The story so far

So to explain the crisis I found myself in last Saturday, I think I need to go back a bit.

On Halloween, I met a boy.

It happened like this: My straight neighbours had a Halloween party on Halloween eve. After a couple hours of that, I decided to see what the scene was like at Touché. I figured some of my friends would be there, which they were, so I flitted about and generally had a good time.

Sometime after 1 a.m. on Halloween itself, I found myself in the backroom chatting with a guy I'd met at a party once and had kept up with over lockdown. He was there with a friend (who we'll anachronistically call "BB") who'd recently moved here from DC. BB and I started flirting, then we started snogging, and finally I invited him back to my place for a fun time. We had so much fun, in fact, that he didn't leave until 5 a.m.

So far, so typical for a one-night stand from Touché. I made sure we exchanged numbers, though, and then waited a couple days to text. Before I did, he got in touch, we chatted a bit, and I playfully asked him for "a song to fall asleep to". He sent me "Mohabbat" from Arooj Aftab, who I'd never heard of, and it was so beautiful it reduced me to tears.

We wanted to get together the following weekend, but I was heading down to STL for a family gathering. Long story short, I wasn't leaving until early Saturday morning and his friend dragged him to the Anvil on Friday night, where I met up with them. We moved on to Touché and I took BB home again--this time making sure he left at 2 a.m. so I wasn't an exhausted wreck the next day.

At this point, what I really had was a successful two-night stand, but my heart went berserk. It's convinced itself that this is nothing less than the start of a beautiful relationship. Since then, I've been kind of running on two tracks: My mind tells me to be cautious, to take this slowly, to consider the risks. Meanwhile, my heart has decided this is the Man Who Will Make Me Happy and doesn't want to hear anything else.

It got so bad, I finally decided I needed to do something drastic. Near the end of last month, his parents came into town for an extended stay. I used this as an excuse to stop texting him cold turkey. The first couple days were hard, but it got progressively easier. By the end of two weeks (the arbitrary time limit I'd set), I was actually questioning whether to reach out and reopen Pandora's box or just return to the status quo ante.

You see, the more we chatted, the more my mind realised he's not a good candidate for anything long-term. He asked me if the fact that he'd never had a boyfriend was a "red flag"; my reaction was, no, but it is a yellow one. Being someone's first boyfriend is a tough job and I'm not sure it's one I want to take on. Plus he's got a very demanding job that only leaves him available on weekends. And even though he was the first to reach out to me, I've been the one to initiate every exchange since then.

But I did reach out, he enthusiastically accepted my invitation to a friend's game day last Saturday, and I found being secure in the knowledge I would see him made me less anxious and needy. I thought, "Cool, the break worked, I've got a handle on this."

And then I saw him again.

Grief post-mortem

So now for last weekend.

Friday night was the 5th anniversary of Monshu's death. I'd thought about getting together with my friend Mozhu or at least going to visit the scattering spot, but in the end I didn't feel the need for anything elaborate and simply burned some incense while I recited the Heart Sutra. The next morning, I reenacted what I did the morning after his death (also a Saturday, due to some calendrical quirk) and laid down for a bit in the room where he died. I felt reflective, but not particularly moved, and started to get ready to meet BB.

I'd decided to treat our rendezvous at a breakfast spot before heading over to JB's as a first date and approach it without any preconceptions about where it was going. I wasn't going to bring up anything we'd shared in our moments of intimacy or try to steer the conversation toward weighty subjects. From that point of view, it was a complete success. We had an easy rapport, I learned a bit more about his mysterious past, and I was buoyant taking him to meet my friends.

At JB's I got my most burning question--whether he was still interested in fooling around with me--answered as well. We played footsie under the table and stole a few furtive deep kisses when left alone. He hadn't been exaggerating when he told me he was lousy at boardgames, but he greatly enjoyed playing them. At about 5 pm, he rushed home to take care of his dog and I stayed to keep playing and catch up with a friend I hadn't seen since before lockdown. JB eventually ended up ordering pizza so we could keep playing into the evening.

It was probably about 8:30 when I left to walk home. I felt blissful; although I considered popping my head into Touché to see some friends, I soon decided it would be an anticlimax to a wonderful day and instead just sat in the frontroom savouring all that had happened.

Sometime after this, things took a turn.

I was in bed listening to music. Talking about 80s bands with the young-uns had put me onto a nostalgia kick and I found myself playing the first side of Upstairs at Eric's in its entirety and wishing I had BB there to share the experience with. I began to get moodier and moodier, found it hard to sleep, and soon it seemed every song I played was making me want to tear up. It seemed inexplicable given that everything that day had gone as well as I dared hope.

The next morning, it was worse. I woke up feeling completely bereft and didn't want to stir from the bed. I managed to complete the very basics of my routine but soon I was under the covers again. I moped around the house all day and got nothing done. Well, I did call my mother, but I was only half listening to anything she said. I tried texting BB but we couldn't get beyond mere banter. I went to bed feeling miserable and began deliberately playing grief songs until I was sobbing almost uncontrollably.

So what happened? I have a couple of hypotheses:

One is that this was a simple case of delayed grief. I wasn't really neutral about Monshu's yortsait, it's just that looking forward to a good day with friends allowed me to delay dealing with it. Once I was alone again, it all came flooding back all the stronger for having been damned up.

A more complicated explanation is that something about my experiences on that day triggered the grief. After BB left, the party was down to me, JB, Hildy (the friend I hadn't seen in ages), and his husband. We talked about their wedding (which due to lockdown we hadn't been able to attend) and Hildy and I had a good conversation about sex with friends v strangers in the kitchen.

In retrospect, I wonder if being alone around couples (JB's husband wasn't there but of course he came a lot in conversation) combined with the anniversary to tap into my fears of being alone indefinitely. I liked the feeling I had of being in a couple with BB, even though we aren't, and thinking that we might never be (which is honestly the way to bet) depressed me. There's no set time limit to find someone, but I guess I felt I'd be further along that track five years on. Instead, this year has brought me only a brief crush which ended disastrously (back in June and I'm still resentful), a mostly unsatisfying summer fling which ended that day with the guy's return to the Southwest, and my crush on BB.

Then there's the possibility that it's specifically my crush on BB which is making me miserable. The weekend after I returned from St Louis, he told me he just wanted to be alone and though I told him I understood I was pretty bummed. I ended up going to a house party and pumping our one mutual friend for info on him. "Don't lose your heart to this guy," he warned me. His take is that BB is looking for to have fun and not much more. And he's probably right.

But I've been through this whole journey in my head over the past six weeks as my mind keeps spinning possibilities and then trying desperately to rein myself back in. Frankly, having a week or two where I wasn't constantly checking my phone for a word from BB felt like a relief (hence my reluctance to get back in touch). I feel resentful of him for "doing this to me" when really I'm doing it all to myself, and that realisation turns the resentment back onto me and this flawed emotional makeup which repeatedly leads me to take crushes too far and then have to keep constantly consciously checking myself. It's tiring and it's no surprise that the strain should lead to bouts of depression.