The Boy in the Bed

I once laid in my bed at sixteen, thinking someone had snuck into my house. I slept until 10:40 that day. It was the longest I’d ever slept. In just a few months, I’d gone from five fucked-up people around me at all times to one fucked-up person, wondering who was at the top of the stairs, waiting until I was back to sleep to slip into my room and stand over me. What apparition? What version of myself from the future had come to have a look? Future me, the same as the present. Still nosy. Still concerned. Still wanting to know how the boy in the bed had become the man from Mars.

I once had a conversation with my mom. She said she was sorry for all of the things… and I knew that she was, but also, she didn’t understand it, hadn’t experienced it or seen it with her own eyes. Hadn’t tried to heal it up. Didn’t have to. I’ve had so many conversations throughout my life. But this one, I remember. So, I can’t say it didn’t matter, because I still feel that conversation in my body. And still wonder what it means.

I once had sex with a woman. With two women actually, though not at the same time. One was innocent … a coming of age tryst. The other was a promise to say goodbye to myself for twenty-three years. I wonder if the man on the stairs had come to warn the boy in the bed.

“You’ll come to a fork in the road, blah blah blah…” he’d say, while I pretended to be asleep … to not hear a word of his warning … fear in my ears because I already knew who I was. Who I didn’t want to be. And for a time, neither did he, though apparently, not anymore. I thought he was a burglar, but it seemed he was a messenger instead, which was twice as troubling.

I once read a book written in 1912. In it, a man was gay but couldn’t be because it was 1912. In those days, I’m sure there were too many layers of clothing to add a sash of glitter, a little lip-shimmer, or a Wham! midriff that might fit her. I marveled at how the boy in the book never knew what to do, but the man who’d given him life by sheer will, who’d created him with his quill, dreamed him up in nineteen hundred and nil.

This is when I knew what it meant to be brave.

He’d conjured truth into fiction in order that he might breathe fiction air, have a fiction life … so he could finally be what he couldn’t be. 

I once knew a boy with unspoken thoughts; the boy in the book, not the boy in the bed. They lingered in his mind in 1912 and on throughout his life. They lived within him, half-alive or half-asleep. The man who’d written him to life died just six months before I was born. And when he did, passed the baton my way. But it was a baton of secrecy, not victory. I held onto it, squeezing tightly whenever it began to slip from my hand. I ran for all I was worth a race I could never win. I thought I was running to courage, but was running further into secrecy. A vanishing finish line and thousand whisperers whispering, “Keep going.” But this was never a race. It was a ruse.

I once knew a gay man on a couch, who desperately wanted to be brave. He remembered the scribbled-out character from 1912, then thought about the man who’d created him—who’d written his own secrets into him—forcing the boy to speak the unspeakable. To tell his secrets for him.

This is the new definition of brave.

It was 1912, after all, when feelings were quelled by adding another layer of chiffon. The boy in the book had been given life—he breathed fiction air and yes, lived a fiction life. But over one hundred years later, those of us who would read his creator’s words were learning how to breathe in nonfiction. And how to live in it, too.

And so, to the man from 1912—the character and the writer—the boy in the bed says, “Thank you. Well done.”

There are heroes, and then there are heroes.

I’m the first.

He is both.