EN UNA NOCHE OBSCURA...

This is truly a dark night of the soul. It’s not just that as August draws to a close, it’s dark by 8 pm. It’s more the internal landscape, and here the noche obscura has descended with a vengeance. It has been quite a week.

My daughter left for college this morning; I made dinner for the boys in their mother’s absence, and both of them left at 8, leaving me alone in a house no longer mine, but filled with the things that I am bound to remove, pledged as I am to expunge all traces of myself. The pictures on the refrigerator have already been winnowed to eliminate any trace except what shines through in the faces of my children. My mail sits in a heap in the building that used to be my studio. The message is: this far and no farther. This was yours but is not. You chose to leave. Now leave.

“What have I done?” haunts my days, as the certainty of a lifelong lonely bed haunts my nights. There is a world of flesh available, in shadow and in promise, but what I seek is the embrace of love, and in leaving the love I had, I flayed my own arms, leaving no place for a loving touch to rest and me to bear it.

No, the worst of it is the lack of comprehension all around me. It is no surprise that the companions of my former life can only stare in incomprehension; but to find that my supposed new life involves the same degree of staring disbelief: the bitterness of that beggars description. What gay man in his right mind would stay married to a woman for 27 years? or offer to stay in exchange for the right to speak his truth? or stay loyal to a love because it spoke his name, and not forsake that love before its time? Well, I am just proof that the Creator has a sense of humor, I suppose, but perhaps the oldest truth beyond Eden is that all comedy is tragedy happening to someone else…

After my first social appearance as a gay man, my "coming out" party, as it were, I came away wondering just what it is I have done, as my wife has been wondering for months now. She saw early enough what the consequences were, when I saw only the need. The consequences are flying thick around me now, and I don’t know that I have the strength and the will to make a go of it. Well, it is the solitude more than anything, unasked for and unwelcome, that weighs me down; that, and my children’s inability to spend more than two hours in my company. The easy sociability, the shared jokes and repartee, have just dropped away. That just cuts my knees from under me.

Where, as that wretched musical orphan piped, is love? Do I have the strength to live without it? Can I survive the constant yearning without growing an armored carapace of bitterness – surrounding myself with a forest of thorns no man, and certainly no prince, will dare to breach? Well, this too is a path thousands of others have trod before me, but its presence in the fossil record does nothing to assuage the freshness of the pain today. Or the apparent emptiness of tomorrow.

And this, I hear the chorus swelling, is what you chose. There is a reason that necessity is called grim. It is past comprehension, and as my guru said long ago, the hallmark of our age is the fact of suffering without the benefit of comprehension. I would hold it against him if I didn't know the suffering out of which he spoke; he had more right to voice complaint than I, that is certain. But the sorrow I bear is in fact all that I can bear. And sometimes seems like more...

Pray for me.