Four years ago, I met someone.  Someone interesting, with a personality and able to perform enough in the way of mental gymnastics to pique my curiosity, unlike the vast majority of gay men in Pakistan.  And we talked.  We exchanged phone numbers.  He–like many of the people in whom I find myself interested–was living in Lahore at the time, but had spent most of his life abroad.  There was some degree of interest, a good chunk of excitement and a sense that were we to ever meet in person, something could potentially come of it.

Then something fairly awful happened to him, and he told me about it, and vanished.  I never heard from him again, no e-mails, no IMs, no phone calls or text messages.  I grew up a little bit, left the country, studied, lived, loved a little bit, cried a lot, and forgot about him.

Then tonight, I discovered that he had been back for a few years.  And is in a relationship with a very close friend of mine.  And he doesn’t know that I know this, but that’s OK, because even though I’m tempted to re-establish contact (and we did, as virtual strangers over the internet, no idea of who the other was until some digging and logical leaps on my part pre-empted the actual discovery), I won’t.

I can’t really explain why though.  Maybe it’s because he dropped out of my life so suddenly, or because he’s now in a relationship with someone very close to me, but I think it’s more to do with the fact that I know, no matter what he says about it, I’ll always be a little angry that he didn’t treat the link we made with the same level of regard that I did.  Which, in its own way I suppose, says more about me than it does about him.  Even though I messaged him online, this most recent time, as a complete stranger who seemed to be personable, even though he wrote back to me the same way now, four years after the fact, knowing who I am, but not drawing the link (although, as he noted “I’m very close to someone very dear to [him]“, so obviously he knows who I am).  But apparently he chooses to avoid picking up where we left off, and that’s fine too, in its own odd sort of way.

I do wonder though, about the way things work themselves out.  About why I, despite everything, find myself sitting on the edge of my bed at three in the morning, typing these words onto a blank screen, hoping that in some way, processing my thoughts by putting them down will help me disentangle this Gordian knot of emotion that I seem to have nurtured over the years, letting it get ever more complicated and not being able to find the right metaphorical blade with which to sever it.  Wondering why analogies are so simple in theory and so cumbersome in actual practice.  Why it takes unhappiness or discontent of an Eliot-esque sort to make me come back to words and paragraphs, turns of phrase and prose that verge on the banal or the absurd, to sort myself out.

And it’s frustrating to not find an answer to that.  Ten years ago, I woke up in my bed at college, excited by the idea of taking a class on iconoclasm and certain that when push came to shove, I’d leave university with some sense of who I was, where I was going–and most certainly–with whom.  And year after year since then has slipped past, while I’ve floundered, ricocheting off the walls of my life, trying to find direction or happiness, convinced that one or the other would automatically engender something more, be the catalyst that would make everything just that tiny bit better.

I’m still waiting.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 25th, 2009 at 03:51 and is filed under Backstory, Ponderation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.