“Don’t be afraid, sweetheart. We… we’ll find a solution. You are not going to go to Hell.”

“You have to be strong. It’s not your fault. You’ll heal, you’ll see, you’ll come back as straight as you’ve always been.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about those sentences, they were impressed on my skin. Memories. To the point that I could have repeated them exactly as they were said. Letting them consume my heart. My coming-out hadn’t gone as well as I had hoped. My mother had started sobbing and, God, there was no sound comparable to that. It shattered my heart. My father had stood up, walked back and forth for a few minutes. He was swearing and yelling at me, asking how could that have happened and I didn't know how else to answer him. I liked boys, it was as natural as breathing. Nobody had taught me how to love, I just loved, and it felt right.

They said there was something wrong with me. They believed it was their fault and they decided without asking me. As always. They decided I would have to be healed, in one way or another. Because that filthy homosexuality was an illness, and needed to be stripped from my sick and wrong body. I would have to be turned normal, and then they could love me like they did before.

I was a freak. a monster.

They made me hate myself.

There was something wrong with me.

Somehow, I wanted to remain that way. But, of course, they ignored me, and they sent me to the St. Louis Clinic for Homosexual Disease, specializing in "curing those suffering from homosexuality."

They thought they could heal me, but things didn’t turned out as they expected. Not at all. Because while I was there, I met Kurt.

My new room was horrifyingly anonymous. White walls, a white table, white parquet, a white stool, a painting of some snow and a window where the sunlight filtered through the curtains and reflected on all that white, making the whole room dazzling .

I had arrived there at late night, so I had been sent to my room quite informally. They had explained to me things that I was too tired to remember, and I woke up the next morning in an unknown bed, in an atrociously bright room, alone.

Empty. Wrong. Sick. Abandoned.

It was eight o’clock, and I could only remember pieces of instructions given to me the previous night. Wake up, put on the uniform you will find in the dresser, go downstairs, have breakfast and then go to the reception, where you will be given the daily schedule.

It was a robotic life, with no feelings. I wondered what the doctors thought of us. Who knows what they believed. Their cold, sharp glances were torture.I always felt judged. What did I do that was so wrong? I could have never imagined being punished for falling in love.

I put on the plain white t-shirt and the too-big pants that sagged annoyingly on my hips. That same, horrible colour that made everything terribly trivial and stupid.

They wanted to uniform us. Make us one, identical, complete, right, correct. Normal.

I went out into the hallway. My hair was a mess, but I didn’t really care. Why should I have tried to look like somebody I wasn't? To be better? To not suck so much? I already was something terribly wrong and horrible, so what did it matter, really?

I went downstairs with the ten other guys from my floor. How many of us were there in that clinic? Twenty? Thirty? Everybody at the same time? And they wanted to heal us? Was it even possible to heal?

I found myself in an enormous white room where about thirty people dressed indentically were getting their breakfast and putting it on their plastic trays.

I took a tray and went to the end of the line. The guy in front of me was slightly taller than me, with light brown hair incredibly perfect for being stuck in that prison. He observed everything with an absent look, the cerulean eyes fixed on a far away place. He looked like a kid, not right for that place, and in the end I wasn’t so different from him.

I got to the food faster than I'd expected and the breakfast ladies gave me a mug filled with coffee and a couple of unappetizing biscuits with absent looks on their faces

We sat down in the order we had gotten there, so I ended up across from the boy that was in front of me in line. It was impossible not to notice him between all the identical bodies. He was bright, he almost sparkled. The prisoners were divided into groups, by age or by table. Some of them remained alone and they really looked miserable.

I was miserable. I was angry. But I detested myself most of all. I didn’t want to end up isolated for the rest of my life, so I forced myself to say something to the guy in front of me.

I didn’t know how to start.

“I’m Blaine.” I said, nut he didn't realize that I was actually talking to him. In fact, he didn’t answer, so I cleared my throat.

He barely looked up, not particularly interested. It seemed like he was in his world that was closed to everyone who tried to arrive from out here.

“I’m… Blaine.” I repeated, dipping one of that sandy biscuits into the dull coffee and blushing like an idiot.

“I’m gay, not deaf.” He answered, shifting awkwardly on his chair.

Amazing. I had found the nicest person in the whole clinic. Perfect. Just my luck. I shouldn’t have let my need of talking to someone win over. I just wanted a normal conversation, but it probably would have been better if I had of just kept my damn mouth shut from the start.

I ended up observing the muddy colour of my coffee, forgetting everything and with the sick sensation that the day had started the wrong way. All that white bothered me, all that clean, all that light… As if we were dirty. And we even paid to be there.

“I’m Kurt, anyway,” he said then. His face was an impenetrable mask. He was putting some sugar in his coffee without paying particular attention. He always seemed too distracted to control everything that was happening around him and I wondered how much time he had been there, and if he was healing.

Maybe I should have just asked.

“I… I’m new here.”

Kurt nodded and didn’t look surprised at all.

“It was obvious.”

I swallowed the sandy, tasteless biscuit. It left a sort of bitter taste in my mouth.

“How could you tell?” I asked, wondering if he was naturally so acidic or if I was just so unpleasant that I made the idea of a conversation detestable.

The chattering in the room was calm and emotionless. It echoed on the white walls and became terryfingly distorted.

Kurt shuddered.

“You still look around as if all this damned white is going to eat you alive. You look at the other patients and you wonder if they've healed. And you still have this dismayed look on your face that everyone has on their first day.”

I burnt my tongue while I was drinking and I tried not to show it.

“Then I'll become like you?”

He made a sceptical noise, sighing.

“You don’t need to be as a basket case like I am.”

“Is "basket case" really a thing?”

He nodded, lowering his glance and trying not to smile.

“I’m more sick than it seems.”

I bit my lower lip. Kurt had no idea how desperate I was. I wondered if he hated himself. If he felt guilty, alone, dirty, wrong, crazy, isolated, forced to adjust to a stereotype that couldn’t reflect him, a delusion to everyone – most of all to his parents – a mistake.

That feeling was like an obscure beast nesting inside me, that whipped with anger, growing with every breath. It consumed and swallowed everything and it was more present every second.

"Look, I see you’re really busy, but if you just explained to me how things are here… It would be fantastic," I muttered, not knowing how to define the glance he gave me with those color-changing eyes. They really were big, and the looked at me in a cryptic way.

“Shut up. Tell them they’re right. Obey. Suffer in silence. Don’t make bonds. Be as normal as they want you to be.”

I swallowed.

“What will they do to me?”

Kurt shut up, biting his lip until it became white and then he nailed me with a glance and lowered his voice almost hissing.

“They will kill you. They won’t let you be yourself and they’ll make you hate yourself.”

I smiled in a bitter way and looked away.

“I wouldn’t worry about that, I already hate myself.”

"I used to say that, too. Trust me, they’re not worried about that." he whispered, in such a low voice that I almost believed I had imagine it. "Now stand up and put everything away. Leave it on the table. It’s time for the electric chair." he said, and then he passed me, fading into the middle of all the other identical patients.

Sooner or later maybe I would have started recognizing them. For now, even if it seemed strange, the only one I wanted to talk to was that usually-silent boy I just talked to.

There was something dangerously charming in him. That something was telling me that I shouldn’t have let him pass through my life as if he never did.

I didn’t decide it, I could have ignored every living creature in that building, but the truth was that I was afraid to be alone.

The paramedics clapped their hands two times. There were three at the entrance of the cafeteria. They told us to follow them with a smile that didn’t really reassure me. I felt like a rabbit in a cage, Kurt talked about an Electric Chair, and I really wanted to escape from it. To run way.

To find my freedom, to be who I really was, to love who I loved without being forced to kill a part of me.

Why did my parents do this to me? And why did I let them do it? Oh, yeah, I hadn’t had the choice.

They lead us to a set of doors, white as always, with a silver handle and they made us enter one at a time. I didn’t understand what was happening. From inside the doors came some quiet sobs, and I wondered if they were hitting them or if they were talking with a therapist about particularly painful topics, but I couldn’t really have an answer.

Kurt was in the line next to mine, he held his arms over his chest and he seemed to be trying to curl himself up to not have to go through that door.

He felt me watching and he looked up. He eyed me with compassion, maybe realizing that that was the first time for me. The first day. The first everything.

It was my turn and I kept looking at him, until he mouthed, “Don’t cry.” I didn’t under stand what he was saying until I entered and they closed the door behind my back.

In front of me there were two doctors and a projector. A lot of pictures of naked men slided on the white wall in front of a chair. Next to it some metal clips linked to a strange machine.

Electric chair.

I was starting to understand.

I already wanted to cry.