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I inclined toward literature and poetry. I felt more at ease with girls than I did with boys, the latter discomfiting me with their crudeness and violence. For a while this preference was indulged by my parents and teachers, first with knowing sighs as natural melancholy at the loss of Annie and then laughed off. I must be, they joked, a pint-size Romeo pining for my crushes. But when at last I imagined myself as a Romeo, it was Mercutios, not Juliets, for whom I was yearning. More than anything I was alone. I took long solitary walks through the Berkshires, examining plants and watching birds. Among many other things, my time in the Argonne Forest spoiled woods for me. Everyone feels old when they’re sad, even children. Roaming the hills of western Massachusetts, I felt old much of the time. Aware in a vague way of my fundamental difference from other boys, I thought a lot about how, if not to be more like them, then to be the sort of person whom they’d like. When I matriculated at Pittsfield High, I deliberately set out to become more popular, with a grim understanding that this would amount to concealing, not expressing, my inner life.
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