Two Lucky

In two hours I will be on my flight back to Singapore.

It’s been a long year. A year ago I moved back to New York with Rusty, and though I had an idea I might be leaving this city alone, I never imagined this day would come with such… calmness.

The man I pledged to spend the rest of my life with, the man I swore to save, I lost him. Kant once said that true love occurs only in a condition of complete sacrifice, when one person gives to another the totality of his being, his raison d’etre. If so, in Rusty’s death, I have lost myself forever, too. At least, that was how it felt when he died. Since the day, my journey of grief has been a process of piecing myself together again; in a way, grief is not so unlike amnesia.

In finding my way back to myself, New York has been a knowing guide. I live daily in pockets of moments, walk among memories that pop up around New York streets like wild, fantastic flowers. These flashbacks - his smile on 11th Street, his fingers under the table at Piccolo Angolo’s, the corner on St Mark’s Cathedral where we sat waiting for him to catch his breath - come back to me as little gifts, tiny bookmarks in the grid of our New York life. To have had this past: to have had the time to spend with Rusty, to have had our home, and finally, to have had the gift of saying good bye - how can I not be grateful?

When Rusty died, leaving New York seemed impossible. My instinct was to possess everything, keep everything still. Don’t change, I pleaded. After so many months, so much has changed. I’ve learned to respect time. I’ve learned to let go. I’ve learned to say good bye.

So good bye, New York. And thank you. You’ve been a great lover, a good friend, and a beautiful home to Rusty and me. I’m sorry to go, but it will not be so long before I see you again.

Seven months

It is hard for me to remember a time of men before Rusty.

It is not for a lack of suitors, because there were many. What I mean to say is that it is difficult for me to imagine the person I was - with regards to men and sex - before I met Rusty. After all that we had been through, it is without hesitation that I say in the final months leading to his death, Rusty and I had become each other; we survive, even today, because we carry a part of ourselves as we go on - for him, in death; for me - in life.

Perhaps I also mean to say it is difficult for me to imagine the man I am now, what with so little of Rusty left.

On hindsight, the string of men I kept - and my experience of them - were episodic, vignettes of bodies and easy conversation. I learned the game well. I sought each person out. I derived pleasure from the heaviness of our bodies held only together by the very lightness of our devotion. Our affairs reached as far as the walls that enclosed us. It would not be inaccurate to describe my proclivities as lascivious, though it was not that no man satisfied me, but that no one man could. I had just come out, and sexual liberation for me did not stop at owning my orientation; it extended to understanding what power I wielded as a sexual being. I was determined to command my sexuality as I would a knife - deftly, skillfully and with practice.

I selected my lovers with care. The first man I made love to was a slender Iranian architect who kept only eggs and bottled water in his fridge. After him, there was a muscular Spanish lawyer who worked on weekends as a personal trainer. The Italian model who liked to watch MTV while he was being serviced. The myopic Swiss entrepreneur I trapped and kissed in a phone booth; the Brazilian professional basketball player whose touch felt like old leather on my skin.

Man after man, I checked off continents, cultures, determined the language of love on different tongues and in different hands. I was a deviant will-o’-wisp, dipping into men like bees into honey. I could never have predicted then that the one man to stump my wings would be an American electronics consultant who grew up on a farm.

Since I met Rusty, my impressions of the men I slept with have faded; since his death, the men who have come into my bed leave faceless and without imprint. What they leave behind, their scent on my body, is washed away. What the walls enclose now, what bodily heaviness it observes, is not without the same emotional lightness.

But there is one difference. In the same room, there will always be one other: that lingering absence of love.

Two days ago marked the seventh month since Rusty’s death. It was then - and after I moved out of our apartment - that it occurred suddenly to me that I was now single again. The idea struck me with an inexplicable, oblique force. I had never considered myself “single” until then. I was grateful that the word came to me when it did. It meant another part of me had woken. In the company of men, being newly single, I tested my body and discovered unexpectedly what power remained in the languor of my legs, the firmness of my bottom, the delicacy of my fingers.

Again, the knife in my hands.

The first snow fell last night in New York. Fall is coming to an close. So begins a new season in this city.

I, too, am starting a new chapter. Since Friday, I’ve moved out of my apartment on East 11th Street to shack up with my brother Zack on East 4th Street. I’m here for two weeks. I’ll spend next weekend with Rusty’s mom in Virginia; the weekend after that, I’ll be at Newark International Airport on a flight back to Singapore.

As I move out of this life, and into the next, I imagined myself feeling lost and depressed; but I feel neither. I am not nostalgic, I am not disappointed. I am not even sad. Right now, right this moment, all I feel is a sense of anticipation.

This surprised me. Before yesterday, even though I felt I was ready to leave New York, I wasn’t completely sure I would be all right. The first step was leaving the apartment. I predicted a teary good bye. But it was as normal a day could be. I waited in the morning for the movers. I loaded my boxes onto the truck. I lugged my suitcase to the door. There, I said “thank you,” and “good bye,” kissed the red walls, and let the door close behind me.

In the afternoon, I took a nap at Zack’s apartment. I missed it, but it was no longer the same home Rusty and I built together. I had no desire to return to it.

When I saw the snow fell last night, I felt a question had been answered. It was a mark of time; it seemed to me the earth had been waiting for that first snow-flake. I realized I had been waiting, too. I understood the necessity of snow. Unwelcome though winter may be, it has its place in life’s measure. There is some comfort in the steady, knowing cycle of time.

So it is with my imminent departure from New York. The day is around the corner. I no longer feel conflicted about leaving. In fact, I find myself looking forward to it. I have everything I need with me. I’ll be okay.

So, let it snow, let it snow. Let it snow.

There are five large cardboard boxes in my living room. Each of them holds some innocent things. Things impregnated with meaning; things who’ve suddenly lost one parent, and who must now rely on one other to tell their stories, how they came into our lives, and what they stood for.

For example, the toaster, for Rusty’s favorite breakfast: warm bread dipped in honey. A book, The Confederacy of Dunces, we took turns to read by the fire. A laugh he perfected to annoy me, recorded in so many e-mails, cards and slips of paper we left for each other: HEE HURR HUEEE HEEE. Even now when I hear it, it still makes me smile.

Rusty and I put this apartment together. Now, I alone take it apart. Who knew it took such strength to lift a piece of paper.

There is so much to pack I’m not really sure where to start. What do I keep? What do I throw away? And what I throw away, will I remember tomorrow? With every physical object I put into the waste basket, I feel I am slowly working up to my final act of leaving all this behind. I’m leaving New York. And as much as I want to take everything with me, I can’t. As much as I want to keep every single detail of my past, I can’t. The heart, as it turns out, isn’t too different from an apartment in this city; there just isn’t enough space to hold everything.

People say it’s the thought that counts. There’s no need to hold on to things as long as you have the memory of it, and what it means to you. But thoughts, like everything else, have a shelf-life, an expiration date. Some ideas and memories keep longer than others, but without commitment and revision, they can fade and be forgotten. 50 years later, will I still remember the smell of Rusty’s hair, or the feel of his skin on my fingers? If only we could have boxes for our senses, boxes we could temporarily put away, and come back to every time we feel lonely, or when we need a reminder of those deep feelings that come so rarely in our lives.

On the other hand, maybe it’s good to forget. If the heart is too full, there wouldn’t be enough room for a new future, new stories that come with fresh memories and adventures.

That’s how I feel right now. My present emotional life is a moving company’s nightmare (or cash cow); it’s cluttered and disorganized; it’s so full it verges on tipping over at any slight provocation of remembering. My feelings are in such a state of disarray I don’t know where they should go, and how I would go about collecting them into heaps to be donated and trashed. Let’s see - I’ll need one box for Anger, a big one for Grief, and ooh, maybe a small one for Denial. I’ll need a separate one for the recyclables, too.

Moving away is a first step towards moving on. It’s a physical end-point to all these months of emotional packing.

In reality, geography has very little to do with grieving. Grief is something you travel with; not what you can leave behind. But my move away from New York isn’t just about leaving my past; it’s also about entering my future. Going back to work, reuniting with my family and old friends - it’s an important phase in the process of reclaiming my sense of identity.

In the end, maybe I shouldn’t be too caught up in putting things away, or in order. The best things in life often come to us when we least expect it. Often enough, they don’t even stay very long. Our instinct to own and possess is merely a secondary counter-point to what things mean to us. Maybe learning to let go is the most important lesson to being thankful for the love that came into my life.

After all, the best things in life, don’t come in a box.

The clock tells me it’s half past one. I’ve been waiting for the minute hand to fall. Six months ago, he died as I sat next to him, unable to help. He was dying, and then he was dead. I was holding his hands when he died. Only his hands weren’t his anymore.

I tried to wake him. I shook his shoulders. I kissed his lips. As if by sheer force of touch I would bring him back. Just like in the movies, except this was no movie. I had been waiting for him to die. The doctor on the floor had already gone home. As instinctively as I had begun, I stopped. It’s happened. Rusty was no longer in this body. There was no coming back. This body was now suddenly, irrevocably empty.

Last night, I had a dream. He was on a raised platform, lying awake in an open coffin, pale, white, smiling. A narrow path led from the steps to some faraway place. The scene was filmed with a soft-focus lens. Or was it the weather? It felt neither warm, nor cold. It felt far away. I was on this path, which led to him. Many people were there with me, except they were all walking away from him, while I alone approached forward. By the time I reached the platform, I had begun to cry. I climbed up the few steps. I saw his face. Childishly, I wondered why the dead were allowed to smile. I didn’t understand why he was… happy. I wanted him to be angry.

Standing over him, I felt his hand reach up to hold my cheek. It was his hand, the same fingers that caught my breath. Like so, we stayed for what seemed like several minutes.

I became angry. I wanted him to stop smiling. You should be dead, I cry out. I wanted him dead. I pulled off his hand and looked away. I started to walk, but tripped on the steps and fell to the ground. The people who had been walking away turned and stood watching me. I buried my face in my hands, shamed. I couldn’t stand up. I didn’t know where to go. I was nowhere, in between worlds, confused as to which way was forward, or backward.

The force of my emotion woke me from the dream. I was still crying, but I wasn’t sad, or angry, like I was in the dream. My body felt full, tired. My left cheek was wet, as was my pillow. I fumbled in the dark for my cell phone. I wanted to see how long I had slept, but before the thought reached my hands, I fell asleep again.

I am counting down the days. In 30 days I will leave this apartment, and in a few days after, this city. A part of me is happy I’m leaving. If I had left earlier, immediately after Rusty died, it would not have felt right. It would have been a form of escape, a dramatic gesture of “leaving everything behind,” starting anew.

In fact, that was what many people had suggested to me. “You need to move on. Have a normal life. Go back to work. It helps.”

Would it? I don’t think so. In a few days it will be six months since Rusty died. In these six months I have accomplished absolutely nothing professionally; in these six months I feel as if I have survived a war. I am cognizant it did take me this long to come to this feeling. And to that end, I am grateful to be given this time and opportunity to heal.

In my young life I never expected to become this closely acquainted with death. But in fact I have been inordinately lucky. To love, and to be loved so well; to experience this devastation without the forced abnormality of going back to work; in reality, death is pedestrian. Grieving spouses, parents and children often have no time to reflect before they are rushed into their daily deluge of appointments, bills and homework. Knowing what I now know of death, it seems impossibly callous, and unwise the way we identify busy-ness with normalcy.

When a person is injured in an accident with a broken arm or leg, he is given all the time he needs to recover. Why is it that when it comes to injuries of the heart, we are all so desperate to pretend everything’s okay?

I am not without war wounds, but to know that I have survived, to have somehow fumbled my way towards the light - I could not have done so without the support and understanding of my friends, my family, and my editors at the office. To my readers: In a way you have been the most intimate of all; for following my story with such dedication and care, I could not have asked for more compassionate travellers along this journey.

In the past few months, I have oscillated between the dead and the manic, swung from hope to despair, triumphed over and been trounced by so many episodes of grief. I can scarcely believe it, but now, I feel the pendulum reaching equilibrium; now, I find myself looking forward to leaving. My body feels ready. It’s time to go.

One important lesson I learned during this time: That it is possible to continue a relationship with a person who isn’t around anymore.

Anyone who has lost a loved one will understand this. I will never love Rusty any less than I did. Six months later I still wonder if he thinks I’ll look good in this or that T-shirt, or try and guess what he’ll order from the menu at the restaurant I’m eating. Some days I’ll remember a joke, or something funny he said, and add quietly, “Oh, Rusty.”

The truth is, I don’t feel quite so lost or abandoned anymore. Rusty is still very much alive in my mind. My sense of isolation, of wanting to be dead, or at least, dead-like, is waning. The eclipse is shifting. I am moving out of death’s shadow. That is what these six months have meant to me: To have the sun come out again, to have journeyed from death to light.

Tonight I had dinner with a good friend of mine, R. To be more specific, I made dinner for the both of us. In my head the night would play out flawlessly: a perfect five-course dinner, starting with a warm potato persillade (garlic and parsley), a seafood risotto, lamb stew with fennel, a simple salad, and chocolate mousse. We would eat and imbibe, laugh over drinks, and at the end of the night, fall asleep in each other’s arms. R is straight, so I knew the last chapter of my fantasy would be unwritten, but in fact, something worse happened. I burned my lamb stew.

I met R during my sophmore year in college. It was also the year I came out. I was 22. We were in the same first-year Japanese class, and even before we got to arigato, I was in the maws of a major crush. There is a reason why crushes are called so. And when you’re young and unskilled yet in the ways of seeing the forest for the trees, a crush is generally what you (and all your sympathetic friends in tow) feel under the weight of your magnificent melodrama. I couldn’t help myself. In the end, our friendship, which had been good and honest, turned into a right mess, a mess which I compounded one night after I chowed down some imported creminis and told him I loved him.

In the years to come, we would slowly find our way back into each other’s lives, and our friendship now is one of the most solid and good things that have come from letting time temper our emotions.

But the fact is I do love him. And even though he will never love me in the same way, it’s okay. I can honestly say I want nothing save for him to be healthy and happy. It may not be a tested love, or even a reciprocated love, but in that this feeling, like love, swells in my heart and brims to my tips - who am I to call it otherwise?

As I wondered about my feelings for R, it led me to think about my feelings for Rusty, and how others have persisted in de-valuing our love, doubting its validity, as if there were a threshold, or a specific mark it has to reach before it is legitimate - be it a certificate, a ceremony, or a child.

In the time Rusty and I were together, and even now, their voices continue to ring from the calamitous “All gays will rot in hell (see comment in previous post),” to the more perplexing, but no less injurious “But you were only together for three years…” Some others even refuse to acknowledge our relationship, and send me cards saying they are “so sorry for the loss of my friend.” Seeing that the words “husband” and “wife” are already rapidly losing currency in today’s world, you would think “partner” would not be quite so hard to utter.

“To have and to hold, for better or worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health; to love and to cherish, till death do us part.”

Where have I been found wanting?

There are so, so many ways I can defend my love, but the true test is a simple one: I feel it. I know it. I trust it. This is what love feels like. In the aftermath of Rusty’s death, while he is no longer here to fill my heart, I need only to look at his photograph, to feel this ache inside, to know again what love feels like.

Many people have asked me if I would, or could love again. My first reaction is that I haven’t stopped. My second reaction, more to the point of the question, is yes. Could I love again? Yes. Could I love anyone more than I loved Rusty? I don’t know. That would have to depend on so many other factors, factors which I really have very little control over. I am not even sure if I care.

All I know for sure is this: That one cannot truly live without love. That love is vital to life as oxygen; it is its muse. And that if one day I should be so lucky to find another man who loves me, I would definitely take care to keep an eye on him, and on my lamb stew.

The fact of the matter is that I’m alone now. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been bad or good - that I’ve slept around, spent excessive amounts of money, or that I’ve quit smoking, or started a book - no matter what I choose to do, where I go with my life, I will never see Rusty again. Hear his voice. Feel his touch. Why is this so hard?

It is such a rhetorical question to ask. Is this what it feels like to have the answer and still feel so far from understanding?

The fact of the matter is I miss him so much. I think of him every day. While watching an episode of The Office tonight, I instinctively turned to Rusty’s chair and yelled “Michael’s crazy!” to no one. The Office was Rusty’s favorite TV show. It was an excellent episode. I laughed, and then I cried.

This avalanche of emotions - when will it finally settle? I feel like I’m playing a game of thumb war with grief. You think you have a grip on the enemy, and in one quick swipe you’re the one pinned under instead. Just like that.

Do I feel better. Yes. Am I coping well with everything. Yes. Are you OK. Yes. Yes has no power to authenticate what, or how I am feeling. Neither does No. What will people say if I say No. Or do. Friends are no good for moments like this. If I am the only person to help myself, then I am as clueless as you are. That amorphous, distant ally, Time - am I simply to trust that one day will come when I stop grieving? Yes.

It has been a little over five months since Rusty died. He died on May 4, on the cusp of summertime.

In October, there comes a time when every New Yorker steps outside and knows irrevocably that fall is here. Tonight was such a night for me. At 5am I went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and had to come back in to put on my coat. The air felt ice cold. It is the first time I am wearing a coat since the fact. Even though he is not here to remind me, I take care to button up before I leave the apartment.

Outside the wind is wet and the streets black with rain. A few hardworking college kids stand next to the Leows on 11th and 3rd carrying 40s. I buy a pack of Parliament Lights. On my way back, like a drunk man, I tear off my nicotine patch and stick it on a street lamp. I am home. I light up.

Four months 

Since I started this blog, I have gained an incredible amount of support from readers all over the world. I don’t know how I will ever thank all of you for checking in and writing the wonderful letters that you send. This blog was born out of love, and continues to be sustained by love. I dedicate all that I write on here to Rusty. Your comments, your thoughts, share that dedication. I believe that wherever Rusty is right now, he continues to see, to read, to love.

Since Rusty died, a couple of publishers have expressed interest in helping me develop this blog into a book. I’ve put aside the idea for a while, because it was something that I didn’t feel ready to commit to. I did try. I started by editing some of my earlier entries, adding in details and depth where I felt I skimmed, or failed to develop an idea fully.

It was a disaster. Rusty had been dead for only two months. I could barely look at the screen.

Two months later, I’ve started working on a foreword for my book. There are so many memories to go through. We have thousands of e-mails, letters, cards we wrote to each other. I will try. I don’t know when I will finish this book, but it will be my anchor to all that I feel right now. Since I started writing, I have thought of little else. If I am not writing as often on here, know that I am writing elsewhere, in a manuscript I hope to get published some day.