1 A memory from eight years ago: It's late spring, our junior year at Yale -- a time when classes are getting easier and one lazy day starts following another until it seems as if winter never really existed -- and about a hundred of us are sitting on a quad lawn where the drama division is performing scenes from Love's Labour's Lost. I'm with Ethan Hoevel and the girl who introduced us earlier this year, and we're all just hanging there taking in the calm, cool night before the parties start and things get out of hand. The show drags on and the night air grows colder and we're wanting the thing to end so we can go on to the next thing, which is really all we ever want these days no matter where we are. And while an actor is crumpling under his heavy robes, his voice muffled by a white cotton beard, Ethan stops watching the play entirely and instead looks across the stage circle where David Taylor is sitting with Samona Ashley. We both know they're the new couple still in their beginning -- that dreamlike space where they aren't yet daring each other to say the words that might actually have a consequence and instead can just laugh while touching each other's face or steal a kiss in public that still feels intimate and exciting -- which is why it doesn't register with either of them that I've followed Ethan's gaze to David wrapping his arm behind her, his hand on the small of her back, or that I'm studying her face as she leans into his hand and rests her head on his shoulder and props her knee gently over his thigh.My feelings for Samona Ashley don't penetrate the world they're in. But still, as David takes her chin in his hand to kiss her, I can't help wondering how -- on this night, in this moment -- the dim light from a hundred dorm-room windows can give such an ethereal quality to their being together, and how it can illuminate so clearly their ignorance of all the awful things to come. When Samona prolongs the kiss by clasping her hands on the back of his neck -- her dark skin standing out sharply against his pale skin; her curly black hair intermingling with his straight auburn hair; her soft curves pressing his lean, angular limbs -- I force myself to turn to Ethan and murmur something vague and meaningless about the incompetent stage direction.

But Ethan's not listening -- he's still watching them with an unsettled gaze. And even though I'm already aware that for Ethan Hoevel, just like for David Taylor and Samona Ashley, it's the beginning of something -- Ethan will announce that he's gay two weeks after this night in the spring of our junior year -- it will only be much later, after everything ends, when I'll be able to look back and imagine him visiting this moment often in his mind, always remembering this glimpse of David Taylor and Samona Ashley -- two people he doesn't even know -- as the beginning of something that he, Ethan, has ended. Eight mostly uneventful years passed after the night on the quad, punctuated by four or five address changes, professional stasis, the beginnings and requisite endings of a few minor relationships, and -- near the end -- the onset of that lonely, latent kind of panic which accompanies the realization that you can no longer afford not to know where your life is heading. And then it was mid-May in New York City: that fleeting window made up of no more than two or three weeks when everyone sheds their black coats in favor of bare skin, still winter-pale. The parks, cafes, boutiques, bars -- all of them were humming with skin seeing its first true daylight in months. It was a good time to teach yourself to live again, to learn all over what it's like to walk on the street with your head up. Which was why, when Ethan called around nine o'clock, I left my apartment on Tenth Street to go meet him. The guy who lived one floor below mine was sitting on the stoop, smoking a cigarette, his Doberman pulling on a choke chain.