He smiles at me, and it is a knock on my chest, as if he had reached out and rapped it. My chest opens, my heart admits him. - Alexander Chee

I loved him, in part, for what he might be someday, which is never a good way to love someone. It was in fact a way of rejecting him, a way of rejecting who he is now, and I think in some way we both knew this.

When I arrived in San Francisco, there was no way to find the Castro on any map. People were forever calling the bookstore for directions to the neighborhood. In my group there was the sense that we were a wave arriving on the West Coast from the East: postcollegiate youngsters seeking and finding a paradise of cheap apartments and thrift stores bursting with the old athletic T-shirts and jeans and flannel shirts we all prixed. I remember when I put the empty clothes together with the empty apartments, on an ordinary sunny afternoon walking down the sidewalk to work: there on a blanket stood a pari of black leather steel-toed boots, twelve-hole lace-ups. They gleamed, freshly polished, in the light of the morning. As I approached them, feeling the pull of the hill, I drew up short to examine the rest of the sidewalk sale. Some old albums, Queen and Sylvester; three pairs of jeans; two leather wristbands; a box of old T-shirts; a worn watch, the hands still moving; a pressed-leather belt, west style; and cowboy boots, the same size as the steel-toes. I tried the steel-toes on and took a long look at the salesman as I stood up, feelign that they were exactly my size.

This man was thin, thin in a way that was immediately familiar. Hollowing from the inside out. His skin reddened, and his brown eyes looked over me as if lighting might fall on me out of that clear afternoon sky. And I knew then, as I paid twenty dollars for the boots, that they'd been recently emptied. That he was watching me walk off in the shoes of the newly dead. And that all of this had been happening for some time now.

It isn't just that you fall in love with someone — you each allow yourself new identities with each other, new skins, almost like a cocoon to who you'll be next.