It was about an hour before the eclipse, and it was silent in the entire building. All of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center shut down so the engineers and scientists could bring their families onto the base and watch the darkening sun of the solar eclipse. No one was even around my office to require I even pretend to be busy, so I was reading “Giovanni’s Room,” by James Baldwin, with my feet set upon my desk reclining in my uncomfortable desk chair.

It felt good to be there, doing that job / doing nothing at that job, that day of all days. I’ve never been more relevant to the people I know: having full reports on the eclipse’s schedule, the list of the best viewing locations in DC and an unlimited supply of eclipse glasses to distribute.

As I was reading, I came across this passage that reverberated in my bones. I’m shaking still thinking about it, and I felt it again in something you just said.

“…And would I then, like all the others find myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places? With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.”

That story is my story.

That story where the light is always the darkness. That story where simply living a life, allowing those joys, is the wrong thing by definition. We loved and fucked when surely it can only kill us with an emaciating disease, the brutality of a stranger. The only thing that will slice biological family relationships swiftly, cleanly, cauterized, is committing to this story. Everything good has such high cost, but we paid it and are paying for it and will always be paying for it.

Despite that! We still show up, fight, love, hold each other so close at arm’s length. We know it won’t work, but we do it anyway. But then, fuck, it worked!

We won.

We won, but winning compromised EVERYTHING. And, now, we have to figure out where we begin again, figure out where our next destination is, how to tackle the root after our winning showed us those things which were really the symptoms of the bigger problem.

I’m a child of that story, but now I’m an adult in the room.
Their story is my story, but I’m living the next chapter.

This is a jumbled mess of a thought, but it lingers in my head. I’d been reading this experience all summer, because I lived the most traumatic experience of my life that summer. The two give each other context, and, all of it, the greater story and my story, sloshed around together as if I were trying to hold it in a cup while climbing a rocky cliff. I was really, though, just walking in the grass toward the gimmicky Eclipse festival NASA constructed in a large field on the government base.

There was a mood to the eclipse, out here at least, that it seemed to be happening for a reason. It seemed that it couldn’t have been a better time for the sun to disappear, nowhere in the entirety of history was more appropriate than today. I was worried that it might never come back actually.

But it did.
It did because of a million things happened that I’ll never know about, and I felt so proud to be there at NASA during the astral event of a lifetime with astrophysicists and astronomers trying to find out why. I was able to see these women and men today, really see them. The eclipse made them relevant to me, to their own families, in a way that is literally impossible any other way.

Those men’s story, the ones you wrote me about, makes me relevant in a way I’ve never been before. Knowing their story is my only hope to survive today’s darkness while still keeping something intact. Learning their story makes me the guy at NASA during a solar eclipse. It gives me confidence, direction, roots, something to offer this moment that is sorely needed. There will only be meaning in the fight we’re fighting now if we give meaning to the battles we fought before.

There is no road map for me to follow, but this very one. Those men, women, queers, fags, dykes, chosen families have meaning, because I give them meaning. They give me meaning.

I’m sorry I brought you back to that moment by giving you Schulman’s book when you weren’t ready for it. I’m at a similar moment, too — unprepared, overwhelmed, scared — and I felt the ground shake when I read her novel.

She gave me a seat with my name on it. There was a seat for me at that table, and I just wanted to know.

Do you know?
Do you know the whole story?

You once looked me in the face and said, smiling “There you are.”

I still think back to that moment and think to myself, “Huh, here I am.”