If I had known what awaited me after I’d worn off my Toronto Hangover I might have kept drinking.
Oh wait, I did.
By Friday, August 7th, only a week from the start of what had been one of, if not the most joyous weekends of my life, I found myself alone in a desert oasis with little to do and even less desire to get any of it done.
True to Griselda’s word, my heart ached and I was experiencing a tremendous sense of longing and loss. That, however, was not my biggest problem.
I could not stop continually ruminating about my last days in Toronto.
Brain was locked into a constant state of examining and re-examining every last moment of that trip. He kept asking the same questions over and over again.
“If Jon and I weren’t happy and compatible, why didn’t he just make a clean break of it?
“Why all the friendly chit-chat texting, prior to my dragging Brodie into this, and even then, why, after chewing me out, say ‘Talk to you later?” That last bit, Brain said, sneered quite sarcastically.
And don’t even try to tell me that as a Canadian he was just being polite. As Griselda observed, “Nobody is that fucking Canadian!”
“It’s as if he’s trying to rewind things back to the time before his visit,” Brain continued, before relaunching into yet another deep re-examination of the events of the past week.
Wine glass firmly in hand, I withdrew to the opposite side of my consciousness where, forgetting she was no longer a giggly freckled face little girl, I found Griselda seated on a bench, quietly reviewing images from our weekend in Toronto as well.
More accurately she was gazing softly at one image in particular. It was the selfie Jonny had stopped to take of the two of us side-by-side on the boardwalk by the shore of Lake Ontario at the edge of the city.
“What do you see,” she asked.
“I see,” I began, nearly as sarcastically as Brain had been, “a foolishly deluded old man pretending to be young and in love.”
“You weren’t pretending,” she responded. “Love makes us all feel young and you were and still are very much in love.”
“Ya,” I snapped, “well I don’t feel so young anymore.”
“I’m surprised you can feel anything at all with all that in you” she responded motioning to my now nearly empty wine glass. I just grunted.
“Tell me what else you see,” Griselda pressed on,
Truth be told, I couldn’t bear to look at that photo. The joyous memories of that afternoon still lingered within me as sorrow and depression threatened to overwhelm it.
“A big dopey guy,” I said trying to muster anger that would not come, “that did and I guess still does make me feel more alive than I’ve felt in the last 64 years.”
“That’s funny,” she said. “I see someone just as in love as the delusional old fart standing next to him.”
With that she drifted away into one of the recesses of my mind, but the image of Jonny and I, arms wrapped around one another, remained.
“THERE!” shouted Brain excitedly, as he approached, waving an arm and wagging a finger at the image of Jonny. “You see that? You see that? Does that look like a man forcing himself to do something he doesn’t want to do?”
Then, more calmly the energy draining out of this particular outburst, “It doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s funny,” she said. “I see someone just as in love as the delusional old fart standing next to him.”
After that he began a whole new round of asking the same questions over and over again. I finished off the glass of wine.
By now it was Friday afternoon, I knew that sooner or later I’d have to face the music; i.e., the local Bear community, all of whom I was sure had probably seen the pictures of Jonny and I touring Toronto posted on my Facebook timeline the week before.
This wouldn’t be the first time one of my aborted love affairs played out before a live audience.
After Michael, one of the most popular members of staff at the San Francisco Eagle, the most popular bar South of Market Street, and I broke up, it became common knowledge around town I was the “bitch” who’d driven him away, forcing him to seek refuge in Seattle of all places.
It was a real life drama, scandalous enough to rival Dallas, Dynasty or any other prime time soap. And I was the primary villain.
At least this time I wouldn’t have to endure the scorn of our mutual friends. I later came to discover that those who knew us, for the most part, were pretty sure from the start things wouldn’t work out between Jonny and I.
Luck being what it is, I walked into Hunters for Fur Friday and three of the four guys in town who knew Jonny best were all there.
“Well sweetie,” I said to myself, “swallow hard, chins up, be honest, and think of England. And for God’s sake, keep the drama to a bare minimum.”
It was a rough ninety minutes and once or twice I had to force a smile and choke back tears, but I got through it. The task being made all the easier by the compassionate understanding nature of these men I’d come to embrace as true friends.
Determined to return to as normal a life as possible I posted an update, sans confession, about that evening in Hunters along with a selfie with the guys in the bar. After that I dined on a to-go order of Del Taco Nachos, had another couple of glasses of wine, watched a movie on Netflix, and, finally, around 1:00 am, went to bed.
Determined to return to as normal a life as possible…
Once there my mind immediately returned to thoughts of Jon, that weekend, what had gone wrong, and why it just didn’t seem to make any sense at all. I finally drifted off to a restless sleep around two thirty in the morning.
I’d no sooner awakened the following morning than Brain was right back at playing all those scenes and raising all those questions in my mind over and over again. Try as I might to think of something, anything, distracting enough to stop these constantly occurring reoccurring thoughts, I could not make it stop.
I tried to think about my youngest brother George’s coming visit, but that wouldn’t be for another eight days and I had absolutely nothing planned to do in the interim.
The final straw came when I opened Facebook to find cross posts from friends planning on joining Jon and Brodie for Fierté Montréal, which, in turn, led to responses from the two of them.
That was it. Brain went into hyperdrive.
“I have got to get this out of me,” I thought to myself. “I have got to stop living inside my head or I will go mad.”
“It’s a story,” my best friend Ken said after I called him to explain how bad the rumination had gotten and begged for help. “You’ve been sharing this thing with me like chapters of a book for months. Now get it out of you by writing it down.”
It was an idea, a good one in fact. The problem was, I couldn’t even get enough of a break from the constant mulling over of questions and events to begin to think of where and how to start.
Suddenly a tiny thought crept into my mind. I had noticed while driving to and from Hunters the day before that I was somewhat, not completely but somewhat, distracted from obsessive thinking.
Brain had involuntarily slowed the emotional storm roiling in my head in order to concentrate on driving safely.
“ROAD TRIP!” I shouted out loud even though I was the only one in the apartment.
“Where to?” I thought. “It needs to be an hours-long but not trying drive to keep Brain/me distracted enough to find some peace and perhaps entertain a different thought or two.
“San Francisco? Long enough drive but way to expensive even for a weekend visit.
“San Diego? Too close and not really all that interesting, or I should say distracting.”
And then I had an idea, the very thought of which so intrigued me that the act of planning the trip took my mind off my troubles.
“That’s IT!” I shouted once again. This time to myself, “let’s do it.”
Edited by
Kenneth Larsen
Join us again on October 10 for: Idnit Grand
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