This Little House of Me

Last night, post Wheel of Fortune, my guilty pleasure. Rain here, tornados elsewhere, and everywhere I've spaded is refilling with crab grass. It is like I was never there, and here, like I wasn't either, occasionally.

Maybe you've had, too, in such moments a sudden vision of yourself: I was thin, and half-gone--the edges degenerating into lamplight behind me. I looked like those old relatives of mine in the Sixties who were dying as I was coming into hyperdrive.

I saw that a whole part of my life, a part the size of Manhattan, had broken off and floated away like an edge of Greenland. That I would have to redraw the map of me, because it was no longer accurate to say I was shaped this way or that. I saw, in my vision, that a type of life I had was gone, had been gone, and I had done everything to resist seeing that truth. That helter skelter fun/mad dash after love and romance, that definition of everything by erection and reaction, the counting of flower petals down to an answer, phone calls, this life was over.

I had been conditioned by my parents to believe that being uncoupled was akin to death, that being uncoupled unless for life was vulgar, and later, once we had all established that I was gay, that I would be alone, they knew it, and they worried for me. Of course I told myself their retro-homophobia was to blame for that, and it was. It was not possible for homosexuals to commit or be together in any meaningful way, and the only way they could be expected to connect was through sex. This was to their minds a life sentence of weary, trudging effort, and it was going to be mine.

Up until last night, they were wrong. I have had a life of strong attachments and persistent affection, wonderful couplings that changed me, those that almost destroyed me, some that continue in different forms until now. But that disappearing man, in that halo of a floor lamp, what he knew was that there would be no more knocks upon the door, and no changes, no additions, finally, to the roster of my life.

I don't find it sexy that my lower jaw is mostly gone, that a tube hangs out of the middle of my torso, and a tube sticks out of the bottom of my throat, that my mouth hangs open, and I stuff it with tissue to absorb any drool. I don't find sex a sexy thought--it's either "meh" or "so what" or easily accomplished, if you get my drift. I cannot kiss anymore, I have no tongue for those kind of kisses, and I'm bumpy and bony to hug. I am neither waiting nor expecting, in this little house of me, for anyone charming or not.

I've known this for some time, of course--I didn't just discover this post Vanna White last night. I have not though seen it, been forced to look at it and acknowledge just what it means. My recent troubles that I wrote about were signs of its last hurrah, the last person for whom I think I will have felt those feelings for--and seeing that it can't be again is a spur to reality. The vision was fueled by the rush of the world I feel leaving me behind, the talk amongst those to whom I can't speak, the dinner invitations that I cannot accept, the work that binds people to a clock that's relatively meaningless to me unless a doctor, a CT scan, a blood draw, a vial of chemicals, wants me at a particular time and place.

I've spent a lot of my life looking for love and I found it in abundance, in different shapes and sizes and places. Valid, all of it, it too disdained the narrow view my parents had of me and those of my tribe. It created interested scenes and apartments and took place in cities--Dallas, Dayton, Indianapolis, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City.

I will remember the plumber from Poland who whispered a poem in my ear in Boerum Heights, Brooklyn--a short dalliance, fueled more by sex than love, but a mutual fascination that brought us together a few times, and not just for naked poems in my bedroom with the fireplace. The wonder with which I met Ben for a blind date in Chelsea, set up because we were both from Indiana. The fast in/out love story of Robert at IU in the 80's, about the time I was listening to Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" on obsessive Walkman rewind/replay.

I will love of course; I have a large family that could absorb any of it I wished to spill. There are dogs that may come that will need all I can give. I have people, a couple in my life, who will be there willing to be loved by even one like me. But it has been eye opening to know I won't thrill to meet, and think obsessively, and hope to hear the phone, and jump at a sound at the door, worry my hair into a better shape, curse my cowlick, hate the way I look without reason to do so--all for the dance, the night, the whirling of early insects, the rain of Spring, the tornado in the tow and service of love the romancer, the eye of it above this little house of me.