The Rooms We Return To

Edmund White died yesterday. The news hit quietly, like a door closing in a room I hadn’t entered in years. It’s always strange when someone famous dies—not because you knew them, but because they once knew a version of you. Through their work, their voice, the atmosphere they created. When someone like that disappears, it’s not just their absence you feel—it’s the way they resurface a part of your own story you thought was done. I spent the morning pacing, feeding the cats, holding my coffee like it might help me steady something. I hadn’t thought about those years in a long time—the ones when I didn’t just read Edmund White, I leaned on him. I lived in his sentences. I let them shape me, quietly, in the background, like music you don’t notice until it stops. That period has lived in a quiet drawer for a long time. I’ve never fully revisited it. But maybe it’s time. 

This morning, I remembered watching Easy A in rehab, on one of those slow, suspended nights when the world felt like it had stopped spinning. Emma Stone’s character narrated her life in real time—not to perform, but to hear herself think. That struck something in me. She wasn’t explaining herself to the world; she was trying to understand herself, word by word. I recognized that impulse immediately. It was the same one that had kept me reading years earlier, and later, writing—not to impress anyone, but to survive myself. Edmund White was part of that first map I followed, even when I didn’t know where it led. His books weren’t just literature—they were instruments. Orientation tools. Quiet compasses I held close without knowing how to read. When someone like that dies, it’s not just grief—it’s recognition. A part of you that had gone quiet is suddenly alive again, blinking in the light.

I was fresh out of college in Mexico. Coursework done, just the dissertation left to write. Suspended between what had ended and what hadn’t begun. A kind of limbo, really—waiting for someone to come back to me. Reading gave me structure, but it also gave shape to a loneliness I didn’t yet know how to name, let alone tame.

This is about that time. About being young, queer, and unsure—living on borrowed books, trying to hold it all together. I was in Mexico City—2009, maybe—living in my then-boyfriend’s apartment, a place far nicer than anything I could’ve afforded on my own. It sat within walking distance of one of the city’s most bourgeois neighborhoods. I was in love—foolishly, hungrily, madly in love with a man who fed me in every sense. He gave me shelter, food security, long mornings with coffee and nothing urgent to do.

But more than that, he gave me books. His books. A private library I treated like a chapel. And there, among the shelves, Edmund White appeared—not once, but in three languages: Spanish, French, English. Like he belonged in every register of my becoming.

Antoine was an academic, splitting his time between Mexico and France. His research circled queerness and literature, and his apartment reflected that. We shared all of it—at least on the surface. He was tall, handsome, white. Twenty years older than me. Though French by birth, his parents were Spanish, and he’d grown up speaking Spanish at home. His accent carried a trace of Madrid—soft but unmistakable, the kind that lingers.

Back then, I thought we were aligned—intellectually, emotionally, politically. But in hindsight, I see how much of him I mistook for possibility.

It only struck me today: I never read Edmund White in his first language. Back then, my English was fragile—enough to get by in conversation, but not enough to trust on the page. I’ve come a long way since then. Is that pride? Maybe. Or just a quiet acknowledgment of the distance traveled—and the cost of getting here. As soon as I finish writing this, I know, I will go to Amazon and order an English version of one of His books. It’s a debt I must pay.

Like many in my generation, I was obsessed with La Maga—Cortázar’s elusive muse. She wasn’t just a character; she was a proposition. A way of moving through the world—free, chaotic, romantic. I saw myself in her: wandering with intention, or what passed for it, savoring moments without needing to know where they led. When you’re young and full of longing, literature doesn’t just inspire—it seduces. It convinces you that drifting is a kind of wisdom, that becoming someone is only a matter of reading the right books or falling for the right person. Mexico City fed that illusion. It was vast, electric, and utterly indifferent to whether or not you ever figured out who you were.

When Antoine was in town for a few months each year, we were social—dinners, friends, late-night laughter that made everything feel cinematic. But when he left, I stayed behind in the apartment and read. I worked part-time at a bookstore to get by. I told myself I didn’t need much. That solitude was part of the arrangement—that this was what it meant to live an intellectual life: to fuck, to read, to wait for someone to return. Back then, it felt romantic. Now I see it for what it was: a kind of emotional suspension. I mistook waiting for depth, and loneliness for purpose. I was building a life around someone else’s departures, filling the quiet with books and fantasies about becoming someone worth staying for.

When Antoine returned to France—he’s a full-time professor there—I stayed behind in his apartment, surrounded by the books and ideas he introduced me to, ways of living and thinking that felt both inspiring and just out of reach. Looking back, I see how that time marked the beginning of my heavy drinking—not only to numb the loneliness but to fill the spaces carved out by all the waiting and uncertainty. I drank to quiet the restlessness, the pressure of trying to become someone I wasn’t sure I could be. I read constantly, immersing myself in gay literature as if it might finally explain me to myself. Until then, I hadn’t had many (close) gay friends. But what I remember most from those years was the waiting: the birds outside the window, the quiet, persistent ache of wanting more while feeling trapped by everything I already had—and none of it really mine.

This morning, that feeling came back—the same quiet tug. When a famous person dies, it’s never just news; it’s a summons. Their absence pulls you back to the rooms where their words first met you, to the life you were living alongside them.

Maybe that’s why I don’t read much these days—unless I have to. I’m cautious now, protective of myself. I know how easily a book can pull me back into that old rhythm: the quiet drift between the page and the ache. Back then, reading wasn’t just pleasure—it was survival. A soft addiction. A way to blur the hours until love returned, or until I could convince myself that being alone didn’t hurt.

So when someone like Edmund White dies, it stirs things I thought I’d packed away for good. Not grief, exactly—more like a shift in the air. My cats move restlessly from room to room. I feed them. I sit with my coffee, still warm. Outside, the birds are louder than usual. The sky is that same dull gray it used to turn in Mexico City this time of year—a color that once made me feel both held and utterly unmoored.

And I’m sober now. I’ve been writing for a while. Writing about yourself is strange—you think you’re telling one story, but you end up somewhere else entirely. In a fight over a blender. In the color of the tiles in the kitchen. In the odd sound the refrigerator used to make. In the small, compulsive tics you picked up without noticing. In the way you drank just to sleep. In the fixation on becoming someone better, smarter, more lovable. “Look how much I have grown since you left”, kind of thing. In the silence you kept because you didn’t know how to name what you were feeling—or were afraid that if you did, it might all fall apart.

It’s unsettling to write about the things that made you. The longing for peace. The doing-whatever-it-took to avoid being alone. The way loneliness could dress itself up as freedom, or intellect, or romance. I can see now that I had a complicated relationship with the books in that apartment—one part devotion, one part escape. They weren’t just literature; they were furniture, insulation, evidence that I was worth staying for. But that’s for another time.

Rehab in many ways tried me to talk about Antoine. I refused. I wasn’t ready. I don’t miss Antoine—not really. But I do miss the version of myself who believed, deep down, that reading could tether you to something bigger than your own loneliness. That if I just read the right books, loved the right way, waited long enough, I’d become someone worth staying for. I miss that hope, even if it was a little off. I miss the hunger, too—the quiet desperation of wanting life to begin, not realizing it already had and I was just too young, too distracted, or too scared to notice.

And here I am again: 15 years later, in another stretch of stillness. A nicer apartment than I ever thought I’d live in. Birds outside again. Another dissertation hanging over me—but this time, the books are ones I picked. The language, the focus, the questions—they’re mine. And still, I catch myself pacing. Still making coffee like it’s a ritual that might help me bring peace. Still wondering if I’ve arrived, or if I’m just looping the same moment again with better furniture and more tools to cope.

It’s hard not to see the loop. The way certain things come back—not just the external stuff, but the feelings underneath. But I know more now. I’m trying to be here, really be here, instead of slipping into someone else’s life or waiting to be chosen again. I know what happens when I don’t stay with myself. I start using things to cope. I lost myself to others.

During these last year I have learned that that’s what grief is sometimes—not just about the person who’s gone, but about who we were when they meant something to us. The pieces of our story we’d quietly packed away, until something—or someone—brings them rushing back. That’s what happens when the famous die. You grieve them, yes—but also the version of you that existed in their shadow.

It’s strange to write about the things that made you, you. Stranger still when they return—not because you summoned them, but because something, or someone, stirred them loose. The death of someone famous does that. Not always. But sometimes. The ones who mattered. The ones who shaped your days in quiet, unassuming ways. Today it’s Edmund White. But it’s not really about him. It’s about who I was when I needed him. That young man in the apartment—wandering the edges of Condesa, trying to be smart and well-read and desirable—is still with me. Not haunting, exactly. Just nearby. He shows up when I read for too long, when I miss someone for no clear reason, when the sky turns the exact shade of gray it used to back in summers like these. When I remember that bookstore job and the way I pretended not to care, secretly hoping someone might walk in and see me—really see me—and decide I was worth something. It’s strange how you can walk into yourself like that, without meaning to. How the past waits, quietly, just around the corner of your day.

And it’s not like things suddenly got easier after that. Life kept happening. I went through things that would’ve broken the younger version of me. But I didn’t go through them alone. My husband, my friends—they showed up, again and again. Some days I leaned on them more than I care to admit. I’ve done things I never thought I’d be capable of. I’ve had to learn how to be alone with myself without falling apart. I stepped away from writing for a while. Coming back to it scared me. Still does. It brings me closer to parts of myself I thought I’d buried. Like the memory of Antoine’s apartment—those shelves full of books. They weren’t just books. They were a kind of proof. That someone like me could live a different kind of life.

I’ve been cautious about reading the way I used to. I’ve treated it with the same wariness I bring to any old habit that once numbed me. Reading had been a beautiful, soft addiction. A way to pass the hours until something—or someone—made the waiting stop. But this morning, there’s something that pulls me back. Not with the desperation it once held—not as a lifeline or a hiding place—but with a quieter kind of urgency. A tug toward memory, toward meaning. Maybe it’s grief. Maybe it’s recognition. The books aren’t a way out anymore; they’re a way in. Into the life I’ve built. Into the mind I’ve spent years learning how to stay inside. And maybe that’s the difference now—I’m not reading to become someone else. I’m reading to stay with myself.

And maybe that’s what watching Easy A in rehab taught me that night. Emma Stone’s character wasn’t telling her story for anyone else—she was figuring it out for herself. I didn’t get it then, but I get it now. Writing, reading—it’s not about becoming someone else. It’s about staying with who you are. Even when it’s hard.