I wasn’t faced with a world that was different from the previous one, was I? The world, awful as it was, didn’t change this time. Instead, it was me who was different—and flashing through my life with this new lens wasn’t easy. All the lies I had told, all the things I’d pretended to be. And shame. Not shame for being gay, but shame for being unable to embrace it. Too much of a coward to say it out loud.

“Someday you’ll be ready,” Paul had told me. “You’ll come out at your own speed, and that’s okay. Everyone has to do it on their own terms.” And then he had added, “When you come out, I will, too.”

Which just reinforced the fact that I was the one holding him back, even though he didn’t see it that way.

When I came downstairs—wearing jeans and a shirt that Paul once said looked good on me—Paul was sitting with Hunter in the family room, watching TV. Some sitcom that I don’t think existed in the world I started from, but just as unfunny as most of the ones that did.

“Why are you just standing there?” asked Hunter. “You’re freaking me out.”

So I sat down next to Paul, obsessively aware of the buffer zone I put between us as we watched bad TV.

There’s something to be said about the communal experience of staring at a screen and allowing it to collectively empty your minds. It didn’t exactly unscramble my thoughts and emotions, but it numbed them just a little. It was comforting just silently sitting next to my brother and my boyfriend—and yeah, I’ll say the B-word now, even though I wouldn’t say it then.

“Are you staying over, Paul?” my mother asked, half an hour later. “Should I make up one of the guest rooms?” It was less of an invitation than my mom’s polite way of suggesting that it was time to leave.

Paul tossed me a poker-faced glance and said, “Naah, I’d better get home.”

Other friends often did avail themselves of the guest room option, but never Paul. Maybe he was always waiting for me to make the invitation—but I never had. The thought of him just down the hall would keep me up all night.