Today was one of those days in the City. The air was thick and warm to the touch, the sun brilliantly shining, the sky that particular soft blue foretelling spring's imminent arrival. It was one of those days in which I would have rather languished laying about on the great expanse of lawn that covers the western side of Lafayette Park. I use to spend a great deal of time up there in my youth; well in my twenties and thirties. It was a meeting place for all kinds of people, some of which I knew from my neighborhood, others were friends of mine. Sometimes we would plan an afternoon up there or on other days we would run into each other then spend the afternoon propped up on one arm talking about the nonsensical things young people talk about. I so enjoyed those halcyon days relaxing into conversation for hours on end. I also enjoyed those spontaneous moments of just running into someone on the off chance in the neighborhood. I use to say to Tyler, "I'm running up to the corner store. Be back in a few minutes" only to amble back in about an hour later to his furious questioning of where have you been? I would turn to him and say "oh I ran into this friend or that and we ended up talking." His fury would always drain away because it would most often be one or more of our friends who he would then ask "oh how are they doing?" and I would tell him of their latest exploits even though we had just seen them a few days before. Life moved so quickly then.
While cleaning the bedroom last week I picked up a picture of Tyler and I. It was taken during those same days by my paternal cousin Bonnie who had been visiting the City for a week. We had met somewhere in Hayes Valley prior to having breakfast nearby and she snapped a picture of us standing against some leafy wall or another. I held the picture closely while examining our faces. We were so young then. So full of life and promise as it seemed to be even though by then Tyler and I had been together for more than a dozen years.
During those same years in the second half of my sophomore year at University I took a photo class. My penultimate project was to create a series of photos depicting an event. I knew what I was going to do and set about getting the props and asking my good friend Ralph to be my subject. When I was ready we both headed up one afternoon to Lafayette Park, to that same expanse of green lawn. I took seven photos of Ralph that day, photos that depicted him having an encounter with his former self from a previous life. The series was of him walking down a pathway, then unwittingly walking though his former self, of them both turning to look back with some faint awareness of what had just happened, then recognition by both, of them both forcing another connection, then of his former self lowering itself into Ralph's body as he sat on the lawn, the last photo being of them as one looking straight into the lens. Even then at that young age I somehow knew that time and space could be breached, that there was an Other or Others existing beside our own space time continuum. That this life was not the only one out there.
As I have said before I have been struggling during this post Larry period of my life for a number of reasons. One such reason is that Larry was the last connection I had to Tyler, to our life together, and by extension to those halcyon days of our youth. I remember the gut wrenching grief I felt that first year after Tyler and I split after twenty five years of being together. I felt that I had lost my very soul. In addition to this seemingly unending grief I was also dealing with the beginnings of my recovery from my childhood trauma which had begun resurfacing one month after we had split. Of course this is as they say all water under the bridge except for one very important fact that I am now becoming aware of. To put it succinctly, I have not been a dead man walking since Larry's death as I had thought but since my childhood trauma began. More importantly, what I had defined as the felt sense of being alive during Larry's lifetime and before was not real but an illusion. This awareness came to fruition in drips and drabs over the last few weeks as guidance often does in my life. A word here, a phrase there, all seemingly meaningless; until they are not. The promises say, slowly and haltingly and sometimes in great bursts.... This guidance coalesced slowly and haltingly until it became a contiguous whole this past Saturday afternoon. The fuller version of the awareness is this: that during those times when I perceived myself to be alive it was only that via osmosis with another living being with whom I permanently shared my intimate space at home. And that when these shared intimacies ceased I was not only grieving their loss but equally grieving the lost of my childhood self. I have believed with all my heart that all things began and ended with Larry, that he was my life support system. That I could not do this thing called life without him. I have begun to take in that my felt sense of being alive with him was this aforementioned illusion, just as it seemingly had been with Crook, and Sylvia; and when Tyler and I were together, and when I was with my two partners before him. No one ever says that guidance is not sobering.
There is a scene at the end of the fifth episode of Brideshead Revisited that mirrors my current awareness. It is when Charles Ryder is leaving Brideshead for the last time.
"But as I drove away I felt that I was leaving a part of myself behind. And to ever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it and search for it hopelessly as ghosts are said to do. I shall never go back I said to myself. A door had shut. The low door in the wall I had sought and found at Oxford. Open it now and I should find no enchanted garden. I had come to the surface into the light of common day after a long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed. I have left behind illusion I said to myself. Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions with the aid of my five senses. I have since learned that there is no such world. But then as the car turned out of sight of the house I thought it took no finding. That it laid all about me at the end of the avenue."
I have left a part of myself behind with each loss I have experienced and in their aftermath I always find myself searching to somehow find a way back so I can reclaim that sense of aliveness I had felt. Now that I know it was all an illusion....
One of the main threads of my grief journalling since Larry's passing is the sense that I am forever destined to search for what I will never be able to attain; arriving home. That I will forever be roaming this earth searching for I will never find within my post childhood trauma life. Maybe the answer can be found in who I was prior to it. I am in no way saying that I wish to erase what was done to me. That I know I can not do. I just wish to become more aware of what this guidance means for me. I've been asking myself where do I go from here? Can something real be found beyond this illusion? Am I to look towards those parts of my existence that are an organic representative of who I am? Do those things actually exist by virtue of themselves or are they too just an illusion? As I sit here writing I do not know the answer to any of these questions. I only know that going forward I will do what I always try to do in my life and that is pray for guidance on what is the next right step for me.
