Typical Awkward Abandon

Until 2003, at the age of 37, I had only had sex with three people. Well, six if you count a drunken orgy with three friends as a freshman in college. But I don’t really count that as we all just got more frustrated than anything else. Poor communication, particularly as it relates to feelings and carnal desires, had to do with the demise of all of these relationships. I’ll own the bit that was mine: I have an incredibly difficult time knowing my own needs and desires after years and years of refining the state of simply not having any to begin with. It was my experience that allowing myself the luxury of desire only led to pain and disappointment down the line. Better to want nothing of life. Of course, I didn’t understand until it was much too late the toll that takes.

When I fell in love with Elle, the third or the sixth of those people depending on how you choose to ad it up, it was quite literally love at first sight. I looked up and saw her enter the room and I was sprung. She had a sort of chubby, well, fat really, soft butch bjork thing going on. I remember she wore a green hoody and shaggy baggy jeans, looking like a scrappy tomboy in a roomful of preppy baristas all trying to appease the corporate wigs at Starbucks. We would be sequestered away all weekend in a stuffy windowless office for a fucking “sanitation” class. It was required to rise from barista to lead clerk and thus merit your lousy fifty cent raise. As the city health inspector droned on and on about the appropriate handling of dairy products and the numerous varieties of cockroaches found in Chicago sewers I gazed at her and imagined she and I and Upton Sinclair were drinking our double tall americanos and laughing as all the grande nonfat latte ladies were dropping like flies on the streets of Chicago.

I wooed her with my typical awkward abandon and it took me for fucking ever to figure out if she was queer. Every rainbow flag and Queer Nation sticker I spotted in her apartment belonged to her roommate, a flaming fairy if ever there was one. And of course, all her queer friends were his friends too. So no dish there. And for every move I made to indicate my adoration I was simply confused more by her sweet smile and seductive silence.

During a particularly treacherous Chicago snow storm that fortuitously prevented me from driving back home to the south side of the city, we went for a midnight walk and I confessed my love. Under a heavy blanket of silence – only three feet of snow and Elle could hush the cacophony of the EL trains and the sirens and the steady stream of traffic off of Lake Shore Drive - I told her “I think I’m falling in love with you.” Her only response was “me?”

Later that night, as we lay side by side on her small futon, afraid to let our bodies touch as we shivered to death trying to stay warm under two thin blankets in a room with a broken radiator and the chilly winter air hissing through cracks in her tenement windows, I finally managed to ask her “Can I kiss you.” “I don’t know” she said. And then I kissed her.

We were together for just about five years, but in my heart it was a lifetime. Of course, being queer, we were never married. But we often spoke of looking forward to growing old together. We talked about having children and creating our own family since our families of origin were not our real families. She would often say “I can’t imagine I would ever fall out of love with you.” And then she would ask me “Will you always love me?” And I would tell her the only truth I knew for sure “I don’t know the answer to that. But I love you very much right now and I can’t imagine it ever being otherwise.” My heart wanted to believe her, that she would always be true to me. But my head already knew that love is fickle.

Eventually, my heart was indeed proven wrong. It started when I bought her the computer. And she got on-line. And she became addicted to the internet. She would stay up late, leaving me to fall asleep by myself to the sound of her clicking away on the keyboard right outside our bedroom door connecting with people in chatrooms on the other side of the world. It got to the point where she was forgetting to eat and not sleeping at all and looking all disheveled and missing work and doctor’s appointments just to be on the internet. I had seen this behavior before with roommates who were addicted to heroin. It scared me, but I knew, as with other addictions, I was powerless to stop it from running its’ course.

One night I came home and she had made a beautiful dinner. Homemade soup. A hand picked salad with fresh herbs. Some fancy entrée which I can’t for the life of me recall. Candles. Wine. She had loved to cook for me in the earlier part of our courting but it had been some time since she had even so much as joined me for a meal. As we sat down I looked at her and told her how beautiful everything was and asked what the special occasion was. She looked at me with her empty, mysterious eyes and nothing came out of her mouth. And in that moment I knew what I had not known the moment before, and, of course, had always known. I asked her “are you breaking up with me?” and she burst into tears. She never said the words though. She never said the fucking words.

Of course, there is more to the story. You have surely guessed it involved secret internet affairs. Which it did. And, I don’t mind admitting, even though I am not proud of it, I learned about these relationships by entering the password she had posted for weeks on a sticky-note to the monitor and reading the incredibly passionate and erotic exchanges between her and some baby dyke in Switzerland.

And months and months of not having been intimate, in any way, with each other.

And not even having the energy to argue anymore.

Eventually a few painful sessions spent with a couple’s counselor brought us no closer to a solution. I believed we could work things out if only we could just tell one another the truth. And she could never say anything more than “I don’t know.” Finally, I told her “I don’t know” was not enough for me and I left. To this day I resent that she never had the courage to say that she did know what she wanted. And just tell me the truth.

So, the part I hadn’t guessed, as I doubt you have, is this: I found out much, much later that Elle had told a close friend of ours that one of her reasons for being unhappy in our relationship was that she wanted to explore more kinky sex. And I thought Jesus fucking Christ, couldn’t she just have fucking asked for what she wanted just that once?

Flash forward five years. I have been celibate and depressed and closed off from people the entire time. Licking my wounds. Thinking if I don’t let anyone close I won’t get hurt again. Then, by some twist of fate, I got sent to a meeting some states away where I met a young man from Africa. Nothing happened but some smiles and a few passing words, and yet my life would never be the same.

A month later fate intervenes again and I get sent as part of a work delegation to Africa. And once again there is one of those moments where I am sitting in a crowded room and I look up and I’m instantly in love. I see his face from across the room and a secret smile passes between us. For the short week we were together in Africa nothing much more then meaningful glances and quiet conversations were exchanged between us. But as soon as I left Africa behind I knew I had made a mistake. I had missed my opportunity to tell the truth and make my desires be known.

Once I returned home to the states we started to email one another and the truth telling began. Our affection was confessed, as was the reality of his situation. In short, he had left the priesthood to be with a woman named Anabelle and he had made a vow to remain true to her. He believed that since he had left God to be with her that leaving her would be betraying God once again. In the end, his love proved fickle as well and he left her too. But not to be with me. Instead he began to wonder the world searching for himself yet again.

But it was too late. I was already transformed. I will never again pass by love, or the chance for it. And I now know it takes more risk, and courage, and humility, and honesty, and did I say risk, then I ever imagined. And it may be fleeting or it may endure a life time, but we will never know unless we dare to say, out loud and to the ones we love, what we want. And to the ones we want, what we love.