Dating Blogger Charles: The Fall

I met a boy. I was on a date when I met him and apparently he had been watching me all night because as I was leaving the outdoor smoking area and heading home he cornered me, my date, and the two gentlemen to which my date and I were talking to drunkenly announce that he had been watching me all night and that I should stop talking to “old guys” and talk to someone my own age, someone like him. I was charmed by this boy and his sheer disregard for the fact that the three gentlemen he announced this to were the very men he had referenced as “old guys.”

It is not usually my style to ditch a date, but I left with Mike and ended up back at his house where we talked until the sun came up and it was time for me to bid farewell and return to reality. As I was leaving, the morning sun caught the blue of Mike’s eye in a glint that profoundly changed the course of how this relationship would go. In an instant this person’s beauty infiltrated my soul, a phenomenon that apparently also can cloud my judgment.

The first few weeks were filled with wonderful beginning stage bliss; romantic dates, getting to know one another and laughter. I had already fallen the moment I saw sunlight in his eyes, but now I was falling and hard and with such momentum that I could no longer catch myself.

Every morning that I awoke next to Mike, the sun would catch the blue of his eye with that same sparkle as the first morning, and I would feel my soul stir. His scent would cling to my clothes and I would bury my face in that fragrance. Like the sun in his eyes, his smell intoxicated me. I have learned that intoxication while fun can be dangerous to ones senses as pertaining to reality and common sense. I should have run at the first red flag, instead this sweet intoxication chained me to a single choice: remain.

It was on a date with Mike in a bar when I first should have taken my flight from him without compunction. On this night, Mike asked for another man’s number standing right next to me. He asked me first if it would be all right for him to ask. I responded with a dry and emotionless “do what you want” even though I could feel the sharp twist of a sword in my gut; a pain which would have been blinding if not for the fact that I was preoccupied with keeping the wells in my eyes from flooding. I had let the moment pass, if only because I could not gain enough composure to react, but later that evening, when he and I were alone, we had a fight and parted ways for good… I thought. I got home and put on my sweatshirt… his smell… intoxication. Common sense… gone.

Six times pleading with an answering machine, several e-mails and several days until Mike called me back. We decided we should talk in person so, four days after the argument, I, full of fear and hope, head out to talk to the boy who had swept me away, even from myself. I arrived and first thing Mike walked over to me and whispered in my ear, “I knew I would see you again” and leaned in to kiss me, the setting sun caught the blue of his eye in an all too familiar dazzle and I was back. Driving to dinner that night, for no reason I could figure, fireworks were going off in the sky; the fireworks were for us it seemed.

I can point to four or five moments in time when I should have swiftly run away, but a smell, or a glint, or a tone stopped me. I should have run when I found out he was a go-go boy at a gay club, or the first time he disappeared for four days without a phone call or a message, or the second time he disappeared. Each time a flag went up I was ready to run, each moment I thought I was free from the stir he had made in my soul on that first morning, each time I even made it out the door, but that stir he made would hold me captive through many mistreatments. Somehow I thought it was all I needed, that the way the light caught the blue of this boy’s eye in the morning, would somehow make this work, set me free.

The time came for Mike to meet all of the important people in my life, and so I asked seven of my inner circle to have dinner with the two of us, they all obliged. There at dinner, waiting for Mike, I can remember the childlike excitement that lurked inside of me. I was the embodiment of the look in a child’s eyes who is about to receive the most perfectly wrapped gift, in a gigantic box and it isn’t even his birthday or a holiday. My friends will love him I thought, and he is so beautiful and he makes me happy. He makes me so happy. Oh the happiness he brings to my heart – unless he doesn’t show up to dinner, while your friends feed you champagne by the bottle assuring you that he is a bigger asshole than the last guy you dated. The happiness he brings – unless of course he doesn’t call for several days after that, and you are worried sick and when he finally does call he doesn’t give you an explanation. HAPPY! It was this that unbound me from the shackles. Suddenly the way the light caught the blue of his eye didn’t seem to matter, and even though it was painful I knew it was time for a peaceful ending to this love affair.

Now is where I would normally go on my rant or diatribe about how gay men suck, or that relationships are impossible to have; or perhaps a commentary about how I should run and have ex-sex, and how stupid I am for not taking my own advice. I will be sorry to shock and perhaps dismay the reader’s who are counting on something cynical or controversial out of me, and I promise those people to return to my brutal and date scathing self for next week, but I have learned a valuable lesson from myself, and even Mike because he was the catalyst. The moment I fell for Mike, that first morning, like many moments in life, I fell in love and although I never truly loved Mike because I didn’t have the chance, I certainly fell in love with him and that was the grip that kept me around to get hurt.

As the hurt heals I realize I am stronger, more whole, to enter my next relationship but especially as myself. I want and need this pain because to lose it, would be to lose my ability to fall; to fall is magical and to hurt is to heal.