I was doing a little thumb-drive-cleaning in preparation for both the new school quarter and the new writing project I am slowly beginning to piece together and ran across a blog post I started last fall. The time frame was end of October beginning of November 2008 and it appears it began as sort of a reaction to my last meeting with Jack. It was rough, a little random, and a tad disorganized but worth the effort to polish and post it. Read On!
I did it! For the first time in my life I managed to tell Jack exactly what was running through my head, explain a few things I felt he deserved to know, and be open about my feelings with little hesitation. It’s a conversation I first asked for way back in May, after another event in my life made me realize how quickly life can slip away from us, and later backed out of at least once. Our schedules didn’t mesh most of the summer and the few times I was in town he was not, or not available, so last weekend was my first chance to see him in almost five months. Our short hour and a half conversation covered more ground than I think the one last fall did when I hadn’t seen him in a little over 12 years. Both of us spent some time asking and answering questions and I walked away feeling a whole lot closer to where I want to be with our relationship. I’m still the quiet one, some things may never change, but at least I’m quiet now because I don’t have anything to say, not because I’m afraid to.
I learned a bit more about him, a little more insight into the way he works and why he values some things over others. I answered at least one of his unspoken questions, possibly more, but I know of one for certain. For the first time in almost twenty years, I sparked that connection with him again and this time I’m wise enough not to walk away from it.
You know, it’s funny how something that we think may be a deal breaker, or give another person the opportunity to think less of us, winds up being nothing at all. I spent the better part of the last year wondering how to tell Jack why I left without a word. I pondered the best moment, the right words to convey my thoughts both then and now, and tried to figure out exactly how much I needed to say without saying too much. I’m still not certain what I was afraid of, maybe bursting his bubble, maybe offending the guy, maybe just showing how much of an idiot I had been. In any case, it took months to get up the courage and collect those random thoughts and feelings into coherent sentences. Last weekend, I finally managed to do just that and was pleasantly surprised both at how easily the conversation happened, and Jack’s response to my news.
I spent almost ten years hating Jack, yes I did say hating, doing my best to erase him from my past, convinced that he thought less of me for something I cannot change, something that is as much an innate part of who I am as my eye color. I walked out on our friendship a long time ago believing that he was a bigot and a coward, something that was completely opposite of everything I knew of him previously. I took the word of someone I thought I loved, who had never even met him, over my own instincts. I listened to what he had to say through biased ears, was angry and hurt, and walked out of his life without so much as a “good bye” one cold January day. Years were spent forgetting him, not mentioning his name, and changing the subject when others who knew him would try to tell me they ran into or heard something about him. As far as I was concerned he may as well have been dead, I was already morning his loss and had been since shortly before graduating high school.
I know I did the right thing by leaving; I needed to go for my own sanity and, of course education. I had to get as far away from that town as quickly as possible before I lost it, and make no mistake about it, that is exactly where I was headed. Had I not been on my way to college in the fall after graduation, I doubt I would have even made it that far. It’s safe to say that I was closer to the edge my senior year of high school than I ever had been, and I was suffocating in that fishbowl of a town. Not even Jack could have stopped me from leaping off that cliff because nobody, especially Jack, knew I was standing with my toes over the edge contemplating the jump so seriously. I hid behind the smile, learned to act like nothing was bothering me, and evaded eye contact with the one person who might see through the facade if I let him get too close or ask too many questions. That was most of high school for me and by the time my world completely collapsed senior year, I had them all, my friends, my family, my support system, and the high school administration convinced that I was okay. Unlike my dark days in junior high, I didn’t want their help; that was the scariest part of all. I clung to my ticket out, my acceptance to Oakland University and the belief that life in the city had to be the answer to everything that was wrong in my life. I isolated myself from everyone who cared, even managed to push away those I never thought I could, and I buried my head deep under the lies and mind games of my girlfriend. That was why I stopped writing to Stacey and left Jack behind without a word.
After much contemplation and self reflection it dawned on me in the fall of 2007 that I had been running from Jack and his memory ever since. I was tired of hiding, changing the subject, or simply walking out of the room when his name or face came up, but I didn’t know how to fix it. I knew I had been wrong, to be honest I think I always knew I was wrong even at the time; I just didn’t want to face it. I had tried to get in touch with him a few times since leaving town over a decade ago, some short lived communication came of it once but eventually the e-mail stopped getting returned. I always figured I wasn’t important enough to make time for, which probably added to my anger and eventually I stopped trying all together. Now, twelve years after that fatal mistake of listening to my now ex-girlfriend rather than my own instincts, I knew it was all or nothing and somehow managed to pen a lengthy letter that got his attention at a point in his life when he too was willing to take a risk. His initial e-mail reply to that letter got me thinking, and I went digging through some old journals and letters that had not seen the light of day in at least six years. What I discovered was exactly what I had been searching for all along. In those written words, some from me, some from Jack, and some from others I considered important enough to write to, and about, was why Jack’s memory had never faded like the others from my past. And, it brought back the one question I had never been able to answer no matter how many times or how hard I tried. How do you explain to someone why they are important to you, or how much they have impacted you, your life’s direction, and your vision of the world as a whole? My answer, Unconditional!
Last fall when I began to remember why it was that I was mad at Jack to begin with, I quickly realized what an idiot I had been. I made the effort to find him again, right where I had left him so long ago, and through half a dozen e-mails and one lengthy initial letter, I managed to make a connection with him again. During the process, I began to work on Unconditional and somewhere in the middle of writing the second draft, it dawned on me that I was writing our story, our history and relationship. Unsure of how he would feel about that, I made a conscious effort to remove as many traces of Jack from the story as I could but still keep true to my view of our relationship. The initial version was decent enough, the writing was good and the story prompted enough questions that I began to take a second look at it in early 2008. That’s when it dawned on me that removing Jack from the character in the book was partly why the character came across as both larger than life and a little flat. I had a few new conversations with Jack, got his feedback on a slightly updated version of the story, asked the right questions, and began to edit with a new goal. I began the story from a position of retelling my connection to Jack and Stacey in the first place and knew very early on that it would be the perfect way to let both of them in on what was running through my head all those years ago and how I viewed our relationship. While working on the re-write it became clear that, while no less important to me in my youth, the story was less about my relationship with Stacey and far more about that unique connection I have with Jack. When I agreed to let that show through in the pages of the book, and got his permission though I didn’t really need it, it rapidly became less of a coming out story and more of a story about unconditional friendship. Make no mistake about it, Stacey is still there in the mentor character, her patience, her tenderness, her unwavering support, but the dynamic of the friendship between the two characters in Unconditional reflects more of Jack and that connection I could never explain any other way.
Jack has now read all but the final version of the story and I left that copy with him when I left last weekend. I was nervous to get his feedback on the first copy he read and even more nervous to hear it after the initial re-write where I put back in all the character traits I had taken out of the original version. I made it clear that one of the goals I had in writing the story was to shed a little light on where I was coming from and how I viewed him growing up. The final version pretty much lays it all out there and yet I am totally comfortable in sharing this knowledge with him now. I’m not certain what I was so afraid of last year and why I felt I couldn’t, or shouldn’t tell him why I left the way I did. I knew it would be impossible to live with if I left it unsaid for too long and missed my chance to at least explain. Jack always figured I left because I didn’t need him anymore, I knew that even back then, but I felt I owed him the truth and spent most of the summer wrestling with the words. When his fall schedule cleared I knew it was now or never, he heads south in December for a few months and I won’t see him again until probably March. I put it a little more eloquently but somehow I managed to tell Jack that I didn’t leave because I didn’t need him anymore, I left because I was an idiot.
I’ve always been a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, well maybe not always but certainly for the last decade of my life. I knew long ago that I had to get out of that stuffy little town and that in order to do that I would be leaving Jack behind. That may be part of why I heard his words the way I did, maybe I heard what I wanted to hear to make the separation a little easier on me. I had no idea what happened in his life for the next 13 years, and for the most part he still has no idea what really went on in my life during those years, but he knows the important things. He knows I survived them, have made a life for myself with a partner who loves me, and somehow arrived at the decision to contact him again. I filled in some of the blank areas, mostly by answering his questions and discovered that connection I always felt with him is still alive and strong as ever. I know that I’m taking a risk in resuming contact with him. I know that eventually I will once again lose him and that pain will be intense, just as it was in the past. I can only hope that something good will come of that loss, some lesson will be learned, or some new connection will be made that makes it all worth while. I know that had I not experienced it the first time around, I may never have fully appreciated his influence or fully understood all the areas of my life he impacted. And, it’s a safe bet that Unconditional would never have been written.
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