionless. A relationship is an act of faith—it’s a kind of magic or experiment, isn’t it? This is almost a real question.
…
But it can be broken, like any faith, and it can’t be restored.

Maybe there’s some kind of heat in my head, she thinks, some kind of heat in my life that’s distorting things. A waking dream. A dreamy fear. It’s a theory.

..she’d chosen this bleak and liminal neighborhood over the other bleak and liminal neighborhoods she could afford. Proximity to something so irrevocably stuck in the past.

Sometimes, they surprised each other, but mostly they did not.
It was something the son could count on—this intimacy they shared. And how, once they'd both come, the two of them exhaled, limbs snaked across each other, wet and blushing and exhausted and alive.

The sex had turned familiar, too. They weren't each other's best fucks, nor were they their most timid. But they'd learned each other's bodies-knowing when to accelerate, and when to escalate, and how to make the other succumb. When Taku fucked the son, he did so vigorously, sweating on top of him. When the son fucked Taku, his pace was more deliberate, and smoother.

All she'd had were those three photos. In her mind, the
son had lived in them for the last seven years.
And it'd been easy, in a way, to let things go: the son was half a world away. All the way over there. It was hard to think about the rain in Japan when she was dealing with the humidity in Houston.

When he'd moved abroad, she'd asked for photos of his home. The son had texted her three in a hurry, but without an address.
The mother had no idea what his life looked like. Who his friends were. If he had friends. The outline of his daily orbit.

One night during my early New York days, Eileen, Dennis Cooper, and Roberto Bedoya did a poetry reading at a bar in Brooklyn. I had a copy of Not Me, Eileen’s new book of poetry. I knew Dennis from a reading he did in San Francisco. He was the first writer I’d ever heard who wrote about things I could relate to: Boyfriends. Getting high and feeling stupid. New Wave music.

Why was I going to Los Angeles, of all places?

I’d always wanted to move to New York, but Los Angeles was okay. I didn’t hate it the way most people do in Northern California. It was a way out. I decided almost overnight that I would go down there.

Except it was never one token. It was usually three to five dollars’ worth of tokens. I didn’t want to miss anything in any of those fourteen movies. I wouldn’t jerk off in the booths, though. I just spaced out with my thumb pushing the channel button until finally I had absorbed so many penetration and come shots, both straight and gay, that I couldn’t soak up anymore. Then I would leave.

It was 1986 in San Francisco and to me sex equaled death. My sex life consisted of getting really high on speed and then going to the peep shows at the corner of Geary and Polk, sitting in a little video booth and pushing the channel selector button over and over to see fourteen different porno movies for the price of one twenty-five cent token.

I fell in love if sex was still good the third time. Doug fell in love if it was still romantic the third time. To him sex was secondary.

.. only this time kind of lovingly.

When we were going through his things James and I felt Felipe leave us, like something went out of both of us, out the top of our heads. We looked at each other and knew. It seemed like Felipe’s spirit had come into the room to check on us for one last sweeping good-bye. We got a call from Felipe’s dad about 11:00 p.m. James talked to him. He said Felipe had died.

After all, hadn’t Felipe told me that his grandmother thought I brought a demon into their house when we went to Mexico and his cousin got drunk with me? Then I thought about it more and figured she was probably in shock.

I gave Felipe’s mother a hug when I left Felipe’s room. She gave me a half-hearted hug back. At first when she hugged me like that, or didn’t really hug me, I felt like she must be thinking it was my fault that Felipe caught AIDS. I was the bad influence.

He’d point out that I was doing something with my life. I was working on a video, and I was always running home to write in “that damn journal” of mine. Although he could never figure out what was so important that I had to go write it down, he said that was something I did that made me unique. I was the only person he knew who kept a journal.

I didn’t like most of the attorneys because they were arrogant and had a lot of attitude, but I loved my immediate co-workers. They were an interesting cast of characters: artists, students, ex-hippies trying to make a go of it, and single mothers. Mostly women and gay men.

Pyramid Building, 1:00 to 7:00 p.m. This was the era of Reaganomics. A lot of money was being made by law firms and they were spreading it around. I was considered a full-time employee even though I only worked a six-hour shift, including full-time benefits like health insurance, 401(k) plan, and three weeks’ vacation.

We agreed that San Francisco was starting to feel like a small town. Plus, everyone admitted that we were really bored with the Gay Scene. Tired of discos. The bars weren’t as much fun as they used to be. There was nothing to do in San Francisco. Nothing but get high.

I lay there following the cracks in the ceiling with my eyes. I liked to squint to see if I could see any cartoon faces made by the cracks. Sometimes I could. That day my eyes were too watery. Everything blurred. I could tell it was going to be a long day.

Like that’s really going to happen. I think being gay means being alone. I mean, you might find someone to satisfy you sexually for a while, but it’s rare that you find someone that will satisfy you emotionally too.”