On Turning Tables

It's been long. Long since I've been touched. We hadn't, not once. Do you want to come home with me, he said. I'm neither young nor prude, and yet. He is full of firsts. Like this question. In my strange corner of the universe, where normative protocols have been put to sleep and an altogether different set of rules applies, this question shocked me in its simplicity. Not for its content, but for the absolute unexpectedness of its implications. I wanted to say, boy I have not rehearsed this part of the script will you give me a few minutes to recompose myself. Boy please allow me to walk back, and in reverse learn to thread a narrative about you and I that logically leads to this moment so that I can fit it within my inner mechanisms of defense and control and fear. Am I fearful of coming home with you tonight, M, or am I afraid of the fact that it was you who asked the question? You see, I've been too used to being the pursuer, to dictating the confines and definitions, the boundaries and restrictions. I've been used to deciding, selecting, choosing, claiming. Love is exception-making, and I am lucky to at least have this maxim to lead me in the unexplored territory that this journey seems to paint. It is terrifying. It is also a quiet form of relief. For once, I will have to brake, to pause, to listen. Oh M, be careful with my heart dear boy, be careful with my love.

I said I'd love to. Your house was cold. You gave me water and talked about books. You said they felt like home. I know you one day will, to me. A says I should write this down to memorialize it, because one does not often find, despite spending a lifetime searching. I do. I find like I found you, M. Coming from the farthest extremes of life, said Baricco, we would have had to cross the entire universe by foot, and instead, we did not even have to look for each other. And this is the part I like, M, about Baricco. This is the part that still resonates with me, so many years later. All we had to do was recognize each other. This is the thing-- you are never too far, never, to find each other. We were, farther than any others. But I recognized you. This is almost all that I'm good at. Recognizing in someone else's gestures and words and silences the potential of a person I could love. It is not love at first sight-- love must of course be built, worked, shaped, kneaded, polished. It is recognition at first sight, and the rest of it is up to us. I recognized you at first sight. I knew from that first night that there was someone inside you I could one day love. And perhaps I won't, but more important than the uncertain and precarious future is this knowledge, that you and I crossed paths and across the room saw each other despite coming from the very opposite sides of existence.