One of the ways we are instructed to safely extinguish a fire is by burying it. Suffocating its access to oxygen is one effective way to stop the burn. That doesn’t work quite as well for the human heart. For far too many years, I made a habit of burying things that bothered me – hurt that went unreconciled, forgiveness that never found the air to flourish, and those messy emotions that only served to trip me up. It was the only way I knew, the only method I’d learned to deal with something that might otherwise derail the tidy life I tried so hard to assemble and keep.
Maybe that’s one of the setbacks of being in the closet. For my generation of gay people, we made a habit of burying things – secrets, desires, attractions, feelings, emotions – and we became adept at living out various lies and masquerades until it was difficult to tell the difference between what was real, what was in our hearts, and what the world perceived.
Looking back over the decades, I pause and wonder at how much I’ve truly addressed, and how much still needs to be exhumed before I can genuinely claim to have let it all go.
My mind returns to the fall of 1994, when I met a man who would inform so many of my experiences with men that would follow. He was the first man I ever kissed, the first man I was ever naked with, and the first man who pulled whatever capacity he might have had to love entirely away from me. It all happened within the span of a couple months, and there is a journal of those days which I recently removed from its bookshelf, blowing the dust off its cover and returning to the words I wrote when I was only 19 years old.
It’s largely an embarrassing and painstakingly detailed account of mostly nothing, given the import and drama of an average teenager. One phrase struck me, pointing out how young and naive I was then: “Am I doing something wrong?” The moments of doubt and uncertainty, because I had never been with a man before and there had been no examples or guides or the merest whisper that what I was feeling and going through wasn’t wrong or sinful, feel keenly raw, even to this day.
There was so much innocence to what I wrote, as much as I tried to protect myself with a jaded attitude and prickly disposition. There was haughtiness too, and the college kid’s typical bravado in the way we thought we knew it all. The writing is stilted and clumsy, but it was only a journal. The magic was in the process of writing it all down.
I read another passage:
…I asked if he was falling in love with me, and he had said, “Not yet, no.” Neither was I, if I could help it. He also said he couldn’t wait to spend the whole night with me, and wake up and watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat cereal. I wasn’t so sure. If I wanted that. Or of anything…
So many words, and so much emptiness. When I read what I wrote all those years ago, the overriding sense is one of incredible loneliness, which is strange, because I rarely recall feeling lonely. Yet that’s the essence of all those words… and they’re only words unless they’re true.
The journal goes into the days after we met – from September into October – and the eventual dissolution of our ‘relationship’ – something that I didn’t even realize I was in. Near the end, all I focus on is the collection of his own words. I don’t think I’ve really listened to them since that year. Seeing them there, in print, an exact quote of what he said, I’m somewhat shocked.
In one entry, after I’d tracked him down after he ghosted me, I was invited to walk with him while he picked up dinner. He asked if I wanted anything from the store to drink – he was getting a Coke. I told him no.
“Oh that’s right, you never want anything.”
We went back to his place, where he sat down and ate his dinner of Chinese food, drinking his Coke. I blurted out a question on whether I was a major or minor part of his life. A rookie mistake, but I knew no other way to communicate other than in the most direct and honest way. He didn’t really answer. He said it was hard to get to know me, that I was so quiet and I had this double-level. One part was the small bit that I let him and the world see, and the other part was this hidden, secret life. He said I was always having an internal conversation and thinking it through in my head and that made it very difficult to get to know me. He said maybe it was because I was alone so often, and that he knew, he was weird too. He said more, but I wrote down that it had already escaped me.
This was actually the next to last time I would see him, but I write as though it will be our final encounter. Playing a game I was just starting to learn, I drew back.
“So this is the last time,” I said.
“That we’re going to see each other?” he asked.
“Yeah, at least that’s what I gather.”
“No, I mean, I’d like to see you again.”
I rose from the bed and picked up my back-pack.
“I have to go now,” I said – and then I left.
Reading that now, I feel confused. I didn’t remember this part of our story. In all my tellings of it, I focus on the end, on our last meeting, when he says it’s not working out, that our age difference is too much and we are incompatible. I forgot that there was this moment when he wanted to see me again, and I pulled away. The startling way a written record brings the past back into focus, no matter how many times you have tried to retell it.
There is a photograph of me in my dorm room at the time, glued to the back of one of the journal pages. The sunset is coming in through the windows, and it looks like the room is on fire. I hold a pillow in my arms, looking upward into the light. I remember that room. I remember that light.
What I don’t remember is how close I came to destroying myself during that stretch of time. It’s there on every page, the danger and the desire for danger, just to prove that I was alive. I don’t think I realized how badly I was burned by the whole experience, how deeply the wounds went.
…The bruises they will fade away, you hit so hard with the things you say…
Fall always brings me back to that place, but I usually resist its pull. This year I’m going to stay there a while, looking at it from the safe vantage point of the life I’ve made for myself, allowing the feelings of loneliness and fear to wash over me. It’s time to acknowledge the past.
And then burn it down.
