405

It's 2009 and it was summer but the breeze coming from the Pacific Ocean, we could feel it as we walked through downtown Long Beach.  The sky was starting to get darker with each new hour.

If you ever wondered whether or not you're different, especially when you're as young as I was, don't worry - everyone is always waiting to tell you how different you are, especially your family.  Different from them, I suppose, but I was just a teenager and everything affected me.  I think that's where I failed to build up a tough skin like people say.

It's 1998 and David invited me over to his house to watch a movie.  I couldn't tell you what we talked about but we watched Pulp Fiction.  I drove all the way up to San Pedro from Carson.  Did I skip class to go?  I was still marveling at the fact I was in college.

David was the first person in years I always wanted to talk to.  He was a friend of a friend.  I don't remember how it was that I met him, not really.  But even all these decades later I still remember his smile and his dimples.  He had a chin dimple.

When Bruce Willis is getting out of the shower in Pulp Fiction, before he blows a gasket because his girlfriend forgot his father's watch at his old apartment, he's toweling himself dry and David says how hot he thinks Bruce Willis is and he shouldn't have had the towel in the movie.

Very many years after David, I became engaged and that day felt like the day David gave me his number.

My older brother and I are in high school at the same time in 1992; he's a senior and I'm a sophomore and one morning we're walking into the school and a person I know from band walks opposite us and says good morning.  His name is Albert.  

David tells me, a few years after high school, he loves the Disney character Maleficent.  I don't know who that is.  He's all smiles when he talks and in retrospect, how could we not see that anyone and everyone could tell we were not straight?  When you're a kid, you always think you lie very well.

Corey breaks up with me twice in a span of almost two years, 2009-2010.  He was right to do it because even after David, and decades-worth of living, he is a more better-rounded man and I am.  It still hurt.  Made me cry twice and I couldn't argue it, especially after he gave me another chance.  He was there when I got fired from my job, he sat in the back of a police car with me when I was driving with an expired license.  Corey was sitting in my car when another car going up on La Brea was hit by a white SUV sending it crashing into mine.  Frankly, what can you do, right?  

I remember a lot about our time together.

I used to call David almost every day in between classes.

Remember pagers?

I used to go to the student union in between my chemistry course and my first linguistics seminar and used the payphone and we'd talk for those two hours. I went to the local Cal state, Dominguez Hills.

Remember having to add time to calls with quarters and dimes?

I have a memory of having a woman waiting for me to be done using the phone one time, but I didn't finish and she left.  I wasn't even embarrassed.

I only knew David for about a month, maybe two.  But he changed my life, and he doesn't know.

I would tell Isaiah he was the love of my life and my best friend.  So when he asked me to marry him  of course I said yes.

We took a vacation that was amazing.

We lived in Dallas then.  We'd been living together for about three years in New York, where we met, and we flew to Las Vegas that spring.  It was 2017.  It's one of my favorite stories about me and him and any of the men I've ever loved, The story of the ring and engagement.

The Sunday before the trip, I borrow his car for work.  I don't remember why but I did.  I didn't think anything of it.

We make plans for a group date in 1998.  David and his friend, and me and mine.  They all love the movie Grease and it is out in theaters again, but I don't remember why.  David held my hand the entire movie.

Corey was the first person I ever reached out to when I found out I was HIV-positive in 2007.  We hadn't met in person yet.

How Corey and I met was in 2004 via MySpace when MySpace was new and a thing.  I'd never even heard about Facebook, then.  But he was so handsome: green eyes and mustache, heavily-filtered  picture before any of us knew what a photo filter meant online.

How it worked then: he showed up on a friend's page – Lisbeth Espinosa - and I thought he was handsome so I clicked his picture and read what he wrote and I was floored.  I never read anything that was so brutal and fragile at the same time.  I wish I'd saved his stories from then because I'm feeling nostalgic.

He was handsome and smart and had had a pretty tough life.  I don't even know why he even wrote me in the first place when he saw I'd added him to my friends list or like one of his posts.

It is 2020 and that is what I'm thinking and I only told him recently he's my hero.

But I called him heroine because it's like that.

My older brother tells me in 1992 not to talk to Albert and to not hang around with him after Albert walks by and says good morning to us both.  I kind of laugh and ask him why, does he know him?

Albert and my older brother are in the same grade so he tells me.

My older brother, tells me I can't be around Albert because he's a fag.

My older brother, he tells me he can't have people knowing his younger brother hangs around with Albert.  Because he's a fag.

I”m fifteen years old and I don't know I'm not straight yet.

David and his and my friends come pick me up from my house to go have breakfast that spring and when I tell my father, he's upset and angry in that way he can't ever hide, but I don't know why.  This is after Grease but before my father hits me for the last time.

We're in Las Vegas and we go do things and eat things and fuck and love each other in a way that I never thought I could.  It's 2017

I loved every second of it.

Here are some things: we took a helicopter ride, we shopped and window-shopped, we had drinks for breakfast, I took him to the Double Down and Freezone, we went to the aquarium at Mandalay Bay.

It may sound very middle class and it was and I loved it. All of it.

On the second night, after the helicopter ride over the Las Vegas Strip, we're in a limousine, on the way to Piranha and we're talking but I don't remember about what because he begins to tell ask me to marry him, he reaches into his jacket pocket for the ring, and I interrupt him and say yes and I fall to the floor of the car and I cry and I love him and he loves me.

The love of my life.

My family never knew about Corey even though I was living with them and I'd lost my job.

I told Corey I would tell them and I never did because I was a coward.  

It was 2010 and I was thirty years old and still afraid of my parents and coming out.  This wasn't self-imposed: Corey asked me how long I needed and I told him the end of August and I never did it.

Over a decade later Isaiah asks me to marry him and I tell my family, my parents and my siblings, all four of them.  None of them tell me they're happy for me.

A decade before Corey, David changes my life.

A little more than a decade after David, I see Corey on the Sunset Strip, at a vegan restaurant where I am with a friend of mine – Jodi – and Corey walks in with his date and I lose my shit.  It was October 17th, 2010.

Strange the things I remember about out time, Corey and me.

David changed my life in this way:

Nearly two decades before I met Isaiah, I wrote pages and pages in my diary about David.  How I felt about him and how he made me feel.  David was the first boy I ever felt about in all the cliched ways.  Puppy love but what can you do when you're twenty-one? I write all the pages in a notebook that I left out in the family living room one night and went to bed feeling amazing and my older brother read it.  This was before that breakfast but after David held my hand.  The next morning was a regular day.  The next evening was not regular because my older and younger brothers told me they read what I wrote.  In the typical self-righteous ways, they told me all the ways in which my life was a mess.  But I didn't care and I'm sure I told them so.  I was so smug.  I remembered Albert, then.  My younger brother was quiet, my older brother was extremely upset.  I didn't give a single fuck about them and their invasion of my privacy and my own stupidity for having left my diary out in the open.  I just wanted to go to bed because I went to class and work and I didn't care about what my brothers thought about my loving this boy.  My older brother then told me he told our parents.

David was the first boy I ever liked.

Very many years later, it's 2009 and we're at a downtown Long Beach train station, Corey and me.  Before we broke up the second time.

Even more years later, I'm calling my mother and father from Dallas to tell them I'm engaged to be married to Isaiah.

Corey changed my life in this way:

I'd read the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy and a movie based on it came out.  We went to The Grove in Los Angeles and I remember liking it but not loving it.  Corey and I were at his apartment building in Hollywood, at the bottom of the stairs.  This is before we became anything somewhat serious, before the two break ups.  And we're talking about the movie and book.  He hadn't read it.  We're parsing out what we think the apocalypse in the story is, what the cannibals mean, what the father's failures are, what the boy gets from strangers at the end, when the father dies.  And we're talking for almost two hours and we're disagreeing wildly.  And laughing and arguing in the best ways possible.  That was when I knew.  I don't know about him, but I remember that night for always because until that point, I hadn't ever discussed something like that with a man.  I knew then because we disagreed about a movie and he never once backed down.  In 2004 I new this but maybe forgot?

My older brother would have hated him.

My younger brother wouldn't have.  Corey and him have the same birthday.

Very many years before then, Albert told me he knew no one liked him at school because he was so flamboyant and openly bisexual.  He told me these things.

Corey was the first man I fell in love with.

That was how Albert changed my life: he existed as a teenager.

In 2017, Isaiah told me after our drinks at the Double Down and engagement that he was worried when I borrowed his car some days earlier, before the Las Vegas trip, because I'd made a joke about him taking me on a vacation so he could propose to me.  I laughed and told him I'd been making those cracks for years but I really didn't want to pressure him.  That wasn't what he meant. We were together for four years.

Isaiah told me as early as 2015 he'd wanted to ask me to marry him and I couldn't believe it.

Isaiah told me when I borrowed his car that previous Sunday to go to work, he already knew he'd ask me to marry him on the trip and I asked something dumb I think, and he laughed and told me that Sunday before our trip, when I borrowed his car, the ring I was wearing, the ring was in the glove box. We laughed.

It was the best day of my life.

My father changed my life in this way:

On a Monday in 1998, he confronted me about David.  I came home straight from classes because he told me to that morning and I did because my father was scary.  And I called my then-best friend crying.  I was worried.  I was frightened.  I came home and my father didn't say anything at first.  In the evening, he comes into the room I'm sharing with my younger brother and tells me off.  This is why he was so angry about that breakfast with David and our friends – he already knew.  He knew David was going to be there.  This was a terrible bullshit play that people make movies about.  Those movies about non-straight kids killing themselves, and adults being murdered simply because they exist.  I don't remember what my father said or what I said, but at a point, my father slapped me.  And he walked out.

Over twenty years before I say I will marry Isaiah, that's when I lose any semblance of respect for my father and my brothers.  I will never be like them.

My older brother changed my life in this way:

His girlfriend called me a faggot and he laughed.

Albert and Isaiah and Corey and David and my father and my older brother, these men all changed my life when I didn't want them to.  But probably when I needed them to.

Over a decade before Isaiah ends our relationship, in 2009, I'm walking Corey to the train in Long Beach and the weather is beautiful and we're holding hands and a pair of women, they say something I don't catch bu Corey tells me what it is and I say something like, “Aw, they like us together.”  We wait for the train – Corey lives in Hollywood, and jobless me lives at home in Long Beach.

Train arrives and the full platform begins to fill some more with people getting off the train.

I move to kiss and hug Corey and he tells me not to.  I think I said, “Really?”

Corey says he can't let the guys in the train he's about to get into for an hour-long ride know he's gay.

Corey is worried, scared?

Corey knows the world better than I do.

We don't kiss, we don't hug, and he gets on the train.

Albert and I were never really friends.  I wonder every now and then what happened to him.

Isaiah changed my life in this way:

I never really thought that I would ever want to be married to anyone. And when I was thirty-nine, we went to a bar in New York City, in the Upper West Side.  We weren't having a great day.  I remember that but I don't remember why.  It was the first place we'd first met for drinks but not as a date a year before.  The Suite Bar was the first place I ever met him in a social situation and I told him about me and my life, and the first time he flirted with me.  But New Year's eve in 2015, before we left New York for Dallas, we were drinking and not having a great time, an interracial hetero couple came in with their friends and they were loud and bright and Isaiah and I lit up because these people were drunk and when other people are having fun, we were having fun watching.  And when this couple bought us drinks we said thanks, and when this couple and their friends asked us to dance we said yes.  She was a firefighter and he was a model; she was white and he was black.  And we danced and sang and drank with them and their friends.  Isaiah saw me onstage at a shitty Upper West Side gay bar singing along to some bullshit Madonna song that isn't Borderline.  And I knew he loved me and I loved him.  Not in the way that it sounds.  I knew then I loved him in the way that no one in my entire life had ever made me feel.  I don't know if I would call him husband, but I think that's when I knew I would ask him to marry me, or say yes if he asked, somewhen in the future.  I didn't know until that moment that could commit to someone so unequivocally and without hesitation.  He changed my life.

Years later I interrupted him asking me to be with him forever while we rode in a limousine to a shitty gay bar in Las Vegas.  And Isaiah changed my life again when almost after two years of engagement, he broke my heart when he said he couldn't give me what I wanted as a man, as a partner, as a husband.

In 1986, I walked into a classroom in Wilmington, California, and saw the pretties girl I ever saw.

“For what are bodies? Where do they end and where do they begin? And why must they be constant? Why must they be strong?”

-jeff vandermeer, THE STRANGE BIRD