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— How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
==So, he said, as he tucked the dropper into his jacket, I normally take boys home and tie them up and whip them.
He smiled as he said this.
Do you want to take me home and tie me up and whip me?
I asked.
Do you want to be tied up and whipped?
he asked.
No, I said, not really.
Part of me thought he was joking.
Part of me knew his reputation.
He lay down next to me.
The two of us were in our coats and boots, and I felt alone with him for the first time.
That’s fine, he said, we don’t have to do that.
And he reached his arm around me.
Can you do me a favor?
I asked him after we had lain there awhile, silent and still.
Yes, he said.
Can you lie on top of me?
Just, you know, lie there?
He rolled on top of me, in a light embrace, and the weight of him pushed the breath out of me.
Am I crushing you?
he asked.
No, I said.
This was exactly what I had meant.
The weight of him pressed me out.
I felt covered, safe; something dark in me retreated and, for what felt like the first time in the arms of a man, I felt safe.
I was still me—the switch was not flicked, but the terrible feeling haunting me then didn’t reach me.
Which is one of the things that love can feel like.
Peter stayed there for some time.== He may have fallen asleep at some point.
And so it is that when I hear stories of how thin he became, I can’t reconcile them with the weight of the boy who pinned me to myself, made me feel the place in me where I attached to the world.
Eventually he got up to go home.
We made a plan to see each other again.
I was with him in a way that I had been with no one else, and from what I understand, this was also true for him.
It isn’t just that you fall in love with someone—you each allow yourself new identities with each other, new skins, almost like a cocoon to who you’ll be next.
Strange to ourselves and to each other; only the feeling of the room, the silence of it, was familiar.
All over the city, people were strung into slings, dancing on tables, walking down alleys following strangers, but on my doorstep it felt like we were a young couple out of Happy Days, out of the fifties, mild as milk.
I watched him go and then turned and went back upstairs to bed.
==I wouldn’t know until years later that he had just told his mother of his illness.
He had shaved his head after returning from his sister’s wedding, for which he had grown out his hair.
In pictures from that day, “he looked gorgeous,” his mother says.
But his grandmother Paula Morgan thought otherwise.
“He’s sick,” she said after seeing him.
She knew before he had told them what was wrong.
“He was a very special young man,” she says of him now.
“It seems to me this happens to special young men.”==