Eliot Prince
I stand on the deck of Woodhouse Lawn, looking at a whole new landscape.
The stand of trees concealing one side of the lake has been removed, and the harsh chemical rains I hear about on the news have thinned the rest of the forests a bit. But mostly, my beloved second home has remained the same. Except for one thing. One thing that defined my life since the day I left here…
Nineteen years have passed since the day I walked away from Robert here. Nineteen years since I looked love in the face, then blinked and looked away. Nineteen years since I made the biggest mistake of my life. But what can you do? What will be, will be…
After Sara died, we never sold the house. My family almost broke apart during the sale of the estate, and finally came together for an emergency meeting and agreed that the best thing for everyone would be to pool our resources and come up with a fund to keep the property going for as long as possible. That way we wouldn’t kill each other trying to decide who got what percentage of the sale price. The house is now being rented for most of the year, but we keep every June open, and Robert is meeting me here today. I’m driving through on a cross-country tour to reinvigorate myself after my divorce, and yesterday I looked him up and asked him for one last afternoon here. He said yes. I didn’t ask questions about his life today, and if he tells me, I won’t want to hear. To know the details of the life he lived without me would break my heart.
After I told him I just wanted to be friends, we tried to keep up. We tried the emails and the social media “likes” and the rest. But there was always an undercurrent of rage. We’d get into an argument, the underlying anger would rise up, and we’d have to stop talking again. Soon I knew we had to end it, so I let our correspondence fade away. And I never got over it.
I glance at the dock where we danced, the creek we traveled up, the trails we walked. I even smile back at the wing housing the rooms where we made love. But then the regret creeps in again, and I have to stop thinking about it.
In those days I thought I would live forever. I was so afraid, choked by the fear of my family’s possible disappointment and disapproval of me down the road, that I walked away from Robert. Because once you are scarred by a gay childhood, those scars never really leave you – and never stop haunting you, either. With my mom’s meltdown on the dock that day, I didn’t see her as accepting me. I saw her as falling apart because of me, because of what I’d done, because of what I was. Once again, my gayness was rearing its ugly head, causing problems, causing difficulties. So instead of being brave enough to forge through the fire, I walked away from Robert and tried to get on with things.
Spoiler alert: I didn’t. The Internet age made us question every connection we made, while we were making them. I regretted my departure every day of my life. I saw Robert in the fields of North Carolina, in the sky-blue seas of Florida. I saw him in the shadows of my closet when I tried to fall asleep at night; I saw him in the shower across from me, washing me with ghost hands I craved more than words could explain. He never left me. The love I felt during that week hadn’t been some case of temporary insanity. All along, it was real. But I couldn’t go back. I knew I’d broken his heart the day I left. You can’t go back from that. And I was still too scared. Too afraid of what might happen. The stepdad and his stepson – that would never work. So I tried to let it go.
We went on and tried to build on our own lives, marry our own partners, convince ourselves we were happy. But we weren’t. I could just sense that he felt it, too. This place pulled back at us, both of us, forever. Every time I closed my eyes I could smell these trees, I could hear these crickets calling to me. And it never went away. It never got any easier. And all because of the fear…
In my head, I go back to that week all the time. I do it all over again, except in my fantasies I make the right choice. I make all the right moves, I do all the right things. And Robert and I are able to leave together, hand in hand.
But this is always only just a flashback. It is always just a Carolina mirage. I left him there after the memorial service, and I never lived it down.
At the same time, when people share a period like we spent together, something inside them merges forever. That neon thrill of first love wraps around you and fuses your soul with someone else’s, even in a small way, and that bond can never fully be broken. Even though we didn’t make it, even though we became different people with different lives, I still looked back on him with the most grateful of smiles. I still saw him down every road. I still felt that summer glow in the still of the night; I still felt his hands on me, even when he wasn’t there. I saw that canoe in every lake. Some love never really leaves. It just retreats. But that doesn’t mean it is gone. Beside this lake, a part of my soul grew into his – and I didn’t want it back. I was fine with the loss.
Suddenly I hear someone clear their throat. I turn around as my body goes numb. For the first time in nineteen years, it’s him. Robert. The best thing I never had.
I am knocked back by him, and like a lovestruck teen I stumble back a foot or two. My knees are weak, my heart is all over the place, and for the briefest of moments, I am young again. So it really was real. All this time, I was halfway afraid the whole thing had been some intense case of puppy love, some youthful infatuation. But it wasn’t. It was real all along. This is the final proof. I love him today even more than I did back then. Oh God, I’m so stupid…
The next thing I feel is…well, insecurity. The years have been far kinder to him than to me. Obviously he looks like an older person, but he wears it well. His skin is still remarkably smooth, and his silver hair suits his eyes. He’s lost a lot of his muscle, but his well-tailored day suit makes him look a decade younger. As for me, on the other hand…
I spent way too much time in the sun as a boy, and it shows. Very much. Botox can’t do much to help the spots on this face, the looseness in my cheeks, the droopiness under my eyes. I also had to get a chunk of my ear cut off due to some troublesome cells. If anything, we look a similar age, or maybe I even look older.
And to think I was so paralyzed with fear, regarding our age difference…
He looks taken aback, but he tries not to gawk.
“Hi there,” he says sadly, and it’s a perfect greeting. We both know we need to stay formal – to get close with him again, and be reminded of what we lost, would decimate me. This is a meeting of old friends. To think of it as anything else would be unendurable.
Do you remember? I want to ask. Do you remember us in the same way I remember us?
But I don’t need to. I know he does. I do, too. That week was a temporary miracle, a fleeting gift. And I remember it all. I always did. But did he really know that for that miraculous week under the trees, he had my whole heart in his hands? Not half of it, not a portion of it. But all of my heart, held right there in the safety of his fingers?
We just stare at each other, two old men who made all the wrong moves. Two old men who won’t get another chance. Two old men who threw it all away.
The truth is, I didn’t think about him every day. I couldn’t. It was too painful. There’s a reason humans are built to forget most of their lives. Some memories are too heavy to hold. But there is something I want to know.
“Are…are you glad we met?” I ask soon.
“Pardon me?”
“Are you glad this happened, or…would you rather have never known me, never lived with the questions, never wondered what if?”
“I’m glad,” Robert says after the longest pause of my life. “Of course I’m glad, Eliot. Life’s nothing but a trip to the fair. I’m glad I bought the ticket. I’m glad I took the ride.”
“Oh, Robert…”
“Why are people so afraid?” he asks after we both stop at the railing and watch the lake together, and I know exactly what he means. But I take a sharp breath.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Let’s not do that. Let’s not go back.”
“Okay, Eliot.”
“God,” I breathe.
“Yes?”
“To hear my name on your breath again…it just makes me wonder so many things.”
“Don’t wonder, then. Just feel.”
I’ve never been sad like this. I feel submerged in it. If only we were smarter and braver, if only we’d known what we had, if only we hadn’t thrown our lives away…
I can see it all now. My mom only lived for ten more years – an accidental overdose of prescription medication sealed her fate – so her opinion would’ve been irrelevant, anyway. My older family members lived even shorter lives. Nobody else would’ve really cared that much. In the end, our biggest obstacle was ourselves. Or just me, actually, and my fear…
We walk around the lake one last time, chatting in that politely distant way you talk to people when you don’t want to get too deep because it would traumatize both of you. We can’t admit what happened. Neither of us can. It would shatter us. So we just pretend we are old friends instead. And my mind wanders…
Almost everyone finds their firestarter, that one person who lights the eternal flame in you, the love that burns everlasting like the memorial Jackie made for JFK. But the first fires burn the brightest, and usually they burn too brightly. The saddest truth is that these first flames are too intense to last. Most people lose their firestarter, and then live out the rest of their lives smoldering for that person, in some way or another, forever. There is a reason most people do not end up with their first loves – that fire is not meant to last. We grow up and we move on and we settle down and we become different people. But even though we are without our loves in the physical sense, that inferno never fully dies. We hold onto that flame forever. Some people belong together, and some stories have no end.
I went on and accumulated other loves and losses, flailing and fumbling and figuring it out. But he loomed large. Those embers still burned in me, and would until my breathing stopped. Nothing will ever change that, or stop it. I could only learn to live with it.
We prepare to say goodbye. I walk him back to his car, but at the last moment he stops. For some reason he turns away from his car and then leans forward and gives me something that breaks me apart from the inside out, something that would’ve remade my whole world when we were back at this house the last time, running from the judgement and the disapproval and the fear:
For the first and last time, Robert Glazer gives me a public kiss.
He gives me the thing that would’ve saved us.
He gives me love, in sunlight.
A decade or two later, I am at a doctor’s office when I get a call from a lawyer. A lawyer based out of Atlanta.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “but you’re named in the will of someone who passed away, and I’m not sure if you’ve been notified of their passing yet…”
I grip the chair in front of me as my surroundings fade away. In my head, I see emerald hills. I see waves rolling across a lake. I see pines swaying in the moonlight. I see the only pair of arms that ever accepted me for exactly what I was.
I see Robert.
“Yes, I can imagine the name,” I finally force out. He’s gone, he’s really gone…I’ll never see those hazel eyes again…
“Well, then. Yes. Robert Glazer. I’m sorry. Do you need a moment?”
I don’t respond. In my memory, I am already sailing back. Back to Woodhouse Lawn during the week when I became a man, back to that lake where we laughed and cried and danced, back to those pines that cast their shadows across the rest of my entire life. Back to the boy I was, before Robert Glazer found me and remade me, grew me up under those Carolina pines, taught me how to love from someone, and how to accept love in return. But most of all, he showed me it was okay to be myself. Those jeans he gave me meant so much more to me than just denim. I know our time together was short, but people never know they are making history until history has already been made. And he was history for me.
“No,” I finally say. “I don’t need a moment. I don’t need anything at all. Thank you.”
The lawyer apologizes and gets on with her business. I hold back the tears, though, because I don’t want to cry about what we lost. Instead, for Robert, and for those eternal days under the Carolina sun, I look up at the sky and smile at what almost was.
“Wherever you go,” Robert had told me once, “there I’ll be.”
And he was so right. Love never leaves, it just retreats. And I know that when I take my last breaths and follow him into eternity, I’ll walk into Woodhouse Lawn again and see him waiting for me. I’ll look around that foyer, I’ll find him smiling at me just like the first day. He’ll hold out his hand, and I’ll follow him into the trees. And for the first time, we will be free.
Wherever I go, there he’ll be.
~
“Eliot? Eliot, are you okay?”
I feel a hand on my shoulder and open my eyes. Then I blink about six times, my chest heaving as I catch my breath. What just happened?
I look out from the balcony, where I’m standing. The lake looks the same as it did before Sara’s service. The house looks the same. And Gracie is beside me, staring at me like I’ve stepped on a kitten.
I retrace my steps after I stormed away from the dock. I came up here, started thinking, and then got lost in a daydream…
“Gracie, what’s the date?”
“Um, June something. Why?”
And just like that, all the feeling leaves my face. “Nothing. Just…double-checking. And sorry, I zoned out. I’ll see you soon.”
I turn away. The whole thing was just a daydream. I zoned out for a little, but I’m still here. I’m still young. I can still fix this.
I press my eyes closed one more time and then open them, just to make sure. I’ve never been more grateful. I’ve always had an active imagination, and I’ll often zone out and see entire scenes flash in front of me. But nothing like that has ever happened. It was…so vivid, so real. Maybe my heart was showing me what my brain was too afraid to admit I already knew: if I walk away from this without fully investigating it, I will regret it forever.
And it’s not too late. I’m still here. I can still go and love Robert.
I take out my phone and pull up the only photo I have of us. I took it in the car the other night, and my face is turned to him as he drives. My cheek is lifted by a smile, and I look so goddamned happy I can’t stand it. His dark beard is a perfect complement to my pink-blonde hair, and both of us are golden from the sun. In this photo we don’t look like stepparent and stepchild, older man and younger man, or any other mismatched title. We look like two humans who love each other, and love being around one another. And at the end of the day, none of the titles matter. We are just like many couples.
Lots of people are prevented from being with the one they love, for all kinds of reasons. At the end of the day we are just two people who can’t be together.
But we can be together. I can make that choice now. Sure, it’ll be hard. I can’t even imagine a scenario where we could coexist peacefully with my mom breathing down my neck, my friends asking questions, our age difference causing eventual issues between us. But I can still try. If my future is anything like my daydream, I’d rather die than face that.
I look out and breathe in the smell of the mud, the trees, the mountains. I get a sudden image of the men in Brokeback Mountain and start thinking again, my brain blooming with colors and ideas and thoughts. I look back at my phone and see yet another flurry of notifications from my advice post – these things come in waves, and I guess another round of discussions is happening in the comments. I pull up the thread, and one comment suddenly strikes me all the way down to my core:
Love is love, Eliot.
And God, this person is right. This is a cheesy slogan, but it’s also so much more. Love is equal. Love is just…love. Whether you love your wife or your dog or your grandmother, it’s all different, but it’s still the same. So how can I turn around and deny that now? I would be going against everything I ever believed. Obviously this isn’t the easiest situation. But…feelings aren’t feelings. They’re the same, and valuable. And love is just that. It’s love.
I smile to myself. Over the past few weeks and months and years, I’ve been wondering a lot. Sometimes, after coming out of the closet, I didn’t even want to get out of bed. Sometimes I wondered what I was fighting for, what I had to look forward to, what I was walking toward when every day’s road could be so hard.
But what I didn’t think about was that regardless of all that, I was still fighting. I was still trying. And that means I obviously care, right? My existence is proof enough that I want to be here, that I want to figure this out. That I want to keep walking on this path, wherever it leads.
And maybe, just maybe, I was waiting for him all along. Maybe he is my firestarter…
“Where are you going?” Gracie asks as I rush out of there.
“To change pants. And then to go find someone.”