I had her and I had him, too, and the fact of one meant that the other was O.K. I'd been conventional and timid my whole life, always worried about acceptance.
In fact I was a man weighed down with disappointment, a man for whom things had not worked out the way he had once imagined, a quiet man, cautious in his life, timid when you came right down to it, though content enough to drift along through the little rituals of his day.
The title of part two, "Dictionary of Timid Love for Life", promises a compendium of Montano's influences, and the names (along with birth and death dates, and birth and death places) are there, beginning with Henri Frédéric Amiel, ending with Paul Valéry, and including the likes of Witold Gombrowicz and Katherine Mansfield.
Most people have a vague idea of what they look like: fully monstrous online, safe behind their computer screens, spraying bile and resentment in all directions, but cringing, timid things in real life.
"Not a timid dancing, but a life-large, goofy, it's-great-to-be-in-my-skin dancing".
He says he is "timid, with no aptitude for life" and wants "never to be a protagonist".
Although outwardly intrepid, when he attempts to draw meaning from the lives that he, his father and Davey have led, his writing can feel timid, sometimes sliding toward cliché: "Life is a barren waste to cross and along the way we'll see dancing mirages that confuse us and a few scattered wells from which to draw our hope".
Karl has an appealing presence as Rocky and Seibert brings some life to the timid Adrian.
Not quite adjusting to his new life of domesticity, timid Frank ditches his wife and two young kids and, in an attempt to mend..
There on in, for the two or so years before I made those first timid steps, I devoted my life to reading everything and anything the internet had to say about being G-A-Y.
