July 2000

The bathroom window is missing a screen and we leave it open all the time; I'm certain my equilibrium flew out this window.
I could not sleep last night, my mind was racing with meaningless images, fragmented sentences, half-faces. I got up and e-mailed friends.
Georgie called and talked excitedly about Pride.
I hate gay men!
How will I free myself of this trap I'm caught in, in this forest, dragging along the snare that possesses me?
Love is terrible. I think Tariq knows this better than I.
Why did I come? Why did I willingly allow the dream to become real, when reality is devoid of color, texture, life? I'm the flamboyant painter who recklessly stepped into his masterpiece and unwittingly became one-dimensional.
I should go before I hurt him. Have I hurt him already? I should ask.
Tariq playfully calls me a sex maniac, belittling my voracious need to express the deep emotions I feel for him.
I suppose I should come to terms with the undeniable fact that Tariq and I will have beautiful days when we are close, tender and erotic, and days that force us to opposite poles of the earth. Today is the latter.
It's raining. I went for a run just to get out of his way. I came home to a note that began with "Emil", not "Darling Emil". It ended with "Tariq", not "Love, Tariq". My heart sank and I wondered if I'm being weak and hypersensitive, or am I being slighted?
It's mad, but when he's talking to his small nephew on the phone I wish I were the nephew. I wish I were the very hair on his body so that I could touch him all the time, be with him all the time. I'm laughing as I write this, it's all so silly.
We have sex and are now in the bathroom getting ready to leave the apartment. Tariq approaches me from behind, unbuttons my shorts, runs his hands up my chest, finds my nipples. I'm leaning on the small sink. He places his penis forcibly between my buttocks. It is an erotic moment. I catch a glimpse of us in the mirror- my brow is furrowed with desire. He kisses my neck, fondles me, whispers, "I wish you had a pussy."
When he looks at other men I am suddenly jealous and simultaneously aroused. His eyes wander to a passing figure, I expect to see a handsome man and am relieved to find a sweet old woman. It makes my heart flutter to acknowledge his many desires, his fantasies, his possibilities- some of which have nothing to do with me. After all, I have the same.
Now he is distant, preoccupied. I know he's about to leave the apartment without me. My heart is empty. I'm more than willing to let him go, but am also feeling less human- I am a body of desire. I lock myself in the bathroom and run the water so that when he leaves I am not facing him, my disappointment splashed across my face. I feign normalcy from behind the latch and white door- warm, summer tile under my bare feet.
No ceiling above. No floor. No walls. No doors. No skin. I am a million adjectives spray-painted on a public wall. Not a beautiful mural.
My love for Tariq is a combination of mist, fire, and dirt. It's elemental. But it's also universal and not extraordinary. I'm sure this is happening in a million places to millions of other people. I'm not alone in this empty apartment. My song harmonizes with similar songs around the world...
Even my penmanship is off because I'm not in my body. I am soaring.
I'm in the kitchen. My diary is propped on the stove, burning with ecstasy. Even the pain is delicious. Tariq is wonderful. Come to think of it, it is never he who is the source of my anguish, but the work it takes to love, human psychology, moods, and real life.
One morning after a delicious breakfast, during which I watch him eat with great satisfaction, he ties me up with our belts so that I can't seduce him, as I love to. Instead, he places tender kisses on my neck, ears, face. He asks if I'm comfortable and although the belts cut into my skin I say yes.
"You trust me?"
I nod.
"That's beautiful."
Bound and helpless. How symbolic of my love for him.
What I see, the things I feel turn out to be true. Tariq admits to withdrawing. He says I have a talent for seeing his moods accurately, respond to them intuitively, when he'd rather remain invisible.
Night. Dark room. We are lying side by side. My throat is barricaded by a barrage of information that travels to my nameless senses by air, by contagion. I am too sensitive to my surroundings. The emotional dilemma becomes a physical war.
It's Independence Day and we can hear fireworks in the distance. I've waited all day for him to give me a sign that it's all right to touch him, but the permission never arrives. Kisses without visa, smuggled through the borders of my imagination.
I miss him, am dying to touch him, be held by him, hold him. Now? Now? Now?
It has been days since I've felt desired, desirable. My sexual confidence is not invested in Tariq, or is it?
When will he unlock the door? Why won't he take down the glass wall?
His voice is beautiful, though he says, "I feel like every time you touch me you want to have sex." I stand up and leave the room.
Days before he'd held my hand in his long fingers, observing my fingers, caressing them, "You have such sweet hands. I never noticed how beautiful they are."
When I return he is sitting on the edge of bed, his head in his hands. Darkness. Silhouettes. I hold him. He apologizes for hurting me. He says that the pain we have felt in our lives follows us wherever we go, with whomever we travel. His words, the facts, the reminder that there has been great loss in life, make me weep. We cradle each other.
He asks if I prefer he were more committal. I shake my head, 'It would be like wishing you were someone else.'
"You know you're going to be OK, don't you?"
'Yes, I know. I'm OK even now.'
I make a circle in the darkness with my hands and continue, 'We're just a small planet together, this makeshift life of ours, and around this planet is a whole universe we have yet to experience. Dreams, people, places. I'm crying because life is so beautiful.'
"You're amazing," he says and buries his face in my neck.
"My friends are going to think I'm crazy for letting you go."
'Then your friends don't know you.'
Earlier Tariq came into the living room and pushed me into the sofa and laid on top of me. He took pictures of me.
I think his desire is confused. The legs with which he approaches me are broken.
I look into his eyes, 'I hate that I've made myself so available to you because people are fucked up and never want what they have. I will lose, Tariq.'
He doesn't claim to understand any of this either and admits to not knowing himself.
No one will ever know the beauty and pain of loving Tariq.
"I want you to be happy."
He asks, "Do you regret having met me?"
'Yes,' I admit, 'But I regret everyone.'
I resolve to always pass through every relationship in life with beauty, not blame. No enemies. No victims.
He urges me never to lose my contradictions.
Now my love for him is brotherly.
Yesterday I wanted to disappear, to squeeze my entire being into a corner, into the cracks in the wall so that I would be out of his way. I feel like a great burden.
"What's wrong?" he asks.
'I'm just homesick.'
"What did I do?"
'I feel so stupid! I have nothing here, but you, and we've already developed this pattern where you distance yourself, then become tender to make up for it. That scares me. I don't want us to be like that. It's stupid.'
He says that it's always been this way with him and that he's never been capable of demonstrative affection, that this is how it was with Pran for eight years. "When we'd go to parties together we wouldn't see each other for hours."
'I don't want that... I'm not as strong or mature as I thought I was, Tariq. I think I should leave early. This rhythm we've established, I can't dance to it anymore. I still love you, always will, but I'm tired and confused. For me it's downhill from here. I'm not leaving to hurt you or teach you a lesson. But I have to go.'
"I don't want you to go, but I won't make you stay."
'I dread your sister's arrival tomorrow. Her presence is going to make you withdraw more and that's going to break my heart further.'
It hits me that Tariq and I are cramming five years of relationship into a few summer weeks.
For someone who does not believe in the institution of marriage I think he acts like the consummate absent husband.
Our words create the illusion of fraternity, but when silence settles we are each orbiting round our personal demons, in disparate universes.
I know I won't love again for some time. There is both comfort and dread in this beautiful desert stretch where I always hover just inches above the hot sand, pumping water out of the depths of my imagination, fashioning shade out of hope. And I'm more than willing to sacrifice pride to salvage some semblance of beauty, even while waking from the original dream.
This is a survival tactic I learned being a gay son of homophobic parents- the original disenchantment!
This morning Tariq leaned over me and placed a soft stubbled kiss on my cheek before leaving for work. But he need not try anymore. We are better at being intimate friends than tormented lovers.
Always beauty above anger. After all, Tariq and I are still the two amazing men we were in May!
Why must we wake from every perfect dream with imperfect recollections?
Tariq's riveting accounts of broken lives of Palestinian people in the diaspora bring me back to reality, and make me feel small for having naively expected laughter and love. He tenderly reminds me that I have been self-centered in relation to his needs. I'm horrified that I have been so selfish. All afternoon at the zoo I ponder this. The lone lion lounging in the sun stirs sympathy in me.
I go dancing with Tariq's friend Donald. We have a wonderful time. When I come home at two in the morning I shower then crawl quietly into bed. I stretch my arms above my head hoping he will stir, turn to me, and allow me to hold him. It's only after I have drifted that I find he has snuggled up to me, his arm stretched across my chest. I lie awake in the darkness for a while. Occasionally a car passes and its headlights cast moving shapes on the ceiling, across walls, and onto the floor. I wonder who drives past, unwittingly creating living shadows in our small room where we have laughed, made love, and cried. We go about our lives, driving alone, unaware that our efforts, our passing through, our most mundane actions may somehow touch someone else's life.
In the morning Tariq says he wishes we could change the view out the bedroom windows. I have been thinking the same thing! But I don't tell him.
It's strange and wonderful to be home, near mountains, the ocean. I've intentionally not written for a week. I've grown tired of living each day twice. I'm in San Francisco, wearing the metal cock ring Tariq gave me, wondering how it is that people seek love. What about pain and loss appeals to them?
I have been running every day, not smoking, not sending e-mails, not calling anyone. Life requires that I care less, dwell less, think and feel less. It's just impossible to live the rest of my life this way- this open, this vulnerable. It's unnatural. There's no use in all this beauty, in seeing all this beauty. I must protect myself as others do. Why has it taken me so long to figure this out? Hardening, resolving to cease looking too deeply for meaning, seeking symbolism.
And yet symbolism is everywhere. While in the yard a crab apple falls from my grandmother's tree and rolls straight toward my feet, but just before reaching me it hits a pebble and rolls in another direction!
Tariq admits he is sad again, misses me, is in love with me. He says he is disappointed in himself, had envisioned building a home together, but feels he's not himself built for relationships. I attempt to console him.
"Why am I such a freak?" he sighs.
'Don't torture yourself.'
Everything is uncertain and perfect. I feel sexy even as the world falls from space. Let my father drink himself to death. Let Tariq withdraw from my heart. Let everyone suffer. There's sun in my days.
Do not doubt yourself, whoever you are!
I try to harden but fail. Inside I'm still idealistic. Outside, cautious, older, unapologetic.
Saturday after work I found myself passing the exit home, drove until I reached Bodega Bay. I walked on the beach, cradled by the dense fog. A flock of pelicans flew past, just inches above the water's surface.
Yesterday, Jorge, a busser with whom I've worked for nearly three years, came up to me while I was placing an order into the computer and rubbed my back, "You've changed. You act different." I looked at him, taken by surprise, 'Love has changed me.' He smiled before rushing back to work.
I look forward to the rest of my life.