The Angel

(The second of three parts) "I thought I understood it, that I could grasp it, but I didn't. Not really. Only the smudgeness of it, the pink-slippered, all-containered, semi-precious eagerness of it. I didn't realize it would sometimes be more than whole, that the wholeness was a rather luxurious idea. Because it's the halves that halve you in half. I didn't know, don't know, about the in-between bits. The gory bits of you and the gory bits of me." (Like Crazy, 2011)

I didn't realize I was past the gym until I got to the crossroad a mile away. I turned right and took the long way drive back to the gym because I had a few things on my mind. I read an article yesterday that disturbed me; the disconnect that happened between mother and son when the son came out to his mother. His mother said, I'll think about it. Some days later, the son jumped off a bridge because his college roommate had secretly videotaped him getting intimate with a man and had sent a link on where to watch it on his Twitter account.

It took me three months to get back to my feet. I mourned for you, I mourned for us more than I had mourned for the death of my parents or anyone else I have lost. You were the heartbreak that kept breaking my heart.

It was still a day before the 24th, but I was a nervous wreck already. I was done with the Christmas presents, but I wasn't confident enough that your family would like them. After more than a year, I would finally get to meet them, although you would still be introducing me as your friend hoping that somehow they'd get what that meant. You wanted to make me feel better after the summer my mother had died. You wanted to welcome me into your world when I had felt so unwelcome in mine.

We had settled into a domestic life between two houses. On weekdays we stayed at my place, on weekends and holidays we stayed at yours. You cooked, I washed the dishes and we did our grocery and laundry together. There was a rhythm to it, like the regular beating of the heart, that felt familiar and safe. In another life, it would have been tedious and boring. But the gay world was psychedelic that the change of pace was a welcome change. I wasn't at all religious, having given up on God when I became estranged from my family and it was friends, not God, who saved me. But I joined you to church on Sunday mornings and we would have brunch afterwards in Eastwood and spend a lazy afternoon walking around or back to your place for an afternoon coital delight. The unsurprising way our life moved, the patterns it had assumed, were things I appreciated and looked forward to. It was something we could fall back into when the outside world was too noisy for comfort.

It was hard working with our different schedules. You're awake when I'm asleep and you're asleep when I'm awake. But we tried to make it work. Although we've never really talked about it, about us. Or if there was an us. I didn't want to broach the subject, because it's only been a month. And even after 30 days of talking with you and being with you, I still didn't know where you stood or how you felt about things. I couldn't tell if you were one of those who needed to be asked or if you simply let things waddle. It was unclear whether a month was still too short or too long a time for you, but I had to ask you. I couldn't bear to stand on uncertain grounds. And because for the longest time I wanted to say I love you. But I was scared that you would only thank me for it.

I shouldn't have told you I was ticklish. Every time I stretched myself you'd tickle me and I'd end up laughing out loud; mad that you're the opposite of ticklish. I had an awareness of those times, the times that we did what lovestruck lovers do. They had a silliness that made me cringe and love them. We spent the day after in your bed, drugged and intoxicated by the rough events of the night. It felt like there was no life before you. If there was, all I could remember was the gray paleness of it--the night shift work that I hated; the dates that never prospered that made me feel like I was looking too hard, almost forcing to find love. The feeling that at 33 I was still muddling through life, still figuring out things I should have figured out when my age was still in the calendar. The general feeling that I was being left out and eased out of whatever wonder there was in life. But being there, beside you, on that bed felt like it was right; I found a place where I...

I stood there on the corner nursing a beer, the sweat of the bottle felt damp on my hands. It was still early and the crowd was thin, both in numbers and in size. Many of them came in groups, in twos and threes, though in fours and fives were the more common. Some were familiar faces, the regulars of the club, who may or may not have slept with one another at one time. The solo ones, like me, flocked at the bar or near it, surveying the place with mild disinterest, more conscious than not of being observed too. Some faced the bartender and observed through the mirrored glass while others faced the still-empty dance floor, as if in a trance. The remixes and the popular dance music would come later when the crowd pours in, but for the early birds, the club played an endless, wordless Euro pop and trance music. Nobody danced on those songs. They were just a way of cloaking the desperation borne by those who came in early on a Saturday night when everyone else was on their third or fourth...