Todd Clayton

I know I’ve been weird lately: changing the station when you come on, never playing you in my room anymore. After what happened last week — when I was singing with The xx in that coffee shop down the street when you came on — I thought I owed you an explanation in earnest.

A week after I graduated, I was on a transatlantic flight to London for a three-week trip across Western Europe. I traveled because I expected new cities to whisper some ancestral secret to me. I expected them to reflect my destiny on the buildings of their foreign downtowns, that the anxieties that haunted me in San Diego would somehow stay there if I flew away fast enough.

Because I didn’t know why I was so mad that night until my fingers hit the keyboard the next morning and the words crawled through my fingertips. Because the ring she buried in the palm of my hand was three-years heavy. Because I almost got married and need to know how…

The smell of potatoes and sausage was rushing up from my plate, caching itself in my nostrils, and — like fetid milk — making me nauseous. I hadn’t been able to keep down breakfast since summer.

I am troubled that the culture that reared me seems to be one that gets off on the failure of others, as if somehow sadness is sexy. Perhaps some vestige of social Darwinism, we seem to celebrate when the lionized crumble, and the applause only escalates when the fall is damaging and the person is left bruised, naked, and shamed.

“I’m depressed, dad. The darkness is back and I’m scared.” I explained how I never thought I’d be depressed like this again, how I thought coming out was the nail in the coffin of my self-loathing.

The shrewdest, loudest, most violent lie that LGBT people at Christian colleges and universities carry is this: that no one else like them exists. More important, and more enduring than the stares and questions and assaulting prayers, are the stories of the 70 current students, and 130 alumni who contacted me to say they had the same kind of dreams I did.

It was a bedroom: modern, tidy, wooden-dresser-ed. A few socks littered the floor, and the sheets of the bed were tangled and loved. The bed itself was simple, boasting a modest headboard, and it sat between two nightstands that each carried frames filled with family, and half-filled glasses of water.

The seasons of the soul, however, tell an admittedly different tale. The gusts of heartbreak inevitably come, the deaths and disappointments and disparities and devastation, and before we’ve even caught our breath we’re standing naked and leafless in the dead of winter.

He has really nice abs. But I only know because he’s shirtless in four of his seven profile pictures.

It looked something like this: we’d been in the city a few days already, and woken up early to head to our favorite café. We were sitting on the patio and my palm was resting on his leg while we read books and wrote and laughed. By noon we were tired, and ready to head back to the apartment we’d rented.

If possible, the iPod is turned on, or a CD is played, and once Bon Iver or The National are on again you’re reminded that you’re a socially aware, farmer’s-market-shopping 20-something who reads good literature and only buys fair trade.