I always did the homework. I’m pretty anal that way. That’s what Natalie called it. She was always real, nothing fake about her at all. I was just getting to know Corey, just starting to crack open the “valves of my attention,” and the connection didn’t have time to develop. The valve image makes me picture myself, or at least my soul, which is the essence of me, alone in this cement box like a big bathtub or a tomb, all cold, damp and drippy with a bunch of faucets on the ends of rusty pipes sticking through the walls. If you open most of them, the water that comes out will be freezing and make you so cold you want to die, but there’s the possibility of warmth, so that miserable as you are in a dirty, concrete box, you have to try to make yourself feel better. I got warm water from Natalie’s faucet. I got a little from Corey that was warm too, or I would have stayed away from him. But it wasn’t enough.
You know how sometimes when you read, an idea just jumps out at you and you know it’s true, or at least you recognize it as important even if it doesn’t make complete sense at the moment, and it sticks with you? It isn’t always reading that does it. It can be a song you hear, or a poem, or even just something in a magazine, but sometimes there will be these words, usually just a few lines that stick in your head. Well, it happened to me in English class not long after Christmas break, and it started this thing going that I couldn’t let go of. It became the obsession that landed me here. I must not have wanted it to stop or I would have ended it. But I didn’t.
It was a normal English class morning, nothing unusual until it hit me. We had been reading poems that week by Emily Dickinson whom everyone thought was weird because she was a pretty alone kind of person. She wrote this one poem about the soul selecting its own society—choosing only one other soul to let in, then shutting everyone else out, shutting the “valves of her attention.” She was interesting because she kept writing even though she didn’t get money for it or become famous, and her poems got me thinking, but it wasn’t just Emily’s words that set me in motion. There was also this guy named Walt Whitman, and some other things that happened.
Whitman’s poem was called “There was a Child Went Forth,” and I had read it the night before even though I know half the people in the class don’t do the reading, but it was assigned, so I had to. Smith asked a few questions about it just to see how much of it we got, and I have to admit, it pretty much went right past me. It seemed like a meaningless string of words, and when I got to the end I was clueless, so when Smith asked if anyone wanted to try and explain it, I didn’t raise my hand.
He read it once through, and it really helped to hear it. I started to see images of this kid learning more about the world, experiencing farm animals, water, mean kids, drunks. Then there were these lines:
Affection that will not be gainsaid, the sense of what is real, the thought if after all it should prove unreal,
The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time, the curious whither and how
Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?
It’s about how you question reality. How sometimes you wonder if anything is real. It wasn’t like this was a new idea to me, but I think it made me realize just how much I felt that way, like I was dreaming my life and none of it was really happening. Hearing Smith read it out of a textbook right there in school, written more than a hundred years ago by this famous guy, freed me to let the feeling come to the front of my head. It made me understand a little better about gay people, and how living your whole life pretending to be different from what you are makes you crazy, and if you don’t get too depressed and do something fatal, eventually you might get brave enough just to be yourself.
That’s what happened to me. I’m not gay, but I’ve been faking my life big time. That passage in that poem made me realize that the reason I felt so bad was that my life was mostly a big lie, and it had became too difficult to live it, even though it was all I knew how to do, all I’d ever done. After that morning, it kept getting harder to go through the motions.