We met pretty early on in college, maybe the second or third day. I was dealing with severe sunburn at the time and had been moisturizing my arms and legs non-stop for several hours. The implications escaped me. I'm actually still not 100% sure what his exact punishment would have been, but all my friends are Jewish and they find his a compelling and pitiful circumstance.
On sight I knew something about him was incongruous. Perhaps he sensed it too. He confessed immediately. The first things he said to me were "Hello" and "Can you believe the toilet paper?!" and finally...
We sat together on what later became my bed frame. I gave him my honest opinion, that I had no idea how to sympathize with him on this one. He interrogated me into the night on my relationship with my family priest. I told him college was a time to reinvent himself, that maybe he could be accepted if he only accepted himself. It was uncomfortably serious.
Soon it was 9:00pm. As he rose to leave the room, he told me about a conversation that took place when he was eleven, where his JCC pals traded perspectives on the itch-factor of sprouting pubic hair. He had no way of participating without relating the specifics. I reached for the seventeenth time in the hour for more aloe, which was when he declared me an unfit friend and left the room.
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