I want all of my life to be like these moments:

Dear much younger self,

This is a warning from your future self. Ignore it at your peril.

I’m afraid you probably will ignore it, because you aren’t looking for advice. You’re looking for absolute answers, and you have some very limited ideas about where to look for them. You will not find any [...]]]> Letter to a young homosexual

Dear much younger self,

This is a warning from your future self. Ignore it at your peril.

I’m afraid you probably will ignore it, because you aren’t looking for advice. You’re looking for absolute answers, and you have some very limited ideas about where to look for them. You will not find any of the answers that I can give you in the places you’re comfortable looking.

There is so much I could tell you, but what I wish for is the chance to stand at your shoulder when the opportunities to make choices present themselves to you. I would stand there and whisper into your ear. “Desire is good. (Or at least not bad.) Trust it. (Or at least don’t fear it.)” Or maybe, “Give in to your feelings.” Or “Use the force, Luke.” Hell, I don’t know if even that would get through to you.

No, see, I’ve gone off on the wrong track already. It’s not about desire. You’ll figure out desire on your own eventually, and you’ll get to understand it before you understand the nature of truth—not big Truth, I’m talking about your truth, i.e., the truth of who and what you are. You’ll start making sense of desire before you get a handle on love or discipline or loss or sacrifice or compassion.

Let me be blunt. Come out! Come out now, or come out soon. Come out to everyone you know, starting with yourself. Don’t think about right and wrong. Focus on honesty. You were always an honest guy. You may not know a thing about hard work, but you could be trusted. It’s eating you up inside to have to lie to your parents, your siblings, your friends. Stop it! You’re killing yourself slowly with the lies. You know it’s true. I’m not telling you anything new. What are you waiting for, your next nervous breakdown? You can be that honest guy again.

I need to tell you something about yourself that you don’t know: You are fearless. I know, you don’t feel fearless. But your fear is only a byproduct of your double life. The fear of being found out, the fear of being exposed, the fear of being known for what you are—the fear is a lie. It won’t survive the light of day when you finally do what you need to do.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

“We never ask for the things we need the most.” I don’t know if I agree with that statement, so what am I going to do with it? If we’re in touch with who we are, we do ask for the things we need the most. But I guess a lot of people [...]]]> Five False Starts

“We never ask for the things we need the most.” I don’t know if I agree with that statement, so what am I going to do with it? If we’re in touch with who we are, we do ask for the things we need the most. But I guess a lot of people go through life without asking. Who is this “we”?

“We never ask for the things we need the most,” she said to me.

“What do you mean by that?” I said.

“I mean, we say we want independence, but what we want is financial security. We say we want justice, but we’d rather have revenge.”

We never ask for the things we need the most. No, strike that. We ask for the things we need, but we don’t actually want them. We ask for Truth, but Truth isn’t what we want. We want a good story. We want a great story. We want a story of wonder and magic and nobility and heroism, but Truth doesn’t tell that kind of story. Truth tells stories about suffering and survival and the slow passage of time….

We never ask for the things we need the most. And most of us make do, we find our way, we get by with what comes our way from the goodness or grace or benevolence or lucky indifference of the universe. But once in a while, one of us gets lost, one of us becomes isolated, or perhaps I should say, one of us becomes more isolated even than all the rest. He finds himself in a place where no one can reach him, and he does something terrible, something desperate, and puts himself in a position where no one can give him anything at all.

“We never ask for the things we need the most.” I don’t know what that means. I’ve tried imagining those words in the voice of a frustrated seeker, an unsatisfied lover, an angry materialist, or the witness to a suicide, but I don’t like where any of these stories lead.

What else to say?

We never ask for the things we need the most, because as long as we don’t ask, then we can blame the other person for not giving those things to us, and so our unhappiness is someone else’s fault. As soon as we ask, we accept responsibility for the consequences of having expressed our desires.

Is that true? Does it matter?

To ask for what we need the most is to accept responsibility for our own destinies.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

Mel and [...]]]> Mel was my best friend during the summer we spent at Lake Barron. When people asked what “Mel” was short for, she liked to say “Melvin.” Sometimes she’d wait for a reaction, but sometimes she’d just say it and walk away. There was nothing about her that made “Melody” seem like a good fit.

Mel and I were horsing around in shallow water in her father’s leaky rowboat the first time I saw the Payton boys race by in their aluminum canoe. I stood staring. Mel waved a greeting, but neither of the boys acknowledged us. They glided past us in a matter of moments. I watched until they disappeared from sight around the point where the campground ended.

“Who was that?” I asked Mel. Her family had spent summers on the lake for four years, and she seemed to know all the locals by name.

“The Paytons—Junior and Mike. Their parents own the house with the tennis courts.”

I whistled. We had rowed past the Paytons’ house a couple of times in our meandering explorations of the lake. It was a palace compared to most of the other houses around the lake, a six- or eight-bedroom Tudor mini-mansion tucked into a stand of pines on the hillside. The entrance faced the road along the ridge on the south side of the lake, so from the water, we had a view of the back. A dozen windows and three sets of French doors looked out on a broad patio. A flight of flagstone stairs led from the patio down to the level clearing where we’d seen the boys playing tennis in crisp whites.

“Which one is which again?” I asked. I tried to sound casual. I had only known Mel for three weeks, and I wasn’t ready for her to know the source of my curiosity.

“Evan—Junior, they call him—is the tall one with the straight hair,” she explained. “Mike has the curly black hair.”

I wanted to be like those Payton boys. I wanted to live at the lake all year in a big house with my own bedroom and my own bathroom. I wanted a tall, handsome brother who didn’t have to share a set of bunk beds with me. A brother who goes rowing on the lake and plays tennis at a competitive level and always gets invited to every party. I wanted the best teeth that money could buy and an expensive haircut and shoes for every different sport and muscular arms and long, tan legs. I wanted gold medals for swimming the butterfly and a wide smile and dark brown eyes framed by perfect eyebrows.

[This story goes somewhere very dark eventually, but I’m not sure where yet.]

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick