Requited

So I've been away again for an extended period. Much has changed, much is still the same. I've had a few love affairs since my last foray into relationship building. Some have been fun others painful. Yet they have all left me wiser and richer for the experience. I had come to the realization that I may have to spend the rest of my days alone.

And I was ok with that. I've been blessed enough to have loved and to have love returned by two wonderful men in my life. Steven and Doug were and are still incredible sources of strentgh, inspiration and growth. I am the man I am today because of their love, wisdom, patience and acceptance.

Just recently after a short love affair bloomed and faded over the fall I came to accept that I've been so very lucky to have had love twice when so many never have it at all. If my fate was to be the good son caring for my senior parents and being a great uncle to my neices, so be it. I'd made my peace with what the Universe was offering.

Funny how just when you think you know where you're life is headed, life shifts gears, changes direction and you find something completely different. Or rather, you are presented with an alternative. Sometimes the past becomes present.

Allow me to explain.

When I was near the end of my first relationship, my then partner gave me a rather meaningful gift for my birthday that year. It was a CD by a gay country artist. Steven knew just how much country dancing meant to me and as was his way, he found the perfect gift to show me that he "saw" me.

So I open the package and this CD falls out. On the cover is the most amazing set of blue eyes I've ever seen, within a face that I find so incredibly beautiful. Later I would discover that the beauty of the music equaled the man who sang it.

As I listened to the CD one song stood out above all the others. The song captured how I felt the first time I watched cowboys dancing at the Rawhide. I was transported to, what at that moment was the most joyful experience I'd had to that point in my life. Mark's music spoke to me in a way no other music had.

And in that moment, I began to love Mark.

It seems silly and childish, but it was the truth. This man who I never met, had provoked a longing I'd never known before or since. His music filled a chamber in my heart with such ache and need and desire I closed it off to contain it.

Steven and I ended not long after. The first love of my life faded like a tin daguerrotype photograph. Full of nostalgia and pleasant reflection but outdated and lacking color.

Not long after I met the first great love of my life, Doug. As fate (or Universal design) would have it, Doug was a country singer. I mentioned my great love for the music of Mark and found to my disbelief that Doug knew Mark. They had been friendly being cut from the same musical cloth.

My love for Doug was in full bloom when one fateful June day at Pride in SF, my love and I are walking around and we happen upon Mark's booth where he is selling his latest CD. Doug spots him and takes me over to meet Mark.

I am terrified and excited all at once. Here at last I am going to meet the man who I've been crushing on for the past 4 years. I don't know what to expect as we approach the booth.

Mark is even more beautiful in person. It becomes clear as he is hawking his wares that the energy and beauty and longing in his music is not artiface. It is as genuine and real and honest as that beaming smile, those twinking eyes and open demeanor of this amazing singer songwriter.

Doug attracts Mark's attention and my heart catches in my throat as my eyes meet Mark's gaze for the first time.

I am thunderstruck.

All the emotions I had bottled away in that secret chamber of my heart begin to roil. I fight hard to maintain myself and reach out to shake Mark's hand. He is easy and familar. We fall into talking and I find myself longing for a man who now has appeared one promise too late. We leave a short time later. My intial impressions comfirmed beyond doubt that Mark is indeed as sweet and wonderful and amazing as his music.

Doug and I begin to spend time with Mark and his partner. We hang out together, Mark even coming to Doug's and my housewarming a year later. Mark never knowing that the first act I performed in that new house was to waltz with Doug on our empty hardwood floor. Sweeping around the oak in 3/4 time to the song which reflected the Rawhide for me, and the music that drew me to Mark.

We'd share dinner occasionally. Walk around Lake Merrit. Two couples sharing a communion of friendship and camraderie. The angst I felt over being torn between My Love and this inexplicable, inexorable attraction for Mark I kept to myself, never betraying for a moment the torch I am carrying.

Then, suddenly Mark is gone. Emails go unanswered, phone calls unreturned. Mark fades into the distance like a ship sailing beyond a curved quiet horzion. I am crestfallen. Not only can I never speak of how I feel or express the love I carry for him, I've now lost the friendship I'd begun to build. The solace and comfort of, "well at least I have him in my life, if only as a friend" had ended as well.

So I am left with just his music and the bittersweet agony of listening to it, wondering what might have been. I close the chamber of my heart where Mark lives. Doug and I carry on until the unexpected curtain fell on our last act two years ago.

I pinball from man to man, short relationship to short relationship. Fleeting moments full of a promise that never comes to fruition. All the while me gaining knowledge about myself, what I want from another man, accepting that the life I have settled into may be one of permanence.

Then this past Sunday I am at my place of communion and healing. My temple of two-step and waltz, Sundance Saloon. It's Trailer Trash night and the carnival that is Sundance is in full swing. As I leave the floor briefly, a song I recognize comes on. It's one of my former love's songs which I've never heard at Sundance. I am struck with a moment of melancholy and longing, but it passes immediately as my friend asks me to dance.

As we sweep around the floor my friend asks me; "Isn't that Mark over there?" I reply; " I haven't seen Mark at Sundance in years, it's probably not him." As I say this I look over to where my friend has pointed and there I see the face of the man I've secretly loved for years smiling at me.

And I am thunderstuck.

That feeling I felt the first time I heard Mark, the first time I saw Mark, the first time I met Mark is still there. As strong as powerful as purposeful as the San Joaquin river full of Sierra snowmelt churning toward my Native Bay.

I walk over and embrace him. Hold him. Scold him for being gone so long. Eager to hear where he's been, how he is doing and is he happy. Then something amazing happens. For the first time in years I notice the same longing, the same desire, the same conviction I have carried for Mark all these years, reflected back at me.

Mark loves me.

He confesses why he's been gone. Because it was too hard. Too hard to be around Doug and I. Too hard to be around our love. Too hard to be around me. Too hard to want to be with me. Too hard to surpress his feelings.

And I realize that we have spent the last 7 years in love from a distance. Unrequited. Unspoken.

Suddenly, the path I've been on, the lessons I've been given, the trials I have faced, have all had purpose. And I stand there realizing that I am in the presence of the last great love of my life. In that moment the chamber bursts and out spills pure unadulterated, untainted, unspoiled, joy.

It's cosmic. It's karmic. It's miraculous.

It's love.

What happend next, will follow in another post.