The Luckiest by Mila McWarren

Author:Mila McWarren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Interlude Press
Published: 2015-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

In Their Own Words

A post from an untitled, anonymous, deeply confessional blog, Wednesday, October 29, 2014:

Once upon a time, I was a little gay boy growing up in a world hostile to me. I was poor and kind of gawky and probably too smart and definitely way too interested in making sure everybody knew it. I was immature and too mature all at once; my dad had run out on us and I had way too close a relationship to my mother, a woman who worked so hard to make sure I never wanted for anything, and who I still think is a saint. So far, so clichéd.

But I was really lucky. I had good friends, really surpris­ingly good friends in retrospect, and then I had the enormous good fortune to fall in love with one of them. And, even more improb­ably, he loved me back. It seemed, at the time, like I was set for life: I had the people I needed, I had him next to me and I had convinced people who had never even met me that I was smart. Life was going to be glorious. As a boy I churned through fantasy novels from the library as quickly as I could get them, so I knew that I had gathered my party and was ready for the adventure to begin.

And then he left me—all it took was the loss of one person, and suddenly it was apparent that I had never had anything; it only seemed like I did. The circumstances changed, somehow I didn’t know myself at all, and my adventures turned into a simple struggle for survival.

A year later I was in a new city and a new life. I had a new boy­friend. He liked to kick his roommates out and cook din­ner for me. He had money; he talked about whisking me away to Europe, something that seemed impossibly exotic to me and frankly still does. I never told him that I thought he over­cooked the pasta; I never told him that I was a much better cook than he was; I never told him that I didn’t like the way he dressed; I never told him that I couldn’t imagine all those places he dreamed about, not when I barely had my feet under me; I never told him that I didn’t love him. And then, one day, I looked at him and it was like looking at every­thing I hated about myself, and I told him everything, and I burned it to the ground. I have never felt so power­ful; I was glorious in my destruction and I was thorough. But after I was left there in the middle of the ashes, I didn’t feel proud. I felt alone, still barely surviving.

Since then I’ve been doing something new with myself: I’ve been fucking around like it’s 1976, a celebration of freedom, only with every barrier known to young gay men. My best friends, who knew me when I was

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