by Seth King
I smile to myself. Over the past few weeks and months and years, I’ve been wondering a lot. Sometimes, after coming out of the closet, I didn’t even want to get out of bed. Sometimes I wondered what I was fighting for, what I had to look forward to, what I was walking toward when every day’s road could be so hard.
But what I didn’t think about was that regardless of all that, I was still fighting. I was still trying. And that means I obviously care, right? My existence is proof enough that I want to be here, that I want to figure this out. That I want to keep walking on this path, wherever it leads.
And maybe, just maybe, I was waiting for him all along. Maybe he is my firestarter…
“Where are you going?” Gracie asks as I rush out of there.
“To change pants. And then to go find someone.”
Robert Glazer
I flee that horrible house and hit a trail along the lake, tears stinging my eyes, breathing so heavily I can feel my heart in my chest.
So it’s over. It’s all over. I should’ve known. I never should’ve tried this in the first place, to be honest. It was insane. The first thing I should’ve done was turn away from the reaction in my gut and just…ignore it. That would’ve been the adult thing to do. The responsible thing. We would never work in the real world.
Eliot was right to be skeptical the whole time. We were built to fall apart.
I circle the lake once, then twice, just lost in my own head. I can’t be too angry. If nothing else, Eliot just gave me the most beautiful week of my life. And the most stressful, but still: memories are valuable. I know our time together was brief, but volcanoes can change entire landscapes in minutes. He was my volcano. Until I die, I think I’ll look back at the words “Woodhouse Lawn” and smile. Maybe masturbate, too. But mostly smile. I’ll keep these scenes in my heart for the long haul.
I take a deep breath of this heady mountain air. I think of something Eliot said before – love is love. It’s simple and dumb, but it’s true. My life is built on the foundational belief that love is love, and is never a choice. That’s the sentiment that kept me sane every time the world made me feel “less than,” every time it made me feel like I was dirty or wrong. I just never thought that belief would be questioned in this way. But hey, nobody can plan for the future, right?
As I look back on this week, I’ll try to be grateful. I’ll try to appreciate what I had instead of mourning what I lost. Will I be successful? Who knows. But Eliot Prince gave me a gift here, he really did. I’ll always remember him.
My phone rings. I don’t check it. I can’t deal with anything right now. I just walk for a while, trying not to cry, until the voicemail sound pings. That makes me get a little curious. Why the voicemail? Who leaves those anymore, anyway?
Finally I look. It’s Eliot. He left me a voicemail. A long one.
I swallow. I don’t even want to hear his voice right now. I guess it’s ironic that, after our relationship being defined by age differences, he is breaking it off with me in a way as old-fashioned as a voicemail. I don’t even know anyone who leaves these things anymore. But hey, we never made sense at all, did we? No sense in starting now.
I pick up and start listening, wincing again at the sound of his voice. It already hurts to hear him, but I guess I’ll just have to deal with it.
“Hi, Robert,” he says in the message, breathing hard into the receiver, but sounding calm at the same time. Despite myself, I smile. “I can’t find you, so I thought I’d start a voicemail while I walked. I’m just wandering around Woodhouse Lawn, basically, looking for you aimlessly. So anyway, something just happened, and I had a thought: what if I saw you, ten years from now, with someone else? Or twenty years from now? You’d have a different life by then. So would I. We’d be different people. Under different circumstances. We’d have totally grown apart. We’d be strangers. Right?”
I swallow and choke back a tear.
“But then I thought…you know, so many people take the wrong path somewhere,” the message continues. “They forget that love is king, and they turn down the wrong road. Soon they’ve let go of the best thing they ever had, and their lives become okay. Not great, not gorgeous, but just okay. I never want to be okay, Robert, and the last week has been the most un-okay of my life. But in the best way possible. I found you, I knew we couldn’t be together, and I started falling apart. But…maybe I just made a mistake, Robert. A huge one. It’s not too late, though.”
As hope springs in me, desperate and wild, he clears his throat in the voicemail.
“You know, a lot of people will look at us and find reasons why we shouldn’t be allowed to be together. But that has been true my whole life. I lost friends the instant I came out, people who thought I shouldn’t be with any man at all. And I’m not the first one. My grandma’s aunt lost her entire family when she married a black man in the ‘30s. There all kinds of reasons people try to keep other people apart, and all of them are fucking stupid. So I was thinking…why not just say fuck it, and choose for ourselves?”
I am crying hard now. I wipe my face as I listen to him. The bird sounds are familiar to me, and I realize he must be somewhere very near me.
“I’m still looking for you now, walking around,” he says. “Are you even here, or did you leave? I guess I’ll find out…”
It’s just too good – right then, Eliot turns around a bend in the path behind me. He can’t see me yet as I watch him and listen to his voicemail, though.
I sigh. He is everything I want within one bag of skin, my dream in real life. I pause and stand taller. This doesn’t make a lick of sense, and the rest of my life might be rocked by what happened here. But…
“Love is love,” the voicemail says in my ear, “is love, is love, a thousand times over. It would be hypocritical of everything I ever believed if I turned around and denied that now, after upending my whole life to pursue the feelings I felt deep down. You know?”
I swallow. Yes, Eliot. I know.
“Anyway, I’m rambling now, but I can’t stop. You know, I’ll never forget the first thing I felt after I really realized I was gay: shame. That’s what I felt. I was so embarrassed of what I was, and afraid of the world’s reaction to it. Ever since then I’ve fought back against the shame, the fear. To be a gay man isn’t anything revolutionary – people are born gay every day. But to be a proud gay man, now that’s a goddamned miracle. I want to be proud for the rest of my life, and that involves never letting them make me feel ashamed of my romantic life, no matter the circumstances. And Robert, that includes you, doesn’t it? Our bond is perfect and normal and clean, no matter what they say…”
My shoulders lift as something large and heavy takes flight from my chest. So he’s changed his mind. He’s not running.
“Love is love, no matter who you’re loving, no matter the skin they come in,” his voicemail continues. “Our situation isn’t ideal, obviously, but then again, what situation is? You were right all along. I was just too stubborn to listen. Whenever it gets hard, whenever it seems like everyone is against us, all we have to do is remember that our bond is the same as anyone else’s. Anyway, um, I’m still looking for you, in real time, as I leave this message, so, uh, I’ll just keep walking around the lake… see you soon, hopefully…oh, wait. And one more thing...”
I listen to him take a breath.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, Robert. But…I love you. What I said the other night was true: I love you. I love you, exactly as you are. I love you, even though I am scared shitless of that love, and of what it would mean for my life. I love you, even though it will set fire to my whole world when we pursue this. I love you, and it’s the first and the last thing I know to be true. I love you, and that is enough for me. I love you. If you’re not risking anything, you’re already six feet under. So…let’s go get a little crazy. I love you, Robert. Bye.”
The voicemail ends, and a smile cracks my face in two.
“Eliot!” I call, as I notice that he
is wearing the ripped jeans I got him – the ones he said represented his freedom. “Eliot!”
By the time he looks up, I am not walking to him. I am running.
The End
