| Everyone
else has a childhood, for one thing; where they were coaxed and coached
and taught all the shorthand. Or that's how it always seemed to me, eavesdropping
my way through twenty two years, filling in the stories of other people's
lives. First they had their shining childhood, which made them strong and
psyched them up for the leap across the chasm to adolescence, where the
real rites of adulthood began. I grilled them about it whenever I could,
slipping the casual question in while I did their homework for them, sprawled
on the lawn at Cologne under the reeling elms.
And every year they leaped further ahead, leaving me in the dust with all my doors closed, and each with a new and better deadbolt. Until I was sixteen, I was the only person I knew who had no story at all. I'd long since accepted the fact that nothing had ever happened to me and nothing ever would. That's how the closet feels, once you've made your nest in it and learned to call it home. Self-pity becomes your oxygen. . . . . I speak for no one else here, if only because I don't want to saddle the women and men with the lead weight of my thoughts and feelings. Twenty-two now and surviving by inches, I finally see how my life align at the core, if not in the sorry details. So whether or not I was ever a child is a matter of very small moment. but every memoir now is a kind of manifesto, as I piece together the tale of my life. My story have died with me a long enough. I mean to leave behind some map, some key. . . . And from
the moment on the brink of Winter's end, no one could ever tell me again
that I hadn't lived. . . . . . . . .
12th March 1998
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