10:15 p.m. - March 09, 2008
Folly
Just realized it tonight, looking across the dining room table, our laptops open and the keys tapping furiously as we race to tomorrow's deadline: I am in love. I laughed off the feeling as nothing more than a crush that would pass in time, but it hasn't. When I see her hug her husband my heart aches not because I wish I had someone to hug, but because I wish she were hugging me.
She is four years older than me; has four wonderfully bright kids I adore, has the pretty New England colonial just outside Rochester with a picket fence. She has beautiful blue eyes and that honey-blonde hair just unruly enough to be playful, and I catch myself in time before I reach out and push aside stray tendrils.
She is popular, outgoing, and social, has a beautiful laugh, and we have the most fantastic discussions that have moved beyond professional work and into real friendship, and for me I wish we could talk next to the fireplace downstairs in the guestroom.
I wonder what it would be like to kiss her, to make love. Her ass attracts my eye, I wonder whether her skin is as creamy as it looks.
I couldn't figure out why I'm a little down this week, until I realized how much I ache to touch her. Did I mention her laugh? Her embarrassed confession that she adores 80s teens-in-love movies, the way her eyes light up and she completes my sentence, or when I complete hers.
We're coming to the end of the project, and I've been in her house this past week, my third trip in the past few months. We joke about meeting next in Napa or a Tahitian isle, and I bone up at the suggestion.
Silly, silly, silly rabbit.
I wish two things: One, that I had the confidence, bearing, and body of a man who can get anything he wants, even if she is married; or two, that there is another person like her out there waiting for me.
It hurts.
I'm in Rochester, NY until tomorrow night. In the span of a week, I've experienced an ice storm that literally covered the rental car in ice an inch thick followed two days later by a winter storm that dropped almost a foot of snow and led to the cancellation of my return flight.
I sit in the chair I've claimed my own in the family room and look out the windows at the snow, the sunlight glinting, and am tempted outside after putting on shoes and a jacket. Take a breath or two, and hustle back inside, back into the chair.
I am ready to go home; I am ready for winter to be over; I am ready to put this silly emotion behind me and return to the grayed-out life that burst into color this week.
United flight 1141 from Rochester to Chicago; Chicago to San Jose, and I'll be sad for most of the way.
Somewhere the gay part of me is rolling his eyes and reminding me one doesn't quit being gay just because he fails at each gay benchmark.
I'm lonely. Nothing new.
