Nostalgia with an Edge

Tonight on the train I saw two teenaged boys sharing the headphones to an iPod, each with a bud in one ear so they could listen to something together (I see teenagers doing this a lot). Of course this requires that the listeners have their heads kind of close together, and one of the boys settled in with his head on the other's shoulder. They rode like this for a while until the other boy shrugged his shoulder and pushed the first one away. The first boy kept trying to put his head back in place, and the other one kept pushing him away and in between there was much grabbing at headphones and sliding back and forth on the seat and generally a bit more touching than I'd expect to see between two teenaged boys in public. They were both smiling and good natured about it and I began to wonder if they were a couple (you never know these days) until I realized that all of the touching was coming from one of them and all of the pushing-away from the other, and then in a sudden rush I remembered very clearly what it felt like to be a closeted teenager myself, with the tension between how I felt and my utter confusion about it, and the anxious, unambiguous sense that there was some kind of line I'd better not cross even though I had nothing reliable inside telling me where that line was.

I got off the train feeling pretty mushy inside.