SPOKEN TOO SOON...

"But the shadow comes with the light, and the sooner we believe it, the better off we'll be. No matter where you are sitting at the moment, it will change in time: read a Psalm. You'll see what I mean."

Be careful what you pontificate about:

it will undoubtedly rise up to bite you in the ass. This past weekend I had stretched myself to be good to the Goat in a difficult time for him, and as he had been overloaded with family stuff in the course of the weekend, I offered to take a day off from work to help him decompress. He accepted the offer. So I took a day off from work. Not, as you may know, always the easiest thing to do.

Today was a killer. He came back to his apartment mid-morning, where I was quietly sitting in a corner trying not to take up too much space in a not very wide open space. And he proceeded to go absolutely ballistic. I was more or less ready for that: it had been a loaded weekend. But it seemed to me that he wasn't just venting: I was the problem, and he wanted me to leave.

I didn't really have a problem with that, in principle. I would have been happy to hear that he had made a mistake asking me to stay past dawn today; I was not happy to have to sit and listen to his laundry list of justifications. I did manage not to respond in kind, and to get him to calmly voice just what he wanted me to do.

Leave. OK. I left.

Driving back out of the Big Woods, I realized that I was in fact really angry. Mostly about the lecture. But then, I had to remind myself that I had wanted to help, and if what helped was my not being there, that was what I should do. And I still "get" all of that. But the lecture still sticks in my craw. I don't mind him changing his mind, I don't mind him flying off the handle [much], but I really hate being lectured to, and I really hate being made into the villain when I was only trying to help, and he had accepted my offer.

Once I did get home -- far too late to think of going to work even to say "hello" -- I felt sick to my stomach, and I finally realized that it was not anger, which had slowly diminished with the passage of time, but the sudden panic that now that I had committed myself, had taken him onboard into my family, had been taken onboard into his family, was quitting my job to be with him, there was a very real chance it might not work out. If he couldn't deal with me in an enclosed space when "things" were getting to him -- not, I am sad to point out, an isolated event -- what earthly hope did we have of surviving even as long as most of his other "relationships"?

It suddenly occurred to me that the answer might be "not much." That would be a pretty awful adjustment at this point.

Partly a big hit in the "pride" department -- not to mention the "gay pride" department -- and partly the complete mayhem of moving again, again, and again.

Lord, take pity on me:

my boat is so small, and the ocean seems so Very Large at the moment...

yikes.