If you were here, I'd share my bowl of watermelon ice. We'd sit by the pool at my parents' place and let it melt in our mouths on this warm-but-cooling summer night. I've been to a lot of places, but this is my favorite. I'm out here now alone composing this.

The front of my thighs are sunburned because I spent the day floating down the American River with 20 people from my singles ward, 100 people from singles wards round about, and bunches of strangers. I must have been showing more skin than I planned. I must have been enjoying myself too much to notice.

I'm taking them at their word: I, like everyone, am welcome. I'm 25 and gay and inactive and welcome, and my ward lets me feel it. They are somehow unafraid of me believing differently, and I am somehow unafraid of voicing different beliefs.

Not all the time. Not, usually, in public. But during the chitchat times when people ask what's up I tell them I'm visiting my boyfriend in Boston next week and waiting patiently for him to finish his summer internship and be nearby all the time, and they say, oh cool, what's his name? When they are the church for me, I am happy with the church and it is something I want enriching my life forever.

Starting August 1, I will be moving out of my lovely, lovely ward, the Berkeley university ward. I'll miss it, and them, and I will probably come back to visit a few times, but my new ward will be out on the Peninsula. It will be great. I am apprehensive.

I will try to remember the confidence and pride that helps me here. It will be great.

It will be great.

If you were here, I'd ask how things are going for you. It's been so long since we've talked. I haven't been keeping up with the blogs, so some of you I've never known. For many months now I've been caught up in living life, not taking the time to consider it or share it. In the past I considered too much and lived too little; maybe this time I'll find some thin gold line of balance.

And you? Are you balanced? Are you happy?

I passed through a rite of passage for literate gay Americans yesterday, finishing my first Dan Savage book. He makes happiness look so very easy. He makes balance look easy, with a few decisive words about Catholicism and back to the soothing but not in and of itself convincing mantra that gay = good.

I hope we all get to that knowledge eventually, of course, but there's something about the way he presents it that glosses over the choking, scratching process of knowledge development and makes me feel silly for not being quite there yet, sometimes.