2001-02-02 - 16:04:29
I Can't Quite Tell This Story

I Can't Quite Tell This Story

Second, there was Matt, my first lover. We have overlapped so intensely and beautifully; what of all that is mine to tell, with him as one of my readers? (Matt has read this before I posted.)

We met at a funeral. March 30, 1988. Tom was 24, one of the first in the local gay community to get it. I was 22, had been paired up with Tom as a volunteer "Buddy" through the AIDS agency. Matt, 19, had been Tom's last lover, his greatest love. They'd gone out for about nine months, just before Tom was diagnosed. Matt now lived in another city, the city where he and I currently reside.

At an AIDS benefit the previous fall, Tom--dolled up in black against pasty white skin, floppy handkerchief almost covering his baldness from recent brain surgery--had a conniption when he spotted Matt in the crowd. Excitedly, he pointed this tall young dark-haired beauty out to me. "That's him! The guy I was telling you about--Matt, my one true love!" Tom wondered if Matt would come up and talk to him. Matt was stunning to look at; I didn't meet him, but I was happy to see him and Tom chatting later on in the evening. Tom said their conversation made his night.

I don't know what to say about my brief, intense friendship with Tom. He was young, he was sick, he was surrounded by a large family whose thumping bibles were put aside enough to love and support him. He had the unfortunate task of coming out to them as gay with AIDS. Tom felt ostracized by the gay community; most of his queer friends retreated in terror when he was diagnosed. We talked a lot, gay stuff and life stuff and dying stuff. He once cut my hair. One time down in the smoking lounge at the hospital, Tom in a wheelchair with the IV pole close by, he said: "I don't want to gross you out or anything, but man oh man I could really use a good fuck!" Two nights before his death, I and his best friend Todd visited; his family had brought him home from the hospital. Tom had lost consciousness. Todd and I stood there with that frail wisp of a body, his breathing phlegmy and irregular. We massaged him goodbye from head to toe.

I was not surprised to see Matt at the funeral. But I was unprepared for the throb in my pants and chest when I looked at this beautiful man at the lunch afterwards. A confusing, arousing tug. That night at the gay bar, a slow song was played in memory of Tom. Matt and I danced. He was wearing a yellow sweater, I remember. By song's end, we were one body.

I held him all night. I spoke about the end of Tom's life, the last time I saw him. Matt cried. We did not have sex, although we tried. Matt kept staying over at my place, prolonging his visit to the city. We felt a bit guilty about what was happening, whether our romance was somehow dishonoring Tom's memory.

Within a week, I was head over heels. Hickies and hard-ons and swollen hearts. The way we'd met seemed so weird but felt so right.

I was delighted that Matt moved back home to my city; he'd broken up with a lover a few months before, and needed a change. Although he kept a room at his mom's house, he basically lived with me. Matt was out to his mother; she wasn't too comfortable with it back then; he more or less pulled away from his family. At the time I lived in the basement of my parent's house; I had just finished my B.A. in History. Neither of us were working, nor looking very hard for a job. Mom and Dad adored Matt. My alcoholic drinking tapered off overnight.

Soon, arguments and clashes arose. I barely remember what any of that was about, but our conflicts intensified. At the four-month mark, I attempted to break up with him. He talked me out of it; my commitment to the relationship deepened.

A month later, Matt's brother died suddenly. The details are his to tell. I sensed this tragedy would undo us and I was right. The breach between Matt's family life and his life with me was unbridgeable. I remember standing at the graveside, tears leaking down beneath my sunglasses as I watched Matt cry, unable to even approach --much less comfort--him in front of his family.

Two weeks later--August 19, 1988--Matt broke up with me. I knew it was coming; I was nonetheless devastated. I began drinking and fucking maniacally; I became a regressed bruise, a baby abandoned by its mother. It was not pretty.

"Our story began at a funeral, and ended at one," I once wrote. "Or did it?"

Within a few days, Joey and I decided to relocate to the "big city" where Matt had once lived, where we all live now. Two or three weeks after the break-up, Matt's sister died. Unimaginable, what he and his family went through during this dark time. But he and I could not, would not, did not break through the divide; not one word got exchanged. Mom and I attended her funeral, she squeezed my arm as I gasped at the sight of him, again, in church; we snuck away early so I could catch my bus, whisked away to a new life.

I had a lot of grieving to do. In and amongst making new friends, binge-drinking, and--after a five month phase of celibacy--slutting my way through the new club scene, I accomplished some of that.

Within a year-and-a-half, Matt and I began a cautious reconnection. He would come up to this city for a visit; I began to visit him back in my old city. We began to hang out, joke around, enjoy one another again. I ached to get back together as lovers, but I did not voice this; we did not speak about our past.

At the end of one of Matt's weekend visits, I shyly offered to drive him back home. He was going to take the bus back, and so was happy to accept my offer. It's a five hour drive. At the mid-way point, I finally took a deep breath and spilled. Shared what it had been like for me since we broke up, how happy I was he and I had reconnected. Risked the fumbling words, "I want you back" as we careened down the night highway.

One of the most important conversations of my life. No, Matt didn't want that, but he too valued our post-romantic friendship. We got naked together in a different way that night. We've been close friends ever since. I let go in that heartbroken way; we grabbed hold of one another anew. Within a few months, Matt moved back to this city for a job and we became inseparable.

Many years later, I was visiting this city from Toronto; Matt was single at the time and he had this tantalizing habit of inviting me to share his bed when I would visit. I was in an open relationship back in Toronto with my lover, Mark. That night--as it turned out, the six year anniversary of our break-up--I made a pass at Matt, started to massage his back. He froze up, said sex would not feel right. I laughed, we talked all that out, and I was overjoyed at how whimsical I felt about the episode. I didn't need to have sex with him; my naughtiness had been a lark; thus, I didn't feel rejected. I could feel in my silly body how far I'd come, how deeply I loved this man.

Now I live back here, just a few blocks away from Matt and his lover of four years, Trevor. Matt and I both wonder, sometimes, if we've grown apart. We lead very different lives. But we have this bond, a shared history which we rarely speak of much anymore: a comfortable, comforting intimacy that can break open whenever a good talk is needed.

In a rare pithy moment, I once said to friends back in Toronto: "We are inarticulate about that which matters most to us." As I struggle here to tell this heart-story, I agree with myself.

These words are not enough. They don't express Matt's impact on my life. Perhaps my prosaic fumblings tell a story I didn't know was there.

I have a file of documents about us. (My friends tease me about my record-keeping, yet they all want to see their dossier.)

Items:

1. National Geographic. How many can say their ex's photograph appeared there?

2. The photo we had professionally taken when I convocated in the summer of '88. The photographer was awkward, discomfited by two guys wanting pictures done together. My face is so heavy; I have one bushy eyebrow growing straight across. Everyone called me "BROW" back then. I began plucking shortly after. Matt looks so young, has such an elegant coif happening. I'm wearing a pink triangle qua tie pin. These pictures were not ready until after we broke up; they were hard to look at for a long, long time.

3. A letter I wrote to him, June 5, 1990. We'd had the big talk the previous November; I needed to raise more stuff with him. My insecurities and feelings and needs. "Let's work on this, OK, because I love you." We did.

4. A Christmas card. "With love your friend forever Matt"

5. Postcard from Club Med, 1991.

6. Birthday card, calling me a "Slut".

7. A letter I wrote him from Toronto, 1994, enclosing a manuscript where I'd tried to write this story before. He loved what I wrote, disagreed sharply--as he no doubt will again--with many of my memories.

8. Another birthday card. Outside: "Flies spread disease." A grumpy old woman, lips pursed, fly swatter in hand. Inside: "Keep yours closed!"

9. His sister's funeral card.

10. Another birthday card.

11. Four pages of thoughts I wrote back in July 1988 when I tried to break up with Matt. "We held each other last night, and said we loved each other. I was crying. 'What the fuck's the problem then!'"

12. A three-page letter I wrote Matt a few weeks after we met, when he came back to this city to collect his belongings. "It was so hard to see you off at the bus depot this morning - I wanted to wrap my arms around you and give you a big kiss. Mom even asked me about it: 'I suppose you couldn't give Matt a kiss at the depot…or did you?'"

13. His brother's funeral card and obituary.

14. A mushy card. Outside: "To love…is to care about another's feelings as though they were your own." Matt wrote inside: "Just to let you know how I feel."

15. A graduation card, from when I convocated from university.

16. The four-page letter Matt handed me, tears in his eyes, the day I moved out of this city in the spring of 1991. "Although I've not told you often enough how much I really love you, but words are hard to describe the way I feel about you, as you know. I feel very lucky, to have had an opportunity to love you as a lover and as a friend. An opportunity that does not come along to many people."

17. A card I gave him, just before the break up. "I will stay in love with you forever," it says on the outside.

18. His sister's obituary.

19. A letter I wrote him a week after the break-up. Begging him to come back.

20. A letter I wrote him a month after moving out of town, October 1988. Begging him to come back to me, qua friend. It wasn't yet time.

21. A chatty, superficial letter I wrote, April 1989. Blah blah blah.

Tom's been dead nearly thirteen years now. I think he would like what's been made from love.

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