Gathered Their Books and Burned Them

I don't know how it was possible for this whole generation to have kept the same secret from each other, but there you go.

See, in the old (ha! what am I, 23?) days, we kept it all under wraps. Sometimes you knew or found out, always in rumor, always about somebody from across town, heard across the bar from friends of friends who knew a guy who knew a guy blah blah blah blah blah. It was always the same story and it was always "us" and "them" and even though every single one of us knew that we were on the wrong side of that equation we all pretended just because you felt slightly less alone when people would still look at you.

And then, then one day, "us" became "me" and it wasn't so much a line as a fence and I forget who it was that first looked up and around and realized:

We all feel like this, every day, and it is okay.

We all came out of our apartments and said it to one another, and the years came tumbling off our faces like landslides.