"The sons of single mothers inevitably encounter well-meaning family members who like to remind us of our role as "the man of the house." The stateme… - Saeed Jones

However many masks we invent and deploy, in the end, we cannot control what other people see when they look at us.

A joke I used to repeat in those days was: Why be happy when you can be interesting? I knew how to be interesting. There was power in being a spectacle, even a miserable spectacle. The punch and the line. Interesting: sentences like serrated blades, laughter like machine-gun rounds, a drink in one hand, a borrowed cigarette in the other. If you could draw enough glances, any room could orbit around you.

I felt like I had made the mistake of asking a fortune-teller to look into my future, and now I was being punished for trying to look too far ahead.