Theatre ended up becoming my refuge, my tool, and my distraction, a space of make-believe where I didn’t have to confront my life’s paradoxes so directly. I auditioned for a dozen shows but didn’t get cast, so I ended up doing backstage work, helping out with lights and stage management. In the spring of freshman year, I got a grant to direct Martin Sherman’s Bent, a drama about gay men in the Holocaust, because the head of the selection committee was queer himself and loved the play. The climactic scene featured two men making love with words as they stood at attention and apart, under the watchful eye of SS guards. The production got good reviews from the Crimson and a local gay paper, which led to a summer internship at the Nora Theatre Company, a troupe that was affiliated with Harvard. Maybe I directed that particular scene well because its yearning for connection in a seemingly impossible situation was something I felt, hooking up with plenty of men but unable to find someone who wanted to spend the night.

The internship thankfully meant that I didn’t need to leave Cambridge that summer, so I didn’t return to either California or New York, determined to see my family as little as possible. I moved from one Harvard dorm to another, then to Adams House the fall of my sophomore year, the queerest of the dorms that also happened to be closest to Harvard Yard and the rest of campus.

The day I moved into Adams, I called Papa’s house to give him my new number. Clara picked up the phone and told me that Tatay Gaudencio, my grandfather in the Philippines, had died in early July, but no one knew how to reach me.

“Didn’t you feel a sign the day he died?” my stepmother asked. “It was July 2.”