LIKE A DOG TO MY VOMIT...

Drew was right; the only way to be fair to your wife is to leave her unmentioned on your blog. So I will try to hold to what is right. But it is not exactly news that I am alone for fifty-eight days. And I will have ample opportunity on each and every one of those days to reflect on what I have done wrong, messed up, or bungled, in the few days we had together. I made a number of promises, most of which I have managed to break, one after another. And so my supposed core value has suffered a certain amount of tarnish as the days have gone by.

First I decided, and even wrote, that I could see the path ahead clearly, that all I had to do now was admit my responsibility for what had happened, and concentrate on making life as easy for the rest of my familyas I could. Ha.
I have swung about 180 degrees in my understanding of what "right" is, day after day...

Then I decided that, wherever we were going in the long term, it was only fair not to ruin the one week we had together by constantly bringing up what could only divide us. Ha. I capped off a week of mistakes and mis-steps by announcing that I would be telling the children one way or another; I did not want to do it alone, nor at a time or in a manner that would cause additional distress, but I would do it...

Where, as I asked so long ago, does honesty stop and brutality begin? Just the other side of my tongue...

One thing that has puzzled me for some time is the way that a blog that I thought was about crucial decisions around love and faith kept attracting comments about the darker side of myself. Then last night I was running through the links on my sidebar to catch up on my elder brothers in the blog biz, and it suddenly came to my attention that I had put up links to the Tom of Finland Foundation and Gengoroh Tagame. How had I failed to remember that? and how could that be anything but an invitation? how stupid, in other words, could I be? [well, THAT is a question whose answer I am in no hurry to hear.]

For those of you who have been put off by the Jesus-ness of things in the Lent and Easter days, here is a return to our initial posts... I clicked on the Tagame link myself, and found myself doing something that I had most particularly promised NOT to do... and caught up in what was new, what was familiar, and, above all, what retained its power, both to attract and repulse. The repulsion wing had a whole new section, and I was brought face-to-face again with the fact that even without the question of marriage and fidelity, I am riven: much of what attracts me also repels me. That bodes well, doesn't it? I have decided that the least I can do is remove the links. You can always Google them if you need to, but I don't need to be running a referral service for what people surely know how to find on their own. I'll stick with trying to link up more of us lost boys...

So some things are becoming clearer, sometimes to my horror, yes, but sometimes to my relief. I can feel how love has changed its valence once again, how the old ache has returned, the hole in my heart in the shape of a particular man; and how that hole in the shape of a man has found a particular seat in my body, where I can feel it on my rising up and on my laying down. And I find myself now quite unavoidably faced with the simple fact that whatever I decide to do, however I find a way forward, I am a gay man. No comforting excuses, no partial truths, no attempts to find a way around it: my heart and body bear witness -- surely even my mind will come around in time...