"The Imitation Of Life..."

“That summer,” said Ennis. “When we split up after we got paid out, I had gut cramps so bad I pulled over and tried to puke. Thought I ate somethin bad at that place in Dubois. Took me about a year a figure out it was that I shouldn’t a let you out a my sights. Too late then by a long, long while.”

 

What I Like About This: I once had that same experience of being sick and not realizing or accepting why.  I was a young man then...  I was in the Navy and when I had to depart from him who had become my best mate, I was sick for over a year and it was only upon a short reunion with him that I realized that it was that I had been in love for the first time in my life.  The two days we spent together were filled with an intensity of pain and longing that I still feel today.  On that last night together, we went out drinking as sailors are want to do, and back in the hotel room, he drifted off to a stupored sleep, and I remember how I sat there for hours in the darkness of the night just watching him... the object of my affection just a few inches away, wanting to touch him, even to kiss him, but I dared not. I knew he loved me too, but his love for me was that of a brother, while I realized for the first time in my life that I felt something far more intense and visceral that filled me with fear and self-loathing. 

After that last night we spent together, we stayed in touch by many letters and rare but occasional phone calls for the next 20 years, until I had finally come-out at 40 and I realized I didn't know how to tell him that I had loved him as I had, and that my life had changed in such a dramatic fashion...  And most of all, I feared rejection by the one I had secretly loved for so long. And so I ignored his Christmas letter that year and the many that followed over the next several years until they stopped coming...  

During the many years of our "friendship," I spun many tales of a happy life in my letters to him.  He knew of my marriage (to a woman I pretended to love because I didn't want to be gay), but not of the disastrous consequences.  He himself had married twice, the second time, happily.  Today, his picture with his lovely wife and two beautiful children (who by now are grown ups), sits in a place of honor on the console table in the hallway outside my bedroom... and there are still days that I linger there knowing that a place in my heart will always belong to him and a love that could have never been.