Alan Ilagan

It’s too soon to be bummed out by the holidays, so I’ll put my present mood down to a general ennui with the end of Fall. It always happens towards the end of November. It brings me back to a story I’m sure I’ve told before, but it’s stayed with me for some reason, so here it is again.

I remember standing in my dorm room during my first semester at Brandeis at this time of the year, looking out the window while some ridiculously somber song by Enya was playing in the background. The night was descending, and the sky was the dimmest of blue. The lights along the path to campus flickered on, and the radiator hissed and sputtered. It wasn’t even six o’clock yet, and all I wanted to do was go to bed.

There was a knock at the door. My next-door neighbor, whom I’ll call Greg, popped in and asked if I wanted to go to dinner, as had become a bit customary. He was someone I considered one of my closer friends, but I didn’t really feel like debating him on his conservative views this evening. Still, I knew I’d get hungry later, so I slipped on some sneakers and we headed out to the dining hall.

Greg and I got along well, better than either of us did with our respective roommates, and he was intelligent, which made him a supportive person in the face of the ignorance so prevalent in the world of college Freshmen. He was in the pre-law track, if I recall correctly, which meant we had no classes together, and that was a relief because the last thing I wanted to do was talk about school crap. We meshed well, though we were nothing alike. But as I said, he was one of my only close friends at school, and I valued him for that.

We finished our dinner and made our way back across campus. The moon had appeared and I tried to sound smart by telling him whether it was waning or waxing. Greg paused and looked up into sky, then at me.

“You’re not turning fag on me, are you?”

It was said without menace or threat, but also without humor or laughter. Believe it or not, I was not yet out as a gay man, mostly just confused and scared, but it had dawned on me that I might indeed be a “fag”. Rather than attempt to talk to Greg about it, I simply reassured him that no, I was just relaying my Intro-to-Astronomy knowledge. I told him to go ahead, as I needed to check my mail at the student center. He walked away, relieved at my reassurance.

I stood outside, beneath the moon, and doubted my friendship with Greg for the first time. I also wondered if I would ever be able to be myself, whoever that was. Above all else, I felt intrinsically alone. Something cracked in me that night, something that would take years to fully mend, if it ever even did. I am still haunted by those words, and by the friend I thought I had.