My father was a petty tyrant, prone to angry outbursts and periodic fits of violence against animals and inanimate objects. By the time of my first memories, my mother was terribly disappointed with what her life had become. My parents hated each other, in the sort of frigid resentment that fuels so much of academia. When they were in the same room together, there was a sudden drop in pressure, a vacuum pull of emotion leaving no air to breathe.

My father never hit me (it was my mother who did) but I lived in the fear that I would unintentionally raise his ire, and therefore resolved to keep myself hidden.

My father once told me “You’re just like me: you’re only happy when you’re miserable.”

It was one of the worst, most infuriating things he ever said to me- all the more so because it was true.

I was five years old when I pushed Sami off of the swing set, shattering both of his legs. He was a year younger and I didn’t want him to play with us. His sister watched me do it. When our parents came running, I denied what I had done. When the ambulance came to take him away, I denied what I had done. When we went to go visit him in the hospital, I denied what I had done. I had seen an awful violence inside of myself and could not acknowledge it.

I stayed with Nathan’s family when my mom was working. All of his brothers and sisters were much older. His mother was beautiful, kind to us, singing Linda Rondstat in the kitchen. I must have been six, because I was in kindergarten. Nathan was in my class. One day, we showed each other our dicks behind a stand of trees in the field behind his house. His teenage brother, Robert, saw us. Laughing, he pulled out his own dick, and pissed in Nathan’s face, and Nathan stood, frozen, unmoving. I knew it was my fault, but didn’t know why. The way Nathan flinched around his father and brothers.

I was standing in the shade of a big oak tree on the field outside of my elementary school when Chris ran up to me and bit my arm. Hard. He stepped back, waiting, his eyes forming a question as I stared at him with the blood running down my arm. Then someone screamed, and the teachers came running. Later, after the nurse had bandaged my arm, she went to speak to the principal, leavening me alone in the little cubicle that smelled of mercurochrome. I peeled off the bandage and looked at the puncture marks. I brought my arm up to my mouth and sank my teeth into the wounds, imagining reasons why. The blood, metallic like a penny on the tongue. The nurse screamed when she came back in, my vampire mouth full of blood.

I when I was young and I thought such things mattered, I would wish on my birthday candles every year that my parents would get divorced. I thought that if I willed it hard enough, it just might happen and we would all be able to breathe.

I remember first coming to the realization of my sexuality when I was eleven. I remember clearly thinking about how long it would be until I could get away from my family- seven years; six if I was lucky- half a lifetime to me. Planning how to get through it, to keep myself hidden until I could get away. But I wasn’t sure what escape would look like. In the mid-nineties, there were no positive narratives about gay men- they were tragic and sick, condemned by the unnaturalness of their loves, or else neutered and flamboyant and trivial. I didn’t see myself in either state.

I started drinking frequently when I was thirteen; I’ve told you the outlines of that story. I began seriously considering the logistics of suicide when I was fifteen. My first very serious attempt was when I was seventeen; I had underestimated the strength of the natural inclination to vomit, even when unconscious, yet somehow missed out on the opportunity of aspiration. There continued to be more, including another that should have succeeded, had I not torn the smallest of holes in the bag duct-taped over my head when I fell out of bed, turning in a tranquilizer stupor to try and locate the sound roaring in my ears.

I don’t think about this much anymore, but my Boy Scout troop was a big part of my life for a long time. They were people I respected and I liked being around them. One night a week and one weekend a month I could join a group where I was my own person, accepted for my own abilities- a proto-family. I’ve become such an urbanite it’s hard to remember how comfortable I was three days out on a backpacking trip, or a week into canoeing down the Connecticut river from Maine. I felt capable. Matt and I traded Quartermaster and Senior Patrol Leader posts for several years. I had known him since we were little; his father, a biologist, and his mother, a science teacher, had run our cub den for years. Matt and I weren’t close friends outside of scouts, but we had an intense bond forged through physical adversity. We had an unspoken agreement that we would always share a tent. One night, when we must have been 13 or 14, Matt held me as we were falling asleep- not for the first time- but he leaned in and kissed the back of my neck, not tentatively, but with purpose. I froze. I could see no way that I could respond or not respond that would be ok.

I still wonder what would have happened if I had turned to face him.

I’ve told you the outlines of my relationship with Noah. Meeting him changed everything. Finding solace in weed also changed my life. We somehow went from awkward A-levels to the center of social life at our high school, almost overnight. Our willingness to be outrageous, our dedication to each other, our vision of an unencumbered life altered the world in which we lived.

I got my license just before my eighteenth birthday; I bought myself a ‘79 Lincoln town car, the last of the big block V-8s produced in the US.

I was driving back home one afternoon, just entering a curve in the rain, when everything went double, one side blurry, the other crisp; I jerked the wheel to the clear side of my vision. In the split second when the tree loomed up in front of me, I realized my mistake. And in that infinitesimal moment, I felt such relief, gratitude, a wave of pure pleasure, an ungrasping of everything within myself and around me. It was over.

But I lived. When I regained consciousness, I crawled through the broken glass of the twisted door and fell into a pool of gasoline on the pavement. Later, they found the lens of my glasses that had fallen to the floor.

After two days, I was out of the hospital, back at school, pale as a ghost in a white linen suit, paler still for the makeup Noah had used to cover the bruises on my face.

I resolved not to go back home, and I mostly managed not to until I started college that next fall.

The memory of such intense relief, such bliss at surrendering to nothingness, only to be confronted by the pain of living- again- haunted me, gnawed my thoughts.