I have a foolish and new tendency to stay up late. Every night, I condemn myself to my bedroom, turn off the lights, open the windows to let in the cool breeze, and I watch the most heart-wrenching films imaginable. Tonight I watched a Spanish film called “Undertow,” the story of a man who struggles to understand his romantic feelings for his wife and his male lover. It may seem like a cheap story, but it was beautifully executed. There’s a scene where Miguel and Santiago are walking through the Catholic, seaside town holding hands, a clear defiance of a rigid tradition of heterosexuality, but no one can see Santiago because he is dead. The scene nearly brought me to tears. It is how I feel. How easy love could be if those whose hand I would want to hold could be invisible, so I could love in public without having to face the humiliation and utter ostracization that comes with being gay. You have to be gay to understand, I think. I do not know if we love the same way as heterosexuals do. I wonder if a man loving a man is more passionate, more intense, more complex and dynamic. To be gay, as the movie put it, takes courage. It takes standing up to a society that hates you and saying screw it, this is who I love and you can’t stop me. I don’t think I’m at that point. I know I want love though. I want to be Miguel, holding in my arms my lover, in secret, kissing them and holding them, as if the whole of the world was contained in that moment. I stay up late dreaming of these things. The other night I dreamed I was dating Tom Cullen, the actor from the movie Weekend. We loved in secret, in a cabin shrouded by frightening green woods, veiled in mist and darkness. I remember walking through the woods, the trees crowning above my head, reaching up to the blank night sky. The cabin sat there featureless, a dark slab of geometry set against a backdrop of drooping fauna. Inside there were tables. People huddled in groups, talking, drinking coffee and holding it close, as if it were cold outside. I don’t remember it being cold. I just remember looking into his eyes, holding his hand in my fingers, not even caring what the people around me thought-only the ones at home. It’s funny how you can fall in love with dreams, with ideas. They can feel so real and you can feel so alive. I woke up in love, with a horrible realization it was only a dream, with the dreadful understanding that I would have to return to my life of hiding and wishing and never having. I am in love with the idea that someday I will meet a man that is as ashamed as me of being gay, but who will realize with me that while this is a curse, it is love. Until I find my man to hold and be held by, I will stay up late dreaming, reaching to the sky like those trees in my dream, as rooted to my fears as trunks to the soil. I am in love with the idea of love.