I wrote to Miles last weekend, my first contact since our abrupt goodbye. He (and his new boyfriend) returned back to the other side of the country just after New Years where Miles will finish his degree; thankfully, I didn't run into them on the street before that. This is what I wrote:
Hi there, well it's been about a month since we said goodbye. I am ready to make contact with you, and my hope is that we can build a friendship.
I knew our relationship would end when you left town, but what I was really looking forward to was a beautiful goodbye, a goodbye for no other reason other than that you were leaving town. I felt our time together was exquisite, and it seemed like a "success", emotionally, romantically, sexually spiritually; that's how I wanted it to feel as it ended.
So that's why I was upset and hurt. Instead, it felt to me like I was being dumped in favor of someone else. I mean, we both understood that once we said goodbye we'd both be single and do our own thing, meet new people: this felt qualitatively different, you pairing up like that, foreshortening our time together. It made me really sad. I guess I thought that, like me, you'd need some time alone to miss me in your heart, to savor what we had together, before you were ready to get seriously involved with someone. It hurt.
I have been doing a lot of reflecting and remembering, and so now I recall the last long walk in the park where we had such a good talk and agreed to stop considering ourselves dating, that from then on until your departure, we woud be intimate friends rather than boyfriends as part of the transition towards your leaving. It was good for me to remember this, Miles, because that alteration we made in our relationship did, I suppose, give both of us some leeway to start moving on from the romantic aspect and consider ourselves somewhat single. In that aspect, I can understand at least a little bit better why you felt okay about arranging your next relationship so quickly. But I guess it felt to me that after that good conversation, the paradox was that we got even closer, and at least from my end, even more romantically involved. We never did discuss that again, I don't think, and so I take responsibility for not keeping my feelings in check.
Anyway, it's in the past now; I will eventually be able to let it go completely. It will just take some time.
Ultimately, as sad and abrupt as it was, our goodbye that afternoon did feel beautiful to me.
You are a wonderful, loving, beautiful man and my life was enriched and in many ways healed by your presence over the autumn months. Thank you for that.
I hope you are well. I hope we can someday call ourselves friends.
Love
A few days later, Miles wrote back. His email really touched me. I'm not going to reproduce it here; somehow, that wouldn't feel right. But he expressed what I needed to hear: that he was deeply sorry about how he had handled this, that he cared deeply about me, and that he too wanted to reconnect as friends. I was overjoyed to hear back from him, and we are now back in regular cyber-contact.
I am not yet completely at peace with how the romantic relationship ended, but the disappointment and hurt feels like it's in the past.
Alex teased me when, in a phone call, I happily related to him that Miles and I had been back in touch: "You're such a closure queen!" And I guess I am. Endings and transitions are important. Ever since I can remember, my interpersonal life has been predicated on flux rather than stability. I'm a sucker for becomings; there's a lot of guys entering and exiting. Relationships that last, that endure and change, inevitably involve difficult conversations, hearing and saying difficult things to each other. And you know something? I'm pretty damned good at hearing and saying those things. I am. I don't give myself nearly enough credit for that. But it takes two to tango, and I'm heartened in a big way that Miles has responded in kind.
The more I think about it, no, "closure" isn't the right word. Sure, the difficult dialogue Miles and I had on email last week closed off one phase of our relationship. But it also, I hope, opened the door to the next phase: a nurturing, meaningful post-romantic friendship.
It reminds me of a passage from Frank Browning's The Culture of Desire: Paradox and Perversity in Gay Lives Today (a book that had a creative impact on the way I viewed my own paradoxically perverse life a decade ago):
Not long ago, an old friend of mine who has been married for more than a quarter of a century, has raised and educated two children, and has maintained a prominent position in in an eastern university made a remarkable confession to me. He had been suffering an especially difficult period both at home and at work. I asked if he shared his anxieties with anyone outside his immediate family. "I don't really have intimate friends," he said. And though he would be more likely to talk revealingly with female colleagues than with males, he admitted, he didn't for fear of being misinterpreted. The personal relations in his life fall into three mutually exclusive categories: colleagues, spouse, and children.
As I listened to my friend's confession of emotional insularity, I couldn't help but think of something Reed Grier had told me about the passing of his gay family. A day or two after his dearest companion, David, died, Reed "crawled into bed" with David's lover, Don. Four years later, shortly after Reed's second lover, Ron, died, Reed found himself having sex with Ron's nurse. At first, it seemed startling to me that Reed should have sought sex in the midst of mourning; it seemed a confirmation of the criticism that gay men are stuck in their sexual obsessions. Yet neither of these single acts in the midst of mourning reflected anything we usually consider obsessive. With Don, the sex seemed to be about ritual bonding, a declaration that even in the midst of an epidemic that had infected every member of these two men's family, they were still alive. In his relations with Ron's nurse, Reed found both comradeship and nurturing. Like many gay men who are able to blend sex with friendship, who occasionally use sex as a form of bonding not unlike an intense game of racquetball, Reed found it possible to break the boundaries that usually separate the categories of male relationship.
On balance I wonder whether by making sex ordinary, even recreational, we have learned to re-form it into a tool for building diverse forms of comradeship. By stealing sex away from the restrictive laws of marriage, by acknowledging its myriad meanings, gay men have shown how lust contributes to the bonds of friendship. By devaluing the taboo of sex among friends, they may have begun to shine more light on the complex and various ways intimacy can be arranged in emerging gay families. This is not to deny that lust without constraint can be abusive, callous, selfish, and ignoble; the point is only that through the persistent exploration of love and lust and nurturing, gay people have helped to open up the territory of family meanings. Individual gays and lesbians may not be able to create new "traditions" of mateship and friendship in family life. But their determination to find a new sort of family may well provide vital models for the remakng of all families, straight and gay.
I found this excerpt so inspiring a decade ago; in many ways, I still do. The part that resonates this evening is the interpersonal flexibility that some gay men--including, sometimes, me--bring to relationships. I sense that Miles and I will stay connected, become important to and engaged with one another in new, meaningful ways. And I'm exhilirated at that prospect; my headspace has improved dramatically since he and I have been back in touch.
I remember the passion with which I devoured Browning's book ten years ago, the passion with which I queerly embraced new relationships of all kinds in my late twenties.
I want that back. Is it still available to me?
Of course it is. I get whiffs of that intense curiosity and openness every so often. But I've been hurt you see. Do you know what I mean? I've been hurt, people have disappeared on me, died on me, said one thing and done another, all kinds of disappointments and vanishing acts. And I've hurt and let others down too. We're all in this together, doing the best we can.
I turn 38 this weekend, and I still feel so much younger than my years. For better and for worse. I sense an aliveness starting to softly hum in me again. I don't think I want to grow up. Ever.
But I am ready to take a bigger breath of life. Ready, again, to spill open.
