8:25 p.m. - July 11, 2002
Be patient, trust, believe the fortune cookie
I want to go home, get in the Jeep, drive into the Sierras, and be alone. I want to swim in one of the Alpine lakes high in the mountains where it's cold and desolate except for the clear blue water and the wildflowers and soft grasses that circle the lake, swim until I'm tired and then float on my back and not think of anything besides trying to identify birds by their calls.
In the meantime, I take walks along the creek in Maryland, across railroad trestles and paths that meander into townhouse developments and parched grasses because most places here don't use water sprinklers, trusting instead on periodic rainfall to keep things green, a policy that seems to have worked well until this summer. I don't mind the dry grass as it's still tinged with green, unlike the hills back home which are burnt brown this time of year. I think while I walk and react slowly to stimuli around me, whether it's the blackbird with red wings who comes close or the hum of a dragonfly that sees something interesting in my hair and hovers over me fanning my face.
Fighting the temptation to close off, power down, run away in both thought and body, turn everything over to cruise control until it's time to wake up. That's the pattern I'm trying to resist through counseling and willpower, allaying brooding and melancholy with invective thoughts to encourage reactive processes instead of inertia.
Those of you who've been kind to send me notes about yesterday's entry cheered me some, but I'm going to level with you. What happened was my fault because I didn't realize how much he's invested in me, thinking all along that it was me taking the leap, marginalizing his own insecurities and uncertainties of a match like ours--yet going ahead with it, only to have me resist and pull away like a game of tug-of-war. I've frustrated us both and fighting was the physical manifestation of emotional exhaustion. There is a checklist of issues I'm working on with my counselor one at a time which is really tackling them all at once since everything is connected to the same root: Sex.
Freud aside, enter Joseph Campbell perhaps, immediate stage exit for Faludi, Steinem, & Co.; sex for me is a power dynamic and one which I've never fully enjoyed. Sexual intimacy was both dispassionate and primal, tinged with the need to exhibit power and skill yet foregrounded by the need to prove to myself that I was normal, despite my feelings to the contrary. Brutal honesty here: I am gay. I know it, I have for a very long time, back in the days when I'd collect pictures of guys in underwear ads from the Sunday circular. I've always known and never admitted it so sex with women was for me power to deny and power to say how can I be that way if I have a healthy sex life with my girlfriends? It wasn't healthy, that's the thing--I pressured girls into sleeping with me to allay my fears and during my promiscuous time it was the more the merrier, the higher the tally the more remote the reality of my fantasies seemed, and I was strong, I was not weak; I was healthy because I won, the victor, instead of him.
What did I win when all my life I've been running/confronting/reliving those experiences as a child, carrying them around not in a suitcase but as a subcutaneous layer that despite repeated washings and acid baths wouldn't go away? With Spec, sex reminds me that I've lost and while I try not to think of it that way, I do. I can't help it. I feel small and helpless and disgusted with myself for being weak, for giving in, even when I yearn for it; and so I push and pull, open up and close off, like playing some pre-pubescent game of playground tag now you have me, now you don't. Each sex act between Spec and myself has been very difficult, some worse than others, but overriding everything has been the rightness of it all, the emotional reconciliation or at least accepting its place in my scheme of things--yet I feel like a failure still. I feel like I've failed God, failed my friends, failed Twiggle and Bathsheba and Dan A[deleted]a and Dave. With Spec, I feel me, Jason, not the Jason With Girlfriend Du Jour, coming through and subverting the past, it's me saying I've had enough and it's time to move past it, put it away and be normal.
I was angry at Spec because he said I'm not him and then today it clicked. Spec brings it up to get me to talk about it, because that's what I'm supposed to do. He wants to listen, even if I don't. I need people to listen but before they can I have to learn to speak. I want to be healthy, to have a healthy sex life and be able to say Yes, this is who I am. I don't want to have my nightmares and the insecurities that keep me from doing anything to influence my relationship, and this means to accept his help instead of resenting the offer. It's easy to point to our differences and forecast doom, easy to see what I want to see--that his motives are duplicitious, that he wants to hurt me--and easy to stay alone. Spec is not Eric C. the man who molested me between the ages of 8 and 11. Spec is not him, and neither is any other gay guy out there. Even if the thought of gay sex worries me, it's not him, it's two people sharing each other. That's all.
My fingers can't key fast enough and this has disintegrated into ramble jumble.
