Dear Tom –
I don’t think I’ve ever written out your name here. I don’t think I’ve even written you a letter. You were always just the first man who ever kissed me, the first man I ever dated, and the first man who tried to break my heart. I didn’t give you a name because I didn’t want to give you anything. Yet in that very act of attempting to silence you, and everything that you were, I began to realize it granted you more power and sway than you deserved. Without a name, you were this omnipotent force – unbeatable, unattainable and unassailable – when all along you’ve only ever been a man.
Now that I’m well past the age you were when our lives intersected in that tumultuous fall in Boston, I can see you a little better, and I think I understand you a little more. Though it’s been almost thirty years, in some ways I feel closer to our moments together, because they make more sense to me now in a way they couldn’t back then. It has softened my stance toward what we experienced, without in any way exonerating you.
I remember the September day we met. It’s embedded in a memory palace like the piano music here. It’s been fading and decaying over the years, from lack of use and occupants, as well as from the physical degradation of my brain. But it’s there, as prevalent and potent as any other formative memory. Beneath the dark gaze of Trinity Church in Copley Square, we passed each other in the dappled light of a Boston afternoon. We both turned around in the way that gay men did before cel phones or social media, at a time when losing sight of someone who instantly tugged at your heart could mean losing everything. And so we held on, both of us, playing some game you already knew so well, a game that I didn’t know at all, though that twinkle in your blue eyes was a signal I still somehow knew things that neither of us were ready to admit.
When you invited me to walk back to your place, we both understood that I would accept, even if our understanding differed slightly. I could never speak for you, and I won’t make a guess as to what you wanted at that moment. For me, I wanted to experience something. I wanted life to open up like a novel and start my adventures in the world. I wanted to quiet the hunger, indulge in the desire, and be open to whatever might ravenously ravage me, and I wanted to be left like I was ripped inside out. Not that I’d ever tell you that. Not that I even knew enough to put that into words. I was a nineteen year old guy, barely a man, who wanted all of life to chew me up, spit me out, and swallow me all over again. I was insatiable, and would be that way for years. It was something my friends would never quite understand, and, more problematically, something that would frighten away any would-be-paramours, of which you were one of the first.
To be so nakedly insatiable was to be dangerously vulnerable to the ways of that world I wanted so badly to taste, even if I could never fully fathom its poisonous risks. My heart wanted to bite into the apple, even as my head worried over what might result. A tug-of-war that waged battle for most of my life – and you weren’t even the first casualty.
In the same way that we burn wishes and letters that we want only to write but never deliver, I’ve spent the last couple of decades trying to burn down our short, shared past. Not the mechanics of it, not the experience of it, and not the differing ways we might view it, but everything that has since ensued – all the drama and hurt and pain I’ve allowed myself to feel because of you. Because for the most part it wasn’t because of you. You were just the one in the way. It would have happened to anyone else who so engagingly bumped into me on that September day, and though anyone else would likely have been much better for me, we don’t always have a strong say in what the universe deals us. Back then, I certainly didn’t feel like I had a say, or a voice, despite all histrionic actions to the contrary.
Could you have behaved better, been a more helpful guide to someone who so clearly needed it? I think so… I believe so… but I don’t know for sure. The whispers of your own secret world were darker than what I could have imagined at such a young age – and I had a vividly dark imagination. There was also some sadistic attraction to danger and depravity that thrilled my younger self, a need to brush up against someone or something that might at any minute annihilate me. So enamored was I of self-destruction that to put it into the hands of another was merely a self-serving quest. I sensed something in you that would, or could, ruin me, and in my impetuous haste to reach that space, I allowed you to wreak the havoc that you likely never meant to wreak. If you hurt me, I can’t say I didn’t want to be hurt.
I write this letter to you now, Tom – a first and last letter all in one – to absolve and forgive, not just you, but myself too. We were both innocent in many ways, but both culpable as well. I understand that you didn’t mean to be deliberately cruel, and that is something I cannot say for myself. Even if my machinations were false, the end result was the same, and for my cutting edge, I take full responsibility. A pre-emptive strike to stave off certain heartbreak… and perhaps I protected myself too well.
These sorts of letters are supposed to offer some closure, a sense of finality and acknowledgment that ultimately frees the heart and head to move on with genuine forgiveness or resolution. If that no longer feels possible, if there’s no realistic manner of acceptance I can muster, then at the very least I no longer feel conflicted or angry about you. Initially I wanted only to burn this all down, to set these feelings and memories and everything that happened between us on fire, and let it rage like an inferno. You would have deserved that once upon a time. Looking back on what we were, and knowing the things I know today, I can’t say you deserve it now.
You were an alcoholic fighting to stay sober, and when you failed I didn’t know how to get out of your way. You were an actor supporting yourself as a restaurant server, perhaps sensing that your path in life was narrowing as you approached the age of 40. You were a man living alone in the city of Boston, in a tiny apartment near Beacon Hill, struggling to keep your life together, struggling to stay afloat, struggling like we all have to struggle at the wicked and wretched things that the world throws in our path. I was nineteen and had the whole world ahead of me. How could I have possibly understood you?
Years after that fall, I would find myself searching for your face when I was in Boston. It didn’t happen all the time, and as the years passed I found myself doing it less and less to the point where I can’t remember the last time I looked for you – it was long before Andy. I used to want to meet you again, to show you how well I survived what I once perceived as your callous thoughtlessness, to show you what you threw away. Time, and humility, gradually erased those thoughts. The one weekend that brought me back to the place where you used to work turned out to have nothing to do with you, and a few years later I realized it wasn’t you at all who haunted some of my Boston visits – it was only me.
And so I am setting the torch down. There will be other fires I need to start this fall, but none of them concern you. For you, and for this one last time, I light a candle. It’s for that September day when we met, when two men came together beneath a beautiful blue sky, and walked along the Charles River. There was beauty in that simple act, and the gentle, tentative motion of two people beginning to make the space for love, of carving out the possibility for it. Even if that’s not the way it turned out, I can honor it. More importantly, I finally and genuinely realize it cannot hurt me anymore. I hope you have found your peace somewhere too, that you have found your happiness, and that you can still marvel at the world you never wanted to teach me about, but wound up doing so in spite of yourself.
