So, Incase you have not noticed the little link you your right, Merriam-Webster is this word whore's new favorite web site.

The following is an excerpt from my current reading selection: Equal Affections, by David Leavitt. ISBN 1-55584-202-x

DANNY'S FANTASY: He is twelve years old, riding his bicycle to the mall to read soap opera magazines. A sunny Saturday afternoon, the shopping mall quiet, full of women in tennis dressas and plump teenage girls, their stomach bulging out of stiff jeans, who've come here in gangs to smoke. Danny is wearing shorts, a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of the university where his father teaches, tube socks, tennis shoes. His legs are brown from the sun, the hairs on them bleached white. He is locking his bicycle to a lamppost, unscrambling the combination with dirty fingers, when he feels the proximity of another body, feels warm breath against his hair. He turns around still crouched, and a man is standing over him, a tall man in a gray leather jacket and jeans, a man who is at once a stranger and oddly, intimately familiar to him--but where from? A student of his father's? A cousin he doesn't remember? "Excuse me," the man says, "I'm sorry to bother you, I--" He puts his hands in his pockets, looks away, "Danny," he says. "Danny."

Danny's eyes suddenly fill with tears. His cheeks flush. He looks at the ground.

"I'm you," the stanger says. "I'm who you're going to become. And I've come to tell you--you're going to be fine, just fine."

The boy stands. Of course he sees it now, all of it--that face so familiar becasue it is his own, but also so strange, becasue he's never seen his own face before, not really, except in a mirror, and now he understands how mirrors distort, and where his legs will stretch to, and the awkward unpuzzling of his own face. Tears are welling in his eyes and in his grown self's eyes as well, as the man bends down, leans over him, puts a hand on his shoulder. "All the things your've worried about." he says, "all the things that make you suffer--they're nothing. They're smoke. I know. And I've come so you'll know, so you won't have to suffer anymore. For you're going to be fine. You're going to leave California and head East, just like you hope. And you'll have love, Danny. I know you can't believe it now, I know everything you feel. You don't imagine anyone will ever love you, you can't conceive how anyone could love you. But someone will. You'll see."

The band on his shoulder--larger, thickly veined, bristled with short brown hairs--is his own hand. Young Danny, crouching still by his bicycle, runs his own fingers over those long fingers, feels the warmth of the skin. One after the other he traces them, until his hand comes to rest on a slender silver ring. Slowly he strokes the ring's rounded outer edge; slowly he rotates it around the finger on which it's lodged. Under the ring is a perfect white band where the skin has not been touched by the sun.

*************

As a gay man, this passage made me so nestalgic for my past.

Made me remember all the times I was doubting the same things that Danny is talking about. Maybe they are not unique to gay youth. But the thought of this fantastic visitor coming to give me those reassurances at that time in my life would have been a bit overwhelming, and at the same time empowering. Can you imagine how resiliant to the crap in the world you would have felt if you would have a visitor from your future to reassure you?

And if makes me jealous.

Jealous for not having that reassurance.

For wasting so much energy worrying.

I'm just sayin.

*wink to Mal*