One weekend he kinda totalled it, although when you have a used car, it doesn't take much to have the insurance company declare it a Total Loss. He rearended another car and the Honda's airbags went off. That alone contributed greatly to the demise. Since then, I have owned and witnessed the demise of my own cars. The one I bought after that was stolen and trashed. And the recent SUV was totalled by a drunk driver one afternoon while it was parked on the street.
Anyway, back to Friday nights. When we were getting to the point of talking about separating and breaking up, we both knew each other well enough by then --having lived cheek by jowl all that time-- to know that it was both of us who made the relationship and both of us who unmade it. It certainly felt to both of us that the other guy was the bad guy, but we knew it was not so simple and we tried very hard to remember that it was a two-man event. I think that's what saved our friendship, though it was not easy or swiftly repaired. The really hard time for me was before we broke up; he found the aftermath excruciating.
Also, Thomas is a Two, and attachment to people is his thing. Sometimes our Fridays have been ordinary and uneventful. Sometimes our old passions emerge --I'm not talking sexual here, but more broadly-- and once in a while it can be pretty rough to get through. He is the only person in my life who can provoke me into having a shouting match in public; last one was just a month ago or so. And sometimes it has the deeply comforting feel of two men who know each other well, have thick history together and care about each other, warts and all. We take each other for granted, in the good sense. Last night was one of those latter evenings, a respite for me from the wearing transition I am in. Before he walked in the door, I was feeling a combo of deflated aimlessness and jump-out-of-my-skin anxiety: sort of like a mummy in the electric chair. Within thirty seconds of his arrival, we were examining my new laptop and exchanging technological wisdom. I was calm; he can distract me like that sometimes.
As we moved from my house to the restaurant to the coffee shop we have dessert it, to the gym where we always finish up by visiting with Bill, the conversation covered: computer problems, money and work, his relationship with his partner (a really nice guy who does not make Thom crazy), my family and his, our friends Reverend Lisa and General Amy, movies and concerts --cannot remember the names of celebrities anymore--, his finger nail polish of the week (don't ask), the incredible Caucasianity of a guy on TV who's learned how to put sharks to sleep, including great whites, in the open ocean. One of Thom's themes, as a black man watching a white world, is what he considers the inexplicable drive whites have to put themselves in dangerous situations: shark sleeping, bungee jumping, ghost hunting, going to the South Pole. He calls it "unsupervised white people." I've explained to him that because we don't dance all that well, to compensate we decided to conquer and rule the planet. We laughed at and with each other and, as he would say, it was "all good." He knew I needed a happy distraction and he gave it to me.
Thomas has been a huge influence in my life. Being naturally introverted, uncomfortable with strong feelings (especially the negative kind), sort of paranoid about having my space invaded --all classic Five stuff-- I had a long and sometime very arduous education in living with a man whose emotional presence, opinions and reactions are instantaneous, very strong, even volcanic and right in your face and up your nose. He once told me that if he feels something and doesn't express it, it is like having a swarm of bees in his mouth. I got stung a lot! And frankly, I am a better man for it.
We have known each other for more than 18 years now. I have not had the combination of longevity, intimacy and regularity with anyone as much as with him. Although we are clearly each other's ex, it is also clear that we have a strong connection. We are opposites in almost every way,--age, race, culture, life history, interests, styles, types-- although our shadows are alarmingly similar. Maybe that's part of the draw, both the challenge and fascination of someone so different but who, once "tamed" in love, can understand something of the dark parts of your soul and not flee, can even have some compassion and affection for them (although he does seem to do a lot of eye-rolling about mine). We have shared times of happiness, kept each other afloat, and we have bloodied and wounded each other's hearts. He gives me hope that love, once lodged in the heart, can survive rip tides and tsunamis, incomprehension and difference, bad seasons and hard times, and that friendship, even when marbled with passions and marked with a scar or two, can be real in this fallen world.
No comments:
Post a Comment