Pride & Opinions

It’s amazing how bittersweet talk of romance and relationships can be, isn’t it? Thank you, everyone, for your responses to yesterday’s article – though I don’t know if I can write another one like that for a while, not when Sihaya wasn’t the only one crying by the time it was finished. I wasn’t expecting to evoke such replies; they made me smile. They even made Steve smile, when he called me to tell me that he’d read the article…and to say that my ex is a lucky guy.

My ex seems to think so, too. Knowing what a pain I can be, I’m not so sure.

Thinking of how I walked away from Steve, though, thinking about the sting of rejection, made me think of the times I’ve been rejected. It doesn’t happen often - not because I think I’m such hot stuff, but because under my cocksure sarcasm I am terminally shy and rarely make the first move. The times I have have been a 50/50 split of success and disaster, and the failures still bring a flush of humiliation to my face and an ache to my chest, every time I remember the names. David – and Louis, oh, Louis, that one still hurts deep down in a place that isn’t going away any time soon. I’m a proud creature and can’t stand embarrassing myself. I hate even more when I embarrass myself over another person, especially when I should have known better.

Stacy was one of those times when I should have known better.

It’s raining right now, slapping hard and silver whiplashes against my window. The glass is cold against my shoulder, coffee cup warm in my hand. I haven’t talked to Stacy in a few months but rain always makes me think of him, even if only for a few seconds, with a smile for the thought of a friend that I really need to keep in touch with more often. It was raining the last time that I saw him, too, years ago, a quiet night in my dorm room just like many others. We’d been watching a film with our friend Shawnessy – Brotherhood of the Wolf - but she’d left. The three of us were known as the PowerPuff Trio, even if Shawnessy was the only girl among us. She was the authoritative one – Blossom. He was the blonde, sweet-faced, making him Bubbles. I, being the dark-haired sourpuss with the acid tongue, was the most natural choice for Buttercup.

I still haven’t shaken that nickname.

I still call him Bubbles, too, or when he’s in one of his moods where he’s successfully channeling Hannibal Lector, Hardcore Bubbles. You wouldn’t think such a demented personality could lie inside someone who looks like the adorable halfbreed offspring of Matt Damon and Alvin the Chipmunk. I used to think it was cute, when he’d get all twitchy. Then again, I was in love with the guy for a while during university.

Too bad that he was straight.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s a rite of passage that we have to go through: The Straight Crush. Just like the hetero version of The Gay Crush, we know better. We always know better; he or she just isn’t buying what we’re selling. It should be easier to take than other types of rejection; we can say “It’s not me, it’s just that he/she isn’t attracted to my gender. It’s not personal.� Only it is personal – too personal. The human mind is addicted to hope, even false hope, and false hope’s favorite phrase is “what if�.

“What if he’s just in the closet? What if he’d think differently after just one kiss…what if…� When the rejection is more because of your bits and bobs and less because of who you are, you want to find a way to make it work. Want to find a way to get past that, especially if you’re a young and naïve university student who still, under his defensive cynicism, believes that love conquers all.

I still remember spending aching hours on those “what ifs� – aching hours in the student lounge of the engineering building where we all had our advanced computer science classes, where Stacy could often be found dozing on the couch between classes. The room could be full of the boisterous noise of freshman CS students getting their geek on, and still we would be two islands of silence: him asleep, me watching him sleep and clenching my fingers into fists to hold back the urge to brush his hair from his eyes, wishing like hell that we were alone so I could work up the nerve to kiss him awake, knowing in the most bitter part of me that no matter how many “what ifs� I dwelled on, I’d never do it because he’d never want it.

Stacy knew. He always knew, but he never brought it up, and neither did I. I think, now, on those days when I’d watch him sleep…sometimes he’d pretend to be asleep longer than he was just so he wouldn’t embarrass me by catching me in the act. I’d look away for a moment, look back, and freeze to find those dark eyes watching me, as if he’d just been waiting for his moment. Two people alone in a crowded room. I always had to look away first, always…and then he would smile, say “Hey there, Buttercup�, and the moment would be over. I’d smile as if my heart wasn’t clenching like a fist inside my chest, and tell him he was drooling again. Just two college guys screwing around. That’s all we ever were.

I don’t know how long I held on to that crush. It was fading by that raining evening that we spent squinting at subtitles and joking that the only role that Mark Dacascos could fill was one where he didn’t have to speak often. Maybe I was getting over it, or maybe over passing semesters I’d simply grown resigned to it, learned to ignore it so that I could enjoy time with my friend without feeling like a lost puppy every time I looked at him. I’m gay. He’s straight. That wasn’t going to change, and I considered myself lucky that I had a friend who could quietly accept my unspoken feelings towards him without thrusting me away in a fit of homophobic disgust.

Knowing that, I should have kept quiet. Knowing that…I should have enjoyed that last evening, the last time I’d see him in gods only know how long, considering that I left after that and came to Houston to find my career. I should have held my silence, and let the “what ifs� die a lonely death.

Getting hurt, that time, was my own damned fault.

“I’m going to miss you,� I told him, and he laughed and ruffled my hair, then yanked back before I could bite him.

“Me too, Buttercup. You’re gonna IM, right?�

“Yeah. Call you when I can.� Comfortable silence, or it should have been. He was sitting on the couch, I while I sat on the floor near his feet, leaning against the couch, so close that I could have pillowed my head in his lap had I wanted to. I wanted to. Badly. “Stacy, I…�

“Yeah, Buttercup?� Fingers in my hair. I hated when he did that, played with my hair. It gave me false hope, made my heart do mad voodoo dances against my rib cage.

“Nothing.�

When I say nothing, it’s never nothing. Anyone who knows me knows that. Nothing, betsuni, mou yeh ah, no matter what language I say it in it means it’s something, but I don’t want to say. I didn’t have to, this time.

“I know, Adrien,� and his fingers stilled in my hair.

“Ah.�

And that was it, just like that. Awkward, tense silence, and that pain reaching cold and wet down my throat and into my stomach. I shouldn’t have said anything. I wished I hadn’t, even if I didn’t really say anything at all. It could have been worse. He could have said cruel things, he could have fleshed out in detail just why, and why not. He could have left, and never spoken to me again. I could have lost my friend.

Instead what I lost was a little of my innocence, and a little of my naivete. I lost a little of my faith in what if, and quite a bit of my youth. Stacy had been my first straight crush, and thankfully I haven’t had one since. Instead I’ve had the growing maturity and discretion to keep my heart in check, and carefully guarded. It hasn’t saved me wholly from heartbreak, but it has avoided creating more than need be.

I think we all have to go through that, at some point. Perhaps it’s part of the unique experience of being gay, or perhaps it’s not so unique at all. Perhaps instead it’s a unifying factor, a human experience that we all know regardless of sexual orientation: longing, and heartbreak, and that desire for companionship. A reminder that no matter how we divide ourselves by labeled partitions, in the end we all feel the same things, crave the same things. I even remember the nights I spent with Stacy, listening to him talk about girls, about how his love life never seemed to work, about how the ones that he wanted never seemed to want him.

No, it’s really not so different after all.

Perhaps it’s just part of growing up.

This is posting a bit late, because the storm that made me think of Stacy also killed my lights and I’d have lost this article if not for the laptop battery. It’s very quiet in here now, very dark, the only light the grey mist coming through the curtains and the low-power glow of the laptop screen. I’m surrounded by a hundred other people in close proximity, little ant-boxes of human life stacked close and separated by thin walls, and yet without the constant electric hum of life to remind me I feel isolated, alone. Just me and my thoughts, me and the rain.

I should really go call him.

love, romance, relationships, growing up, life lessons, gay relationships, gay romance, lesbian relationships, lesbian romance, homosexual, heterosexual, straight crushes, rejection