Two Lucky

Cooking macrobiotic food is simple enough. You arm yourself with good, clean ingredients and proceed with little else: water, salt and miso. Its central philosophy is that there are no extreme flavors: A delicate balance of Yin and Yang cooking, if you will. I roll my eyes when Rusty tells me this. To me, it’s plain bland.

I am unused to limiting my palatte to such pared-down essentials. In every meal, there is always a miso- or vegetable-based soup. No beef, lamb, pork or poultry are allowed. Protein is wrought from beans, soy and white fish. Most food is cooked gently - steamed, boiled or quickly sauteed - if not served raw.

So far, some of my more successful attempts at macrobiotic cooking include: For breakfast, a bowl of steamed barley, cooled, then mixed with cut melon and raisins. For lunch, steamed butternut squash with edamame, 15-grain rice boiled in miso soup, and a broccoli-shitake mushroom stir-fry with sesame. Dinner is a steamed fillet of cod on a bed of scallions, topped with ginger, whole-grain brown rice, and a sweet onion soup with seaweed and tofu.

After three days of this diet, I can attest to one real (and important) benefit to taking in all that macrobiotic goodness. You shit really easy.

In about six hours, I will be on a flight to Seoul to see Rusty. A new scan yesterday cleared him for take off. Dr Banovic came into the waiting room and told him the good news. In less than four hours, Rusty was on a plane back to Asia.

When I spoke to him this morning, he had just landed and was feeling poorly. His shoulder hurt. He was running a slight fever. When I announced to him that I had taken the next week off and would be on the first flight tomorrow to see him, he cried.

In the last two months, Rusty has had three surgeries and two rounds of chemotherapy without me by his side. Earlier this week he wrote me an email that said:

“I really need to see you this weekend - I need the scan to be ok for me to fly. I need you to come up and just hold me and take care of me for the weekend. This is what I need now more than anything. I want us to eat macrobiotic food and chill out and watch tv and hold hands and snuggle.”

Tomorrow, Rusty will go back to the hospital for a new, slightly different procedure. It will involve first surgically inserting gold flecks into the remaining tumor. Because the tumor moves while he is breathing, placing the gold in it will allow the radiation beams to zone in and target the cancer, without damaging surrounding tissue.

Following the initial procedure, there will be three days of radiation. We hope to finish this leg of his treatment by next week. If all goes well, he could be NED (No Evidence of Disease) by the end of the month.

Rusty, you are the best thing in my life. I love you.

Doctor Banovic told Rusty yesterday he could not fly. His latest scan showed that the pneumothorax - pockets of air in his lung - had not resolved itself. If he were to travel by air, the effect of the plane’s cabin pressurization could be deadly.

This will be the second time Rusty’s flight back to Asia is postponed. As a result, I will not see him in Seoul next weekend, as we had planned. When he called with the news, he turned his frustration and anger on me. “What did the doctor say?” I asked him. “Did you get my text message?” “No, are you okay? Will you be able to…

“What do you think?” he lashed out.

Usually, when Rusty snaps at me, I do not let it slide. In the past, I have snapped back, walked out, even threatened to leave him. But yesterday, it left me in tears. I could tell from his voice that he was getting weaker. His breathing was shallow and he was coughing a lot. By the end of August, it will have been 18 months of chemotherapy and seven surgeries altogether. Last night, the anger was his way of masking the desperation with which he coveted a normal, healthy life.

Even though I understand it, I am not used to meanness, especially not from Rusty. But I do not think that was why I cried. I cried because if I had been there with him, I would at least have been able to hold him, and tell him everything would be okay. Over the phone, my own feet lacking flight, he had been too far for me to reach.

This post from Brechi expressed his opinion about a man who relocated to be with his lover. He said: “I have learned from experience that to completely alter your life to fit someone else’s needs is the most powerless decision you can make.”

In response, Chris said he had plenty of his own good reasons to move. Besides, “relationships are about making compromises, not sacrifices.”

Love is full of such decisions made on a daily basis. It’s a question of scale. Is two types of milk (2% and lowfat) really necessary? Do we eat where he wants to eat? Should I move to Timbuktu?

Granted uprooting is a herculean task for anyone, physically (But this kitchen sink was custom-designed!) and emotionally (But this kitchen sink was custom-designed!), it marks an important signal in the development of any relationship. It’s a test. It’s a more difficult test if you have to move to a different country, but a test nonetheless. As far as in sickness and in health goes, this is pretty vanilla.

I should know. To take care of Rusty, I went from a full-time student to a part-time student. In New York, I schlepped my stuff from the UWS to Chelsea. Between commuting to Philadelphia for chemo at least once a week, sleeping in hospital cots, and keeping track of his medication, I was too busy and tired at the same time to stay in touch with friends. My life, as Brechi said, was altered, to say the least.

But I don’t see my decision as a powerless one. On the contrary, moving in and getting involved was the second most powerful decision I could have made about my life. The most powerful was my decision to see this through with Rusty, after his diagnosis. When it comes to love, change can be difficult, but it ought to be the most natural thing to do.

A comment Mark left on Patrick’s blog led me to consider my own relationship with New York. He said: “It’s like every gay boy dreams to move away from home and make it in the Big City. No, scratch that. It’s not just gay boys - it spans all people, I think, to some extent.

“But sometimes it just doesn’t end up fitting, for whatever reason.”

That was how it was for me. When I boarded my flight to New York, I had just turned 21. I was still in the closet. This new life in the city was my ticket out. But it was a little more difficult, more complicated than I expected. In my first year, I found myself having to grapple with other, new issues.

I had not traveled in the US before. Americanisms, pop culture references were lost on me. For the first time in my life, I was among the visible minority - I was not white. Coming out in the city: In chatrooms, I struggled for a sexy label to fit into. Jock? Noo… Twink? Not white enough… Dad? Bear? Not yet, anyway.. Asian? Was that it? That’s it??

Living in New York, as Mark said, is a daunting exercise. It’s as if every day you have to live up to the hype, the expectations of a wealthier, cuter, more glamorous boyfriend. But live there a little longer, and you realise one of the city’s bedrock philosophies: It. doesn’t. fucking. care.

And this is why I heart NY: It’s a city that is truly diverse because of its people. Anyone can find a space to call their own. And ever so often, these accidental worlds collide, and you discover yourself a better person because of it.

Rusty went for his second round of radiofrequency ablation yesterday. With the dosage of his anaesthesia doubled, doctors Banovic and Collins were confident they would remove more cancer than they did the first surgery.

In the first, the electrical probe inserted into his lung killed one tumor, and was on its way to the second when the anaesthesia wore out. Rusty started to struggle. Air leaked into his lung and the operation had to be cut short.

This second surgery was more successful. As Rusty lay unconscious on the hospital bed, doctors told his mother that they were able to destroy 75 per cent of Rusty’s lung tumors. “We’ll get the rest of them sonsofbitches the next time,” Dr Banovic muttered as he walked out of the room.

This morning, when I spoke to Rusty, he seemed tired, but well. Right before we said goodbye, I heard him say to me, or to no one in particular: “We’re getting closer,” and his voice drifted to sleep.

When I took this scholarship to come to New York, I already knew that leaving the city would be difficult. After all, in the four years I lived here, I have learnt so much about the world and have met so many interesting people. I have made lasting, meaningful friendships. More importantly, this was the city that unembarrassingly nudged me to self-discovery. I came out. I met Rusty. I began to appreciate what it meant to fight for life.

Now, school’s out and I’ve almost repaid my bond year. Unfortunately, I still have five more years to go. Leaving Rusty in the middle of his chemotherapy was the single most difficult thing I have had to endure in my young life. When I said I already knew that leaving would be difficult, I had no clue this was what lay ahead of me.

Both Rusty and I have bounced ideas on how to quit this job and move back to New York with him. At the end of the day, it comes down to money. To break the scholarship bond, I will have to repay my sponsor close to half a million dollars. That is the total cost of my tuition fees, living expenses, with interest.

Young love in Singapore is not obvious to the pedestrian eye. Acts of intimacy, like holding hands and kissing, are typically expressed in the privacy of bedrooms, darkened movie theatres or parks. Seldom it is to witness displays of affection, even less common is to see a gay couple in public being, well, gay.

So when I read today in a friend’s blog about two gay men being affectionate on the subway, it made me smile. It reminded me of the time Rusty was in town a few months ago. It was his second trip to Singapore, right before we went on our vacation to Thailand and Laos. He had already lost his hair then, but he was still able to keep his weight steady.

That afternoon, we were walking through the main square of a shopping mall. It wasn’t crowded, but more people had begun streaming in from the thickening heat outside. I was so happy just to be with him, doing normal things like window shopping and arguing about ice cream (Is Rocky Road a real flavor? Yes). On a whim, I said: “You know what would make this moment perfect? If we could hold hands and walk down this row of shops together.”

Usually, Rusty is not one to be affectionate in public. So I did not expect it when I felt his larger hand take mine in a firm grip. Without a word, we walked, our hands undivided, through the crowd and their wandering eyes, right to the cinema, where we had tickets to watch Russian Dolls.