from chicago!

hot off the press (or, you know, terry's computer in chicago)!

Lesson Learned

“I just don’t like feeling like this lovesick homo that’s chasing you all over New York City,” I said to Charles one day. I shifted my gaze downward, studying my new skull and crossbones Converse, not wanting to see his reaction. I picked at the molded rubber, bits of it already falling off even though I’d only bought them a few months earlier. This was one of the expenses you don’t think about when you move to New York: going through a pair of shoes every three months.

“Why do you say that, Robert?” he asked me, clearly a little bewildered. In the months he’d known me he thought he’d learned what to expect. This, I could tell, had caught him off guard, as if he’d just seen a new side of me. As if a new door, one he hadn’t noticed before, had just opened. “You know we’re friends, right?” he said. “You know that I care about you, and that I want to be around you. That’s why I ask you to hang out all the time. Why would you say you feel like you’re chasing me around?”

I did, in fact, know that we were friends. I also knew that I’d been attracted to him since the day we met: attracted to how wild he was, loving way I felt like I was on a roller coaster every time we went out in the city, flapping along in his wake. For weeks I’d wanted nothing but to know what it’d be like to kiss him, even just once. To feel the fire, the spark, that I knew would pass between us.

But it wouldn’t happen; none of the late-night conversations or lingering hugs would lead to anything, I knew. Not because there wasn’t a connection between us, but because he had a girlfriend.

See, I’d been down this road before, being infatuated with a straight guy. Having spent most of high school in some unrequited love affair or other, I’d sworn off it completely, knowing full well that it was a waste of everyone’s time and energy, most of all mine. In high school, where there were no other options, no other gay people who’d admit to being gay, I went from one crush to another, always with my best friends. They always ended the same way: with a statement that I was really great, man, and if they wanted to be with another dude then I definitely would be at the top of their list. But you know, bro, that’s just not how they felt about me.

The last one, the most intense, taught me once and for all that it was better to be single than heartbroken. I’d sit for hours on this boy’s back porch, smoking cigarettes in the cold Oklahoma night while his mother was at her boyfriend’s house. Under the glare of the unshaded light, I tried to make my cigarette last a little longer, tried to prolong my time with him. Inevitably I’d sidle right up next to him, making sure that at least our legs would touch, and complain about the cold. And inevitably he’d put his arm around me, pulling me close to him. This, giving me the touch I so desperately wanted, might have been worse than freaking out, pushing me away. It gave me unending hope for the future, hope that someday his brotherly affection would change, hope that he’d turn his face to meet mine.

And so, eight years older and wiser, when I found myself in a very similar situation, one in which feelings that shouldn’t have been there in the first place started taking over, I wasn’t exactly sure what to do. I’d chase him around New York for a while, I thought, knowing that I’d sometimes I’d be nothing more than an accessory, the funny gay guy he and his girlfriend hung out with.

This time, I thought, I’d shift my focus, look for what I needed from someone who could give it to me. I was too old to beg for scraps; I’d been freely given too much affection to ask for it from someone who didn’t want to. I’d keep the line drawn between friend and lover. And I’d be more careful.