OH, GOD, HELP ME, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

OK. Just when I thought I had finally figured it all out, when I saw how the best of our hopes of making it all work were dropping away for all of us, all the mighty hopes of the Pop Quiz answers heading down the drain together with a great communal sigh, suddenly everything is turned upside down again. And I'm not sure I'm "man enough" to take it any more. I can cope with anything if it will just sit still and bite me, but this continual shifting is draining what little strength I have.

Here's the strange thing. I have been carrying this sorrow, this longing for one particular man, this hole in my heart, around for weeks now. My body has made a home for it where I feel it any time of night or day, and that ache has accompanied me through every hour of my days...

And then today, a grandfatherly friend took me out to lunch and in one hour, without addressing my issues at all -- he is not on The List -- he lifted the the weight from my heart, the pain from my skin, and I suddenly had to ask myself: how real is this suffering? if my own suffering is so easily lifted, so easily reprieved, how real can it be? and if this love, which has been my lodestar for all these weeks of upheaval, is so evanescent, how can I even think of sharing this suffering with my wife and children by asking them to walk my "coming out"? Can even I walk it knowing that my "need" to do it may turn to mist and smoke in my hands?

An hour or two later, I was with one of the Permitted Addressees on the Topic. I was almost twenty minutes late for our date, but we started up the trail with his dogs and without a word of complaint from him. And then that Good Angel turned to me and said, "So what else is new?" I laughed the particular whinnying sort of laugh I have when I can't think how to find a way out, and replied, "How much do you really want to know what's new?" Well, in his innocence, he said that he would not have asked if he didn't want to know, and I, in my deep lack of innocence, told him. He did an amazing thing, wrestling with what was anything but good news, trying to see how justice could be done on all sides...

I made all my usual arguments, but while they didn't ring false, the lifting of the weight of the last few weeks suddenly made me question how much I could go on saying any of the things I was saying with absolute conviction. How little extra would have to happen next to lift the entire question off my mind? And how could I take such a terrible step with the possibility that I would wake up one morning and find that nothing mattered but what I had left behind? He asked all the hard questions: how did I know that one part of my riven self was more important than another, just because it was the unfed half? how did I know that my eagerness for clarity was anything but a temptation? was I sure that I couldn't take up the cross of the last 26 years and continue on? [Well, yes, on that one, I was pretty sure I knew the answer.]

I could only say that I no longer knew anything for sure, except that I couldn't go on as we have; not that I have any choice but to continue until the end of August in any case, but beyond that, oh God, beyond that I cannot see, or hope to survive. I suppose that by the end of August many things will have become clear that are still seen only "through a glass darkly". The return of uncertainty on such basic questions that I was nearly sure had been nearly settled -- it all cuts deep, all the way to the bone...

So I came home and made myself a really good meal, and had a glass of [medicinal] red wine to go with the steak that had miraculously been on sale... white wine is my indulgence, but the red wine is what they keep telling you to drink...

So I hang on by my fingernails, waiting for the little messages from friends that keep me afloat. This is not the anguished desperation of last month, my toxic reaction to well-intentioned intervention, it is the "life of quiet desperation" Thoreau looked down on with such condescension from his oh-so-superior height. But I figure as long as my desperation is relatively quiet, as long as I am not broadcasting it abroad to work other people's woe, I may and can continue...

Both of my friends offered to pray for me. I am bad at prayer myself, but the knowledge that others are with me in spirit does lift me up in the dark hours...

Let me find something new to make me laugh out loud again, O Lord.

Give me a moment of unfiltered enjoyment in human absurdity, even in my own -- and let it last me the rest of the day.

Give me back that peace which passeth all understanding, which once you gave me. For I am ready for it.