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LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.16 67 be called something you were not. Were not supposed to be. Your aunt and your mother talked about their divorces, even though they never talked about their divorces, and you smiled a lot that night because they seemed like they were not what they were supposed to be, too. Te next night, he was gone. Confetti of cigarette butts along the cement walk- way to the house. You don't know how much time passed after that night before you started sleeping on the couch, but you remember no more nights in your mother's bed. Just that lumpy, threadbare arm beneath your head, entrails of yellow stufng spilling out. Te long-empty racecar bed in your old room no longer acceptable. No longer accessible, the wreckage of stufed animals, overstufed dressers, abandoned toys, and God- knows-what junk blocking the door from opening more than a sliver. Tis is how you learned the past flls up and shuts you out. Tis is how you learned you could come back, not return. You tried to fnd yourself outside your- self. If you had a piano, you played it. Your thumb knew the soft sharpness of a book's corners. Craft all around you, a kind of light. You stared into it, hoping, if you could only look at it long enough, you'd become it. Well-read. Technically profcient. Straight. You learned your scales. You listened for the pitch, the cadence when your friends said: She's hot. You said: She's hot. You often asked — What day is it? — too devoted to your practice to spare any efort for recording the time. Tis is how you play, this is how you pass. Tis is how you talk, this is how you walk, this is how you walk away. Everywhere you walk you are walking away. Your childhood has no temporal form, no container. It is a puddle at the bottom of a hill, amalgam- ated beneath the singular focus of leaving yourself behind. Tis is how you walk away. Tis is who you are. *** People will ask you questions you don't have answers for. When did you fnd out? What made you realize? When did you know? You didn't fnd out. You didn't realize. You knew and you didn't. Boys were beautiful. Boys didn't think boys were beautiful. Gay, for you, was a shut gate. Your parents turned around when they realized it was Gay Day at Dollywood. Gay was a shimmering lane of trafc facing the opposite direction. Gay was like a storm that sent you feeing from the park. People will expect time to supply responses. But the older you get, the harder it is to explain. You were what you were not. A bad equation. Maybe if your parents had walked into the park that day, smiling, it would have been simple. All those hands clasping hands in a staggered, soft applause. An electric, a hum. Maybe things could have been what they were not. Instead, you sat on a motel balcony, your legs dangling through the railway, the concrete marking mountains on the bottoms of your thighs. Tings were what they were. Your legs were not a landscape. Your feet, fying above the blacktop, were not birds. I am not a storm. I am not a storm. I am not a storm. *** Your heart thundering— *** Tis is what you walk away from: One day the dogwoods bloomed. Your mother dug an old radio out from a cluttered cabinet you'd never opened and tuned to Rod Stewart and cleaned out the old furniture and cobwebs and catshit from the upstairs bedroom. You want to remember her putting a hand on your shoulder and asking, You wanna sleep up here? You hope you didn't ask her for it. You hope she didn't want it herself. Either way, you moved up there, farther from the hole in her bedroom door. You have no idea how long you lived there before you decided to leave, but it was soon after she started sleeping on the couch, packing her bedroom full of old clothes and papers covered in numbers. You looked out your win- dow all night one night, watching cats slink from treedark to moonlight. Te next day you told her you wanted to sleep in your grandfather's living room just down the street, to practice living almost-by-yourself for college next year. She helped you pack some clothes. How fast it all seems. Sometimes, when you're sitting still, your stomach lurches like you've just shot of on a rollercoaster, zero to sixty. All those years you slept in those rooms blur into a few short nights. But then again, you can't remember much of sleeping but its lack. What you remember most of that is the small screech your grandfather's sliding glass door made as you snuck it open some nights, stepping barefoot onto the freez- ing concrete, too drowsy or too discreet or too desperate to bother with shoes. What you remember is choking down a cigarette, ember burning in the direction of your mother's house, a two-minute walk away. Te fame a tiny beacon. Te fame a big betrayal. What you remember are your feet freezing, your toes searing, then wet, then numb. What you remember is that your father left, and came back, and left, and came back. And you didn't call the police. And you never came back. Tis is how you learn you can't come back, either. *** In the memory you are in many plac- es, and in all these places you are pacing, thinking of a memory. Heat lamps melt holes in your mother's icy koi pond, muscadine vines lace the treeline, cars honk complaints at the city's summer heat below your dorm window. Smell of spring peach, smell of gasoline. Te woods wear nothing, the woods wear bloom. Te woods burn with autumn, the woods drown in kudzu. In the memory inside the memory, your father kneels down, wrapping your small body in an embrace. Your face over his shoulder, tipped up toward summer light. His beard tickles your neck, and he says: My boy, my boy, my boy, the best. Your eyes on the burning sun. Wherever you paced after that, the circle deepened, even without carpet. It still deepens. It deepens everywhere you walk, or drive, or sail, or fy, the whole world shifting under you and you still sitting still in your braincase, blinking. You didn't fnd out. You didn't realize. You knew and you didn't. Boys were beautiful. Boys didn't think boys were beautiful. Gay, for you, was a shut gate. Continued on page 98