It’s always an interesting thing revisiting a book that was personally significant once. “Giovanni’s Room” was the first queer book I had ever read after coming out, and I remember taking it as a cautionary tale. I encountered David’s character with a smug satisfaction knowing that I wasn’t him, and I felt assured that there was a myriad of paths that I could follow that let me avoid joining him on the one he was on. This time reading it, though, way stronger than I could than 10 years ago, I identified more with his persistent and cloying desperation and his avoidance of something that threatened to violently surface from the depths at any moment.

I did get to revisit this one important passage, though, before I had hand it off to you. Guillaume tells David that nobody can stay in the Eden and that he doesn’t know why. David is left to interrogate his own departure from the garden: does he recall it as he had it when he lived there, or is it as obscure to him as a fever dream from years ago? The age-old battle between remembering and forgetting.

“Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”

There was a time that that was such a pressing question for me, and I read this line more often than I did a daily horoscope.

I think now I’m settled into my understanding that I’ve never been to the garden. I couldn’t have forgotten it, because I’ve never known it. My consolation, though, has been to set up a life right outside of the gate. I have always appreciated the ornate lattice work on the border between it and me, running my hand over it as I walked along its wall, but the truth is I’ve never been inside. Instead, I rented an apartment a couple blocks away from it and started building something there. The apartment didn’t have a laundry machine in the building or a garbage disposal, but I convinced myself that the ice cube maker in the freezer made it good enough.

It’s a tired metaphor, I guess, but still a testament to my belief in transcendence, despite the fact I don’t know what it will look like and the search for something I’ve never seen is quite difficult. I walk a narrow line between faith and naïveté, and, honestly, stumble onto the side of the latter again and again before regaining my footing.

But I (am trying to) believe we all will find it one day.

I think we’ll all stumble our way through the door one day, whatever that would look like. I believe it today, will probably believe it tomorrow, and my money is on the fact that it will hold strong through next week.

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This essay adapted from correspondence to my best friend.