I woke up at 2:30 in the morning and spent at least the next hour awake. After getting up to pee and check my e-mail, I crawled back into bed and snuggled up against Matt’s warm back. Thoughts fluttered through my head for the next half hour.

I should go back and read all my old journals — everything from high school up through the summer I realized it was okay to be gay — and see what I was like back then. I should do some research.

It’s odd how we project ourselves onto others. You know someone who’s like you in some particular way, and you assume you both got there on similar paths. But it turns out you didn’t. His path was much different from yours. So you’ve dug beneath the earth and seen the underside, the roots, and you see that that particular trait — responsibility, thinking about the rules — is similar in only some ways, not all.

Every person is completely different.

There’s a sweetness in knowledge, in continuing to get to know someone even after more than a year.