The Non-Event
Here, at the keyboard, sitting, am in a 25 year relationship with a fine man. Have listened to his stories of coming out, have read so many that cannot count. For me, it was a non-event.
Can’t say ever came out, period. Have just been me. Made no fuss about liking this person or that, the sex of the person did not matter, the person themselves mattered. Sometimes there was sex, sometimes there wasn’t.
Starting High School at 3 feet 11 inches, with severe asthma, made me to small to be picked on. The medication that was on, gave me what prefer to call delusions of adequacy. That had me ordering seniors out of my way, as a freshman. Being annoyed when the tall got in my way and letting them know it. Must have looked like the mouse that roared, yet, they put up with it. No one ever did anything to me. The one time some one called me out, went to the appointed place, but they were not there. At graduation was 5 feet 1 inch tall, the height of your average twelve year old boy.
P.E. was a non-starter, my health was not up to any exercise at all, at least back then. Today, with special attention to those who cannot get anywhere near the average, they would have found something,
In college, my friends let me be me. What a glorious gift that was. My dad, simply loved me and let me be free. That was such a gift from him. Having seen me locked up in hospitals by the year before sixth grade, he trusted me and that trust was returned. Never brought home anyone just for show or a spare bed to make use of. As he was widowed during my college years, we adjusted to each others needs for the night, till moved out in my junior year.
Simply cannot ever remember having to tell anyone that they were talking to someone who liked men, and depending on the personality, women as well. Yet refuse to call my self either bisexual, gay, or straight, at any point in time. The only word that fits for me, others may choose another, is to call myself a lover.
Some, perhaps most, will consider this a hedge, a refusal to come to terms, but the terms that are offered are mere identities, which die when we do. Love, at least in my view, continues to live, to rain down on those who knew that love, and to influence to some degree those around them. Rather than proclaim something that is due to become dust, would rather identify with something that can only be experienced and not objectified, and may last for ten thousand generations, to some degree.
We are golden, we are stardust, and we need to remember original innocence as much or more as anything else about us. Love to all from All, is my motto, what’s yours?
