sunshine
Registered User

Like a moth to the flame, I return to the memory of you. You are, in death, something pure that I can point to with certainty. The certainty that you loved me and that your devotion to me was evident while you laid in an ICU bed, your body riddled with cancer. You awoke from your slumber in a panic, worried that I would worry about you....if I did not hear from you. Despite your dire circumstances, death creeping steadily towards your doorstep, you thought not of yourself, but worried about me. You made such a fuss that they brought you your laptop, so you could reach out to me. I was there, lucky to be online when you reached out to me. Yes, I was worried sick about you, helpless to do anything to help you. Unable to be by your side. We spoke briefly, I told you to rest and save your strength. Your half asleep words on my screen told me you were drifting off. You said that you loved me. I replied back that I loved you too. Such simple words said, but carried the weight of stone and meaning. A woman loved a man at the end of days, not worried about herself and dying, but that I would be distressed not hearing from her. How can I ever questions that you loved me....how can I ever think that I am not lovable? Your actions in the end of your moments remove all doubt. Your love is comfort, certainty, and peace.

Oddly, I find myself in the same situation when I met you. I am in a vanilla relationship and I crave more. I laugh at myself and where I find myself....back where I began when I met you. That said, I am happier than I have ever been in my life and I would not trade it for anything else. Still, I wish I could live two lives. The one that I have now, where I feel loved everyday I am with my wife. We laugh together....we are partners in life and she knows me deeply. She knows about you too. We don't hide things from each other. Yet, it is vanilla. I miss you...talking to you....hearing your voice. I miss the sexual tension between us. The promise of so much....a perfect circle of need and desires we hope to fulfill in the other. I still desire what we going to have. I feel sad for what was lost, what never had a chance to be. Despite the pain of it all, I am grateful for your love and for knowing you. Looking forward to each day to chat with you. To try to get to know a little bit more of you. It is more than just lust and kinky sex...I wanted you to be healthy and happy. I wanted to make you happy or at least give you some happiness. Isn't that enough....knowing that someone cares enough about you to want good things for you?

Am I sad and pathetic for coming here month after month to mourn you...to remember you...to night-dream of what could have been? Maybe I am a sad little monkey for mourning your passing. But this is not about me and how others perceive me or how they may judge me. This is about letting the world know who you are and were....in my memories and my mourning, you come back to life for a brief moment. If people can feel my emotions.....really feel what I felt and still feel for you, then it means that your life endures beyond the short life that you had. Maybe all they need to know is that a man fell in love with a women when neither of them was looking for love. We were both lonely people searching across the darkness of the night on the internet....looking for something exciting and titillating. Perhaps the fantasy of our darkest dreams were found together...here. Despite that lustful, emotional trap....we found an unexpected love. A deep understanding of each other...our flaws, frailties, weaknesses....and none of that mattered. We accepted one another...warts and all and saw past the emotional scars. Seeing past the loneliness....seeing someone worthy of hope, love and acceptance. I miss you....I miss wondering how your day went...the sound of your voice telling me about YOU.

I daydreamed about what we could have done and maybe a life together. I reached for my phone and texted your old roommate and asked her to share with me memories of how she knew you loved me. Not because I doubted, but because I wanted to feel that you were real, beyond my own distant memories. I wanted to know her memories of you.....someone to remind me that you were real. What we had was real.

I was walking around San Francisco....the Mission area of town, waiting for my daughter to get her tattoos done at a place called Black Serum Tattoo. I had four hours to wander around the neighborhood. There were the Latin Mission District with its charm and color. Billboards and shop windows in Spanish. I wandered further and found the Castro District with its Rainbow Flags waving proudly. A beautifully bold statement of being and of permanence. The weather was sunny and warm with locals wearing shorts and tank tops. There is a vibe to the city that is different from the East Bay suburbia where I grew up and live in today. An ebony woman with stripped stocking and star like tattoos on her eyelids that reminded me of a clown. Others with piercings and tats....to the more mundane with people riding in the bike lanes with stand up electric scooters. Without a doubt, people in THE LIFE would be found in this City. I thought of you....how you might have felt at home here, where I was just a tourist visiting and appreciating the differences that makes each place unique and special. In that place, enjoying my silent walks...I longed for you and missed you. I allowed myself in the waking moments of the daylight to imagine WHAT IF.

A day or two after writing my last message to you, I was driving to work when the country radio station that I was listening to was suddenly filled with an odd static. There were voices, muffled music...it all seemed very distant, like an echo of reality. I briefly thought of you....then as I was driving into work, I heard part of a country song and the words, "Looking over you." Pulling into the parking lot at work, the static faded and the station I had been listening to was normal. I took it as a sign from you....that maybe you were disheartened by my last message that you managed to reach out to me with all of your might to give me some small sign that you are still there. Maybe? Maybe I am deluding myself with a beautiful lie? But given the coincidence of it all, I am choosing faith to believe that you reached out to me. To not despair.....to keep talking to you. Or that you just want me to know that you do still love me or at least care about me to give me some hope that I am not here in vain. If it is true....thank you for making the effort to reach out to me my love. I am here, I will always be here for you.

I have been lying to myself for the past 13 years. I lie to myself that you will hear my words and that I will see you one day. The thought of an afterlife seems absurd. Yet loving you, a person who I knew as a text on a screen and a voice on the phone is absurd to anyone who would hear the tale of you and I. I chose to lie to myself because I am NEED to remember you.l I cherish the gift that was your hard won love. Your gift to me for my patience, my attention, and desire for you to be healthy and happy....even if it meant that you would eventually leave me for another. I lie to myself because there is no choice. I have to believe and have faith in us. I still burn and yearn for what the promise of us was. I seek out that promise here, online. Yet, I am never fulfilled. Like a glass without a bottom, I can never satisfy my thirst. I accept that this is what I have when it comes to you....beautiful memories and gut wrenching desires that I suppress and try to kill. But, like hope....the dream cannot die. So I am here, in the dark telling myself that I am writing to you when I am just telling myself the lie that you are still here with me....listening to my words cast into the night.

I have been thinking about where you now fit into my life. I thought it was lust, but realized it is not that. Lust is hot, passionate, and burning like the moth to the flame. You are beyond my grasp and on the other side of the flame. You are in the darkness of the night that surrounds me as I type late into the night on this screen. What I feel for you is longing. The yearning for something that you remember and can taste on the tip of your tongue when you close your eyes and savor the experience that once was but is no more than the fading memory of it. I long for you like a traveler who has been on the road for many countless miles....working his way home step by step. The image of his love held fast in his mind...driving each hard step forward to get home to his love. I long for you as a man who craves water in the desert. I long to taste your lips and to hold you in my arms to savor the warm of your body and of your love. I long for the memory of you and of us....what we had, what we shared.....the mutual desire for each other. You are gone, I am left here....savoring the sound of your voice. I only hear whispers of your voice that fade into the corners of this dark and empty room. I cling to no hope, but I still long for what I will never have. Maybe when time takes me and I awaken into a new world, I will open my eyes to gaze upon your face and hear your voice welcoming me home...into your loving arms.

Misty....it has been a while and I am sorry for not visiting you sooner. I went on a wonderful trip....driving down to San Diego, visiting the historical Spanish Missions. Seeing museums and enjoying some good food. We drove to Red Rock National Park, just outside Las Vegas to do two nights of camping. Snow at 7000 ft in the desert! We did an 11 mile day hike. I hope you can see the world through my eyes....see the natural beauty that recharges my soul. I hope you see how lucky I am to have someone in my life who loves me deeply and I love her equally so. Yet, I always come back to you....because you will always be part of my life. You are the unfulfilled fantasy of what I desire and lust for that is not part of my life. Part of me will always be here....this dark place, this taboo. Maybe this is how I keep you in my heart....with a longing desire that won't be fulfilled. I keep it here for us....I suppress that desire, so I can enjoy what I have now....yet keep it here to share with you......putting it in its place. Maybe that is sad, but it is what I have done. I am almost 54 yrs old....you remain 36 years old forever.

It has been a very wet, rainy year, which we desperately need in the drought stricken West of California. I think about your last words for me. That I would find you in the waters. You would be in the waves of the ocean crashing upon the beach. You would be with me on the trail with the rivers and streams by my side. Water is life. It is a gift...you were a gift to me. I am heading out on a vacation....some little bit on the trail. I will see you in the waters....I will reach down and touch the cold winter rains and think of you....thinking that I am touching you too. I honor you and us by simply sharing our story....our memory of love. I remember you because you matter and are important to me. I miss you....always.