A Different Universe

I've always been impressed with Ethan Gray's blog. His sophisticated humour and ironic, melancholy entries make him one of the best gay bloggers on the net. I can't help feeling jealous and a little ashamed sometimes, and not because of my inferior writing skills; I'm jealous because he's fucking porn stars while I'm sitting here writing about him fucking porn stars; I'm ashamed because he's living the life that I could never dare to live, nor live even if I dared. I'm simply socially inept.

Well, if I can't imitate Ethan's life, I can at least try emulating his writing. But what's his secret? Jotting down a list of book titles he mentions, I make for the local branch library, my mother's card stuffed in my pocket. The library is in an aquamarine crystal which until some five years ago had doubled for the Nepean City Hall. Inside, a fountain ripples beneath a winding staircase while a nearby gallery shocks passerbyers with its harsh and abstract art.

I was hit by a wave of nostalgia.

I was a reader too, once. Back in grade school I used to tear through books by the dozen every month. I was the kid who read at recess, who left orange stains on the pages of library books I'd left too close to my lunch. Wasting a single minute in mundanity was unbearable when a universe full of fierce dragons and triumphant kings beckoned, always, just beyond the next page. This library was like a second home to me.

But things change. Since moving to Toronto, books for leisure have been few and far between. Its not just the lack of time or opportunity. I seem to have lost the desire. Those fantasy worlds which once filled me with such wonder now seem somehow cheap, excessive, artificial, like makeup on a prostitute past her prime. And like so many other things in my life contaminated with doubt and self-deception, books now rekindle dark and despairing thoughts which should have no place in a healthy twenty-two year old. A man can't be healthy if he's given up seeing a psychologist because he's become so anti-social he's terrified of leaving his house, if he's quite university because he breaks into panic and cold sweat just seeing an assignment, if he escapes to the library looking for a fantasy only as a last, desperate resort to stave off inevitable self-destruction. If he writes in his blog what he's just written.

So there I am, sitting on the library's thin faded carpet, looking for a book in the fiction section. A find it. "The Lost Language of Cranes". But it's the book next to it, which hadn't been on Ethan's list, which really catch my attention. I turn to its first page. I can tell its a different kind of book, different from the stories I'm used to reading. It's about a mother dying from cancer, a father who wants to leave her, an older daughter travelling the world, and a thoughtful gay son. It's about love, family, and the things which are said and the things which aren't. "Equal Affections", it's called.

I check it out. It's a different universe that I need exploring now. Questions I need to ask. A universe like my own.