Exploring ideas and directions for the novel project…

“Even though I have a boyfriend,” he said, “you can kiss me now.”

The invitation, as strange, dangerous, and illicit as it sounded, could only be accepted.  I acknowledged it first by a discreet kiss on the cheek, on his left side, my right side.  Our arms soon followed, and like an airplane on its approach to landing, my nose guided my lips to that mysteriously sensitive area under the ear, where they dwelled for a while, tickling the thin layer of skin, muscle, and nerve.  With an unconscious decision to move on, again led by a nose excited by the softness of a fair skin on which only the suggestion of a beard manifested a pleasant resistance, the lips found each other and locked in.  It felt as if they had been measured for each other.

“Oh, if only…” my head started to reason, raising the alarm that the moment was about to end.  I tried to ignore it, tried to think of a mantra as one does when practicing yoga.  Nothing could be done about it.  Here was the young man who could easily have been my son, and as infatuated as I could be with his youth, this kiss, to be savored eternally, was all that I could get.

“Thank you,” I said, withdrawing, but resuming our tender embrace with a regular hug.

“Don’t,” he said.  “I wanted it just as much as you did, and…”

Our faces still close enough to feel the molecules of air moving with the words, I smiled.  Or perhaps I beamed, who knows.  We touched noses as if we were Eskimos.

“And I love you,” he exhaled.

Tears always came out of my right eye first.  It was getting wet upon hearing those words.

“I wished I had a rational response,” I started, “but I don’t.  I’m not going to tell you that we can’t.  I love you.”

These words, prohibited for more than half of my life, then liberated like a volcano, still provoked more tears in the right eye, and the left eye followed.  I could become a mess.  Was it possible that a classical return to my teenage years, statistically proven to be the banal destiny of men passing by mid-life crisis, could be viewed as negative?  But no, I had told myself already, I was not that common.  This, I was sure, was different.  Granted, I had a repressed youth and worked hard to conform to the world’s expectations of me, to find myself wanting the freedom of a vagabond life, one with so light a baggage that my older body would not ache to carry it on.

We sat next to each other on his couch, holding hands.  His boyfriend would be back from work soon, and everything would be back to normal.  This word, “normal,” held its own irony in my head.  Normality was a big planet around which we orbited, and on which the weakest had crashed.  I had decided that to be normal was simply a temporary state while you orbited around a group or an individual, considering whether or not you wanted to keep going on that interstellar journey of life.  The truly normal crash landed early in life, while the rest of us kept bouncing around, sometimes traveling in lonely directions, feeding on the excitement and resting in a vacuum.

“I don’t want to mess up your relationship with Diego,” I said.

“You’re not,” he said.  “Diego likes you very much, and he knows you and I have a special relationship.”

“But…”

“There’s no ‘but,’” he said.  “You’re family.”

“Which is where it scares me in many ways,” I said, “as for me, a family has a forced kind of relationship.  For many of us, family was where we couldn’t be ourselves.”

“Okay then,” he said, “you’re a very special friend.”

We took our hands back as we heard the door opening, with Diego pushing his bicycle in.  He left it in the entryway to come to greet us.