Chapter Nineteen
There is a nice life waiting for you just around the corner… How about when you turn that corner, and the unknown hits you hard, such a slap in the face, and you have no idea why, how, when, where, what, but still you decide to jump on the adventure - closer to truth, you have no choice because if you didn't jump on it, you'd eat yourself alive, - and the nice life turn to be an awful feeling of a deserted kitten? Where is that nice life around the corner, for crying out loud? Would somebody be so kind and please, please, I beg you, show me that corner that hides the nice life? I need it so badly!
Chris stayed over for the night with me; I was worried about my parents' reaction, but surprisingly enough, Taylor covered up for us by keeping their distance from my room, and Chris could slip in and out in the morning without being noticed. I guess Taylor was trying to make me trust him again. I appreciated his efforts, but somehow I was withdrawn from him, unsure if I could come closer. Chris, as he heard about it, just said it was natural and he wouldn't have expected anything else.
I sat on the floor in front of him and we held hands. I talked and talked, telling him my sad tale of Enid's walking out on me today, and he listened. That's one of the things I love in him - he's quite a listener. And he's wise.
"Before I tell you something, I just want to ask you, if there was any decision reached about the preferences you have in sexual matter," he said.
"I think I'm bisexual, given the circumstances," I replied calmly. "I'm attracted to you, and I used to be attracted to Enid. One and one makes two, isn't it?"
"You got everything in the middle," he smiled. "Both genders as love material and from the three categories, a couple of parents from the second one."
I closed my eyes and sighed. I got no best friend, how about that? Where is that middle of good and bad, that if I could, I would have grabbed it and hold it close to my heart as a lifestyle, because now I felt only sadness covering my world.
"The third category is the worst…" Chris murmured.
"What is it about you and categories anyway?"
"I got parents from the first, you got ones from the second…"
"Did you know somebody that was a kin to the third?"
He nodded without saying a word, and my wild imagination immediately drew me a picture of some wonderful young boy of sixteen, whom Chris loved desperately and who knew he was gay but decided to keep the urges down for the sake of not upsetting his parents. "Tell me," I said quietly.
"You don't wanna know."
"How do you know?"
"Present has nothing to do with the past. When you date somebody, you don't really talk to them about your past loves."
"It was your ex?"
"Yes." I looked him in the eye. There was nothing reflecting through those brown mirrors of his heart, except maybe numb grief and dim remembrance of something from the past. "Zachary, if I tell you this story, it won't do you any good." It was the first time he called me by my full name; then I knew it was quite an issue he was talking about.
"I wanna hear it anyway."
"It's a story of a guy with parents from the third category, this is what it is. Somebody with great attachment to those who brought him in this world, with their great expectations of him and big hopes about his future. And strict rules to live up by. And an entire book of the ways their son should behave and what he should become, with a special chapter in that goddamn book dedicated to his future wife. This family lived by religion's rules, and as we all know, the religion does not support homosexuality and never did. He was aware of all this. Still, he met me one day at this party - it's the classical way to meet, whether you're straight or gay - and he couldn't resist anything. So we were together for a while before he started questioning himself about his future. He knew what and who he was, and it was a big question for him, how he's going to live with it. I hated to see him all depressed, thinking about his possibilities in life, all those hopes he was going to shatter to his parents, all those things they wanted for him and his sexuality prevented him from doing - there never had been a gay priest or a gay prime minister, right? He knew he was going to disappoint them bitterly, and lose them, eventually. They were the kind of people who wouldn't have it unless it was their way - and their way only."
"So he broke up with you and forced a life of a heterosexual on himself," I finished his monologue.
"Worst. He couldn't do it, as much as he wanted to. He loved me, he wanted me to go on loving him, he couldn't even bring himself to think of a girl in a sexual matter, and he couldn't force himself to do anything once he knew what he really was like."
"Sounds like a hell of an inner conflict."
"Well, he solved it by jumping off a cliff," Chris said bluntly.
"He - what?"
"He brought himself to the highest cliff he found in the entire United States of the America, climbed high, stood on its edge and dove down to the ocean's water, leaving a letter to his parents, to his grandparents, to the girl he knew had a crush on him and to me."
"He told them all?"
"Yes. He explained also that now that he's gone, it's even easier to remain as a secret. So if you go to people who knew him and ask them, they would say he was a heartthrob and shagged fifteen girls a week. That was how he tried to look in their eyes. And to me he promised his eternal love, since there never was and never would be another love for him, and he urged me to love another, since he was gone."
Chris didn't look at me, but I hesitated to face him either, afraid to see the pain I knew was there. Somehow, I had the sight of my mother and father in front of my eyes from that day they all crucified me, and they looked like just parents scolding a child for not behaving properly. And I had a blurry vision of a figure on a cliff, with his arms wide open and tears streaming down his face - the figure of Chris' ex.
"What was his name?"
"Charles. His mother was a big fan of the Gone with the Wind movie."
The figure of Charles, probably good looking, dying a minor of his own choice… No, no choice. His being passively forced.