Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World

MY LIFE TOOK ON A kind of rhythm, the going to school, the talking to school friends that I’d never had before. School friends were good because you could leave them at school. That sounds mean, I know, but for me, my life was really crowded. I don’t think I could have handled one more take-home friend.

I guess you could say I was a failure at turning myself into the invisible man.

“I mean, what happened to the old Ari? The one who sat there, socially disengaged?”
“Socially disengaged?”

Before every school year begins, I feel like crawling under my bed and staying there. I don’t know what it is about the whole school thing that makes me feel anxious. I always feel like I’ve thrown my summers away—well, until I met you.

And I didn’t give a shit that I was young, and I had just turned seventeen and I didn’t give a shit if anyone thought I was too young to feel the things that I felt. Too young? Tell that to my fucking heart.

“How do you know I’m straight?”

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE boy and I’d walk into a room full of people, I would count them. I would count them and recount them—and I never knew why I did that. I wasted a lot of time counting people, and the counting had no purpose to it. Maybe I didn’t see the people as people but just as numbers. I didn’t understand people—and even though I was a people too, I lived far away from them.

I’m not a writer. I’m not going for art. I have things inside me that I have to say, and they are things I need to say to myself. To figure things out for myself. If I don’t say the things I need to say, it’s going to kill me.

I took out my journal, and I wasn’t sure what to write. I don’t know why I suddenly had this thing with writing. I mean, sometimes I’m thinking something, and I just want to write it down. I want to see what I’m thinking, maybe because if I see what I’m thinking in words, then I can know if what I’m thinking is true or not. How can you ever know what’s true?

“Some children leave, some children stay. Some children never find their way.”