Two Lucky

Merry Christmas, Rusty

The plane landed. From Changi International Airport, I hailed down a taxi, and gave the driver the address of my parents’ apartment. I didn’t realize how much I had been holding back until the driver asked me: “Are you coming home, sir?”

I didn’t see it coming; I was overcome.

Where is home?

In the years Rusty and I were together, we had several - and in different cities: New York, Seoul, Singapore. During doctors’ appointments and between rounds of chemotherapy, home was refuge in hotels, friends’ houses and hospitals. We were always taking trips, if not for the cancer, then to take short vacations from it. But most of the time, we would be flying to see each other; until the last six months we spent in New York together, we had lived mostly apart in Asia: he in Seoul, I in Singapore.

To live at one time so entwined with someone, yet separate from his person, was difficult. At night, alone in bed, to have our heartache consoled by each other’s voices, yet not by its curing warmth - that was punishing. In the year of lost touch, each reunion, each embrace, was the prize of our longing: in all the trips I took to see him, waiting at the interminable terminals, walking from gate to gate, one, and only one thought sustained me:

I am finally coming home to my man.

After all our days apart, it was always knowing I would soon rest by the hearth of his body that kept me going. I longed for the clasp of his chin, the pillow of his chest, the quiet breathing we’d learned - after so many years of fighting - to be grateful for. The moment he takes me in his arms, I am safe; and in the nascent light of departing shadows, I know it without doubt, and beyond question: I am home.

After he died, I vanished into our apartment in New York. For days I was unable to leave the bedroom. I slept on the same side of our bed. I searched for his smell in the sheets; I crawled into imaginary nooks, positions I learned by heart to remind myself the shape of his body. It was no use; I had never felt more homeless.

In the past year, an aspect of my grieving process was to find for myself a new home. In the first blur of grief, I sought it in the unknowing hands of men I solicited in bars and on the Internet. I was desperate for impersonations of love, no matter how unconvincing, or poorly rendered to life.

Each man who came into my bed was unfamiliar to my body; our limbs pieces of jigsaw that didn’t fit.

It took time, before perspective gave clarity to my wounds. I began to see that no man held the salve to my pain. I realized the haven for my anguish I pursued with such dogged blindness was no further than the tip of my nose. It was me: I was my new home.

Guided by that epiphany, I decided all that I had left of Rusty wasn’t the apartment, or the clothes and books he left behind, or the letters, or the ring he gave me the week before he died to seal our rendezvous in the afterlife. What he left for me instead was a country filled with the domiciles of our love. His love would be my shelter until the time came for me to join him in our final home.

I held my tears until I stepped out of the taxi and pulled my suitcases into the apartment. It was 7am. My parents were still asleep. Quietly I lay down on the couch and searched in my mind again the feel of Rusty’s body behind me - his arm around my waist, his hand I hold to my lips. It was then, carrying all of him in my heart, that I heard him say to me: I had not lost a home. I had now become one for him.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 25th, 2007 at 4:07 am and is filed under Singapore. 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.