A couple of weeks ago I mentioned in here that Xel and his girlfriend were going to be attending the retreat I went to last week. And… it was just about as hard to handle as I expected. Every time I saw him, or his girlfriend, or especially the two of them together, it was like a stab in the heart. Envy and bitterness, grief and anger and nervousness in a little hard knot of pain in my chest. And I seemed to see them everywhere. Consequently, my moods were swinging out of control during the whole gathering.
Turns out Xel and I were bunked in the same building (though not the same room) for the weekend. For the first day or two he avoided me, in increasingly comical ways. He saw me on the porch as he was walking toward the cabin and quickly veered away. Standing ten feet away in a crowd, his eyes skated over me like I wasn’t there (which is especially laughable since my hair is bright blue at the moment). The wall became intensely fascninating as he passed me on the way to the bathroom.
I was perusing the dungeon two nights ago and found him standing almost right in front of me. I put on a dazzling smile, stepped close enough that he there was no way he could pretend not to see me, held out my hand and said, ”Hi! I don’t know if you remember me, but we met last year.. my name’s [AlmostMagic].” He took my hand as a distinctly nervous smile flickered across his face. “Hi… Yeah…”
With a teasing smile of my own, “I believe I noticed you avoiding me the past couple of days.” He denied it. We both knew he was full of shit.
“So.. the silent treatment! Wow.” He grimaced and shamefacedly said, “Yeah… about that…”
“I gotta say, I expected a lot more from you. You are older than me, after all. Shouldn’t you should be the mature one?” Still with a lighthearted tone of voice, but daggers in my smile. He stammered a lot and looked like he was going to bolt and run at any moment.
I was stern, without being bitchy. “All you had to do was send an email, leave a voicemail. Even if it was just one line: ‘Hey, this isn’t working out.’ ‘I’m really sorry but I’m freaking out right now.’ ‘You’re a creep and I never want to see you again.’ Tell me something. We are adults, I can handle it.”
He apologized, almost as much as I wanted him to. And repeated himself a lot as he attempted to explain that he had had kind of a breakdown, that he had stressed out and shut down and couldn’t find the words to tell me. I couldn’t help thinking that his eyes are fucking beautiful and felt an ashamedly strong impulse to press myself against his body. I’m about 95% sure it didn’t show on my face.
“That’s fine, I would have been happy to leave you alone to sort your shit out. All you had to do was tell me. Tell me something, anything. It wouldn’t have mattered how you said it or even what you said.”
More apologies, and I think he called himself a jerk at least five times. The velvet-covered steel smile stayed on my face, but inside I was cheering. Because I did it! I stood up for myself! I confronted him, I was in control and said what I needed to say, how I needed to say it. I’m not sure I can express how amazingly wonderful that was. Generally I am terrible at confrontation. You know those situations where you think of the right thing to say, 5 hours after the conversation? Well, that’s me all the time. But not this time.
At the end of the exchange he said, “I’d like to talk to you again before the weekend’s over.” The smile fell off my face with the weight of my skeptical incredulity. “Do you actually mean that?” “Well, yeah.” “Seriously? Look, don’t give me platitudes. It’s bullshit and I don’t want that crap, all I want is honesty.” He made a joke, but when I gave him a look he nodded like a scolded schoolboy and looked earnest. “Yes. I would really like to talk to you some more.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Last night he buried his face in my neck and clung to me like a child. In a broken, tear-infused half-whisper he said, “Thank you - thank you so much for allowing me this. I’m so grateful.”
This morning as we were saying good-byes he framed my face in his hands and just looked at me, more closely and fully than I think anyone ever has, and he had such an expression of happy tenderness that it almost made up for the months of silence.
So maybe I’m a sucker. But right now I’m a happy one.
