Intimacy

“I love you,” I said spontaneously and almost without thought, cuddled in bed with someone I had let my guard down with, at his home, watching a movie, feeling safe, feeling I could just be me.

I knew it was a mistake as soon as he responded, agitated, almost panicked.

“Well, I’m getting to know you,” he stammered.

If intimacy is the ability to let someone else know me, really KNOW me, and for me to express my feelings to someone without reservation or fear, then it’s something I’ve been looking for my whole life, and never found.

This goes back a long, long way.

The first time I expressed my deepest feelings to someone I was eight years old, and I expressed them to an older boy, a young teenager, whose father had come to work at the dairy. Ricky offered me a ride on his bicycle the day his family moved in, and I put my arms around him as I perched on the small rack over the rear tire for a short ride from the milking parlor down to his house.

I’ve never forgotten that feeling, how good it felt to hold him. I didn’t know what I was feeling, but it built and built as we became friends and playmates over the next few months.

Then one day we were playing in a hay barn, and he fell and twisted his ankle. I held him as he cried; moments passed, he stopped crying, the wind blew, and still I held him.

Then I said what was in my heart.

“I’ve wanted to do this, to hold you, a long time.”

He threw me off of him, screamed “you little faggot!” and ran without a limp back to the calf barn. By the time I made my way there, he had told the other kids on the farm that I was “a little faggot” and from that day on, until he died in a car accident shortly after coming back from Vietnam, he made my life as miserable as he possibly could.

I didn’t know what faggot meant.

I tried to share my feelings with my mother, lump in my throat, around the little kerosine heater one cold Florida winter night.

“I love Ricky,” I blurted out.

“Well, of course it’s natural that young boys look up to older boys,” she said, and briskly changed the subject.

As a child, there was no safe place for any of my emotions. I knew that already, that I couldn’t share what was happening in my heart and mind, that no one would understand, that my parents had no capacity to see the real me. I especially couldn’t tell about the sexual assaults from another, much older teenager, that had occurred when I was even younger.

But after I tried to tell my mother about my feelings for Ricky I became even more isolated, the loneliest only child imaginable, for the next decade, until late high school. And even now.

In early 2016 I was dating for the first time in several years, with some good sobriety after my early struggles with chemsex addiction, which came in my mid-50s. I really liked a guy who was attracted to me, we met organically through mutual friends and although he was much younger, we had mutual interests and a great connection.

We had met right before New Year’s, and it was so much fun going to a party, not alone for the first time in forever, and a few weeks later we were at his house in Tampa, cooking in his kitchen.

That was a first for me; my previous partner had never been able to share the kitchen, so this simple act of domesticity was incredibly poignant.

Afterwards, cuddling on his sofa, I was holding him and just said what was in my heart, how wonderful it was to be with him, to do simple things with him, and how I could see lots of these moments in the future.

As I spoke, I felt his body stiffen in my arms; what had been soft and open became rigid and closed. He didn’t say a word, but I knew, and my words drifted off.

That was the end. I relapsed not long after, scattered brief escapes into sex on meth, and struggled again for several years.

There were other moments when I let my guard down with someone I felt I could be vulnerable with, with painful results. But these are the ones, early and more recent, which are most meaningful and painful in my mind tonight.

I’m awkward.

Life doesn’t turn out the way one hopes, for anyone. I’m so fortunate, in so many ways, in my abilities and circumstance. And I hope I’ve done some good in the world; I’ve tried to. When things are difficult, I find helping others helps me overcome self pity and find purpose.

But still; the thing I wanted most still eludes me, and maybe always will. And that’s ok.

It has to be.

Intimacy and Art

I’ve had the experience of desperately wanting to show myself to someone special, or sometimes to anyone at all who might be capable of seeing me, through writing or composition or, in recent years, through art.

The need for expression and connection is, I think, deep and profound in every human being, regardless of how they express it. I usually know when something is working, when what I’m creating is expressing what I’m feeling, and can evoke in someone else the same feelings.

If I find out later that it does, and they let me know, it’s kind of a warm afterglow of the initial creative experience. In some way I’ve connected with someone else. It’s nice.

New Collage Art

The Memory Palace uses strips of photos from many months of travel to imply an imagined structure with chambers rising on either side of the central corridor. The title comes from the old trick of holding in one’s mind a known space, or creating a mental image of a new space, in which items one wants to remember can be mentally placed. On a mental stroll through the palace, the items can be remembered.

In this case, the photographed experiences themselves provide the structure, which in my imagination rises beyond the physical collage to infinity. Looked at closely, the strips of photos reveal recognizable scenes, objects, people.

This piece is available, framed with three-inch mat and conservation acrylic, for $585 plus shipping. Please check out all currently available original pieces in the Works for Sale portfolio.