It was a computer at which, in years past, I had exchanged e-mails with middle-aged men about sex and sexuality. Some of them had been good to me, offering advice and the vaguely comforting sense that they'd "been there." Most of them were unhappy, unattractive in that they were still sitting in the darkness of their own living rooms. Hiding.
It was also a computer at which I had constructed fake internet personalities that suggested the kind of boys I wished I had been. Boys braver, more boyish, more likable than I thought myself. You are what you are not. The boys who I pretended to be were those whose energy was directed outwards rather than inwards. Boys who explored what lay under the stones they found in the woods rather than what lay beneath those less-tangible things they found within themselves. They laughed often; swung their arms when they were excited; grinned broad grins; spoke countless words to crowds of attentive people rather than writing to an audience that consisted only of the self.
"My eyes look back, they self-examine," I wrote at seventeen in my journal. "They look for solid answers. My mind wanders back to... the fact that I'm always alone..."
I was lonely and alone among friends, writing to a girl who lived in California simply because she existed in the realm of elsewhere, in a world other than my own. She was less of a threat to the reality I wanted to preserve, where I could be silently gay forever: "If I could go my whole life without telling anyone what I'm about to tell you, I would"-- a sad statement not only because I desired such a fabricated existence, but also because my internal ache was becoming so unbearable that my speaking out, my coming out, was perceived as inevitable in spite of such a desire.
"I think I trust you more than anyone," I write to Megan. It's a lie. She was the intended recipient of this letter, the later recipient of another letter saying a more concise and less honest version of this one, but the only reason that I was sending it to her was because I knew she didn't exist in my day-to-day world. I could live with her never speaking to me again: "I'm not ready to lose a friend over it." I just needed to prove to myself that I could do it. I was in the bottom of a well looking up at daylight, realizing where I was and where I could be. This letter unsent signifies the beginning of my ascent.
In one of the paragraphs most unusual for to me read now, I mention my friend Jacob, who I've known longer than I've known any of my friends, and how I might not blame him if he found out and never spoke to me again. Six months or so after this, I will have come out to him. He will be driving his car and I will be riding shotgun, waiting until this moment exactly because that way I do not have to look him in the eye. My hands tremble and fumble in the dusty heat exhaled from the vents of his station wagon. In the year that follows before we leave for college, we will continue to have these conversations, confessing things we had imagined we would never speak, assigning words to ideas thought inarticulate. We are infatuated with our own reluctant audacity. We drive through the darkness of the night, through the sleeping suburbs we've grown up in, then in-between the tall buildings of a city we're only beginning to know and then we ascend the mountains. We reach the peak and for a moment we can see through the dead winter trees the persistent quivering light of Harrisburg. Here we are not still going up, not yet coming down; we are all potential energy, like a book on the edge of a desk. We are glowing. And then we are not--we are descending, weaving through the trees which are no longer trees but shadows pierced by headlights. We are breathless, returning.
