Adam Venus
I rush back to St. Marys with new hope breaking on the horizon. His response said only this: Yeah sure, let’s talk. Meet me where we had our second date. 9 pm. And as I get closer, I know exactly what I am approaching: my destiny. Do or die, make or break, this is about to happen. And there will be no going back.
I don’t know why, but my smile grows with every mile closer I get to home. I think of my mother, and something she’d “left behind,” as that pastor had put it. Her favorite song ever was Something To Talk About, and she’d start singing it whenever I started worrying someone didn’t like me or had said something cruel. “Fuck it,” she’d said once, with typical color. “They’re gonna hate you anyway. Give em’ something to hate.” People like Kinnan, and all the boring, beige people in my old life – I don’t care about them, anyway. Why do I care about their disapproval? At least I had fun giving them something to hate this fall…
Obviously I don’t have it all figured out yet. In fact, I know less now than I did when I met him those months ago. But that pastor was so right. I do know a few things to be unassailably true in my life now. I love Fabian, but I have to remember that I don’t have to give up my beliefs in order to choose to open myself to him. I will always have my faith, straight down to my marrow, but I can send that faith into whatever God I prefer. Love, heaven, the sky, fate, destiny, grace. Just like Fabian himself always said – God doesn’t just have to mean one thing to me, with one set of rules. The rule I keep ending up at now?
Rule number one: love. Love with everything you have to give, in every way you know how. The rest will fall into place. I always knew that, but my mom’s death really sent the message home. And Fabian is all of my love. He is everything and all of it, all at once. He is my prayer. Or he was, at least. And nothing could ever be more beautiful, more valuable, than love. In a world that guarantees nothing, he was my perpetual yes. This autumn, I found my God. I found my heaven. I found my Fabian. At the end of it all we were just two humans, of blood and bone and water, who felt what humans were born to feel. Love. There is so much to figure out, so much to unravel, but we can figure it out. With two things inside me – God, and love – I can do anything. I really do think we can get there together, if only he meets me halfway…
And I know a lot of people will look at me and think I can’t exist, like I can’t have God and gay love in me at the same time. That I can’t be a Christian and happily in love with another man. That a rainbow and a cross belong nowhere near each other. But they are wrong. They are feeding into the wrong parts of God’s word. I know God is real, because of the blessing He gave me of Fabian. Everything else is just noise. There is no juxtaposition in accepting love from above, and offering it to a human right next to you – regardless of what gender that human comes packaged in. I am love, I am God, I am anything I want to be. But above all, I am free. The moment you let anyone else decide who you are, you’re already dead. And today, this year, I am deciding.
Tears run down my face as I turn off at my exit. With Fabian, if only for a fleeting moment, life was elevated to something else. Something greater. Something brighter. And also the fruition of my worst nightmare, too – that somebody really loved me, really wanted me around, really accepted me for what I am. I won’t be able to run and hide anymore. I will have to look at him, eye to eye. Will I be able to do all that, though, without turning away from him like I have three times before?
I guess all I can do is find out.
On the deserted feeder road into town, I pass a billboard showing a grotesque photo of an aborted fetus. Above the photo it says, in big black letters, ABORTION IS A SIN. REPENT NOW OR FACE CONSEQUENCES. I smile a bit – oh, Georgia. Never change.
But it also gets me thinking. Maybe I should pray, too – but this won’t sound like any prayer I’ve ever sent. I’ve got a new prayer now. Everything I was ever taught made me believe that loving another man would be wrong. But loving Fabian didn’t feel like a sin. He felt like sunrise. His beautiful silence when I watched him sleep, the aching tenderness of his touch, the warmth of his body in bed next to mine – I may be a man of the cloth, but his flesh is all I yearn for. And I can’t run from his kaleidoscope love anymore, no matter what it may mean for my future.
I bow my head a little, still keeping my eyes on the road:
Father, this is my sinner’s prayer. I must repent, and make a confession, too. I love Fabian Blanco, but I am no longer sorry about it. He is my new salvation, my perpetual sunrise, but that’s not why I’m praying right now. I’m not repenting for falling in love with him. I’m confessing that I don’t care anymore, and repenting for ever letting the world trick me into feeling guilty about it in the first place. Every moment between us confirms that love – the comfort of his silence, the passion of his embrace. And I don’t care about what the Bible says about me anymore. I still love You, but I am going to love You on my own terms now. I was born this way, and I’m not sorry anymore. I’m still Your child, I’m just making a few new rules of my own now.
Love always, Adam
~
He’s waiting on the outdoor patio at this tiny little country-style restaurant, one of the first places we ever went out together. My chest contracts as I see him, so beautiful in the night. Oh, Fabian. Everything else slows down as he comes into view. It’s felt like a million years and also ten seconds. What I wouldn’t give to do this all over, to go back to that first night and start again…
“Hi,” I say. “Thank you so much for coming.”
“Of course. Um…sorry about your mom.”
I feel my legs go weak, and soon I am on my knees. I pretend I am tying my shoes but really I am praying at his feet, where I belong. Seeing him again is making my heart swell and grow – I want to tell him everything, right here and now. You can’t be silent when you were born to be loud. His presence overwhelms me out of nowhere. I want to be everything to this man – I want to be the family he never had, the God he never believed in. I want to become everything he ever needed, and didn’t even know he needed, too. I want to be his only.
First he looks impassive. Then he smiles, but it doesn’t touch the rest of his face. “Hi. Get up, Adam.”
I push myself up and finally sit across from him. “So. Hi. How have you been?”
“Good,” he says, pained. “Okay.”
He doesn’t ask how I’ve been. I guess I deserved that.
I try to make some small talk about the weather and the news, anything but the gigantic rainbow elephant in the room. He offers nothing, though, and soon I give up and decide to get down to business.
“I’m moving,” I say after the server brings us two beers. “To Savannah. Long story, but I came into some money, and…yeah. There’s nothing keeping me here, anyway. Well, besides you.”
He just stares. “Okay.”
That’s when my heart breaks. Right there at that table, I feel it break. “Oh. Just thought you might want to know.”
He gets this guilty look. Soon a smile flickers again, offering me momentary hope. “Well of course I like knowing. That’s great. I figured as much. What will you do there?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know any of that. But, I came into a little money, and I’ll be fine for a while. For the first time in my life, I want to do nothing. I want to get to know myself.”
His eyes burn.
“I’ve been looking at apartments, by the way,” I say soon, hopefully. “I found a two-bedroom one, with a pretty small kitchen, but oh well. Anyway, it’s on the main street of Savannah and you can see everything worth seeing. I think I’ll put a deposit down next month.”
“Cool,” he nods, still coming off so angry for some reason. Why did he meet me in the first place? Is this my punishment? Did he come here just to watch me beg and squirm? And if so, don’t I deserve it?
I swallow deeply. “Well, I’m telling you because…well, I was thinking, maybe you’d like to come with me? You don’t work here anymore, both of us are sort of in-between things right now, and…”
He stares at me for a long time. Soon he sits taller. “No thank you,” he says, his voice cracking a little. “I’ve figured things out. I’ll stay here. Thank you, though.”
“No?” I ask, my heart breaking again, and he shakes his head. I’m not getting through to him. So I lean closer, unable to hold this in anymore.
“I love you,” I say. “And you deserved so much more. I love you, Fabian.”
He looks away. The server comes, sticking around way too long as she describes the special. Both of us turn down any food. When we’re alone again, I clear my throat, unsure if I will even be able to speak. This is happening in a way I never expected, and I am broken.
“So…that’s it?”
He swallows so hard, his neck flexes. “Like I said, it doesn’t matter anymore. We probably just can’t go down this road,” he says. “Again, I mean. Look what you did the first time around.”
“But I’m…I’m different now...”
He pauses. Then laughs a little. “I mean, I can see that – in some ways, at least. You’re…you’re like a different person.”
“Yes, yes, I really am! I’ve been reading these books, and talking to this gay man, and…I’m different, Fab. I am.”
“That’s so great for you.”
He looks away, and I know this doesn’t matter. He’s too angry. I don’t even know what to say.
After all this, I just put it all on the line and got rejected by the person I love the most. I can’t believe it. I made a fool of myself because of that pastor. Damn him.
“So…um, are we about done?” he asks. “I’ve gotta get going.”
“Yeah. I’ll get the check. You can just go, I guess?”
And that’s what he does – he gets up and leaves me there, alone.
~
I walk to my car in an absolute daze. He rejected me…he turned me down…he did what I did to him a month ago. But this time it was final. I can feel it everywhere. He’s done.
I collapse into my car and stare straight forward. My phone rings with a Savannah area code, and I laugh to myself in a sick little way. Because I have nothing else in me to give, no fight to put up, I answer. Life has been so weird lately – I know God is real, but why is he working overtime? Maybe it’s Ed McMahon telling me I won even more money. More money that won’t mean anything to me, because I won’t have anyone to enjoy it with. Because I’m alone, and I’m going to be alone forever because I’m messed up in the head. I’m sure of it.
“Hi. Adam here.”
“Hello there,” a smiling voice says, a voice that I instantly recognize. “It was so nice chatting with you. Forgive me for calling so late, but did I mention to you that All of the Colors is looking to hire a junior priest?”