I’m drunk and he’s there and I have to walk up and say hello. It takes me a moment to be ready, and then there we are.
It’s awkward and a relief and it really has been two years. He’s relaxed and cautious and distracted and hopeful. I’m in a tail-spin.
It’s brief. I don’t want my friends to meet him, I don’t want it to drag on. I can’t keep it together for very long. I’m drunk and he’s there.
I go back once more. Intense, honest, overdue conversation takes place in a short amount of time. We were in a relationship, it was important, we do want to kiss. Then I leave.
Every thing that happens after that is a mistake. I let him talk me into things I’m not sure I want. I am exposed to his pain and mine and I’m too caught up in old feelings to recognise that this should be over by now. Should be the end. It’s not.
He could be sweet, he could like men, he could like me, he’s never been more, he can’t be any less.
Focus on the tiny details I know, that he’s beautiful, that he closes his eyes to listen closer. That he asked questions I’d never been asked, that he highlighted things no other man has. Smitten, it happens so rarely, so for a couple of days, I let myself adore him.
We’ve known each other so long now, kept each other close and far and away and here. I reach out, he reaches back, always the same, same patterns. It’s hard to change when you’ve always been a particular way with a particular person. Which leaves me to behave the same way I did all those years ago, when love was fresh and he meant the world. When my hurt was strong and our feelings were stronger.
He’s still the same, in some ways he’s more “him” than before. More pained, more fucked. He resists my shit more too, and I end up pushing harder because of it. I want to talk about us (again, with no end, for no purpose). I want to remind him he hurt me. That’s who I was. That’s how I knew how to handle being around him.
But I really am not the same as I was then, or the same as I was two years ago. I look at myself reverting backwards and I am so surprised by it. It’s not what I want to do, it’s not how I want to be with him. I wasn’t capable of holding onto my changed self around him, and that’s embarrassing and annoying and okay. Because I’ve spent the last week trying to decide what it is I do want, why I keep letting him back in and what I hope our relationship will be like now. I keep treating him like I want the same things from him I did eight years ago but I don’t want that. I want something totally different. And what’s really surprised me about that, is that I think I want what he’s wanted for this entire fucking time. That’s the thing that’s gets me the most. I want to hang out on my couch and drink beer or coffee and watch the office. I want to go on late night drives and talk because we are great at talking. I want to see him rarely but know that I will again. I want to know he’s okay. I need to know if he’s not. I never want to talk about us, I just want to be us. Without the past, without what comes next.
For the first time since I moved home from England I asked myself what I wanted from him, really and truly. I thought about what was fair, what was useful, what was right. It became clear that my behaviour around him has always been about making him show me, tell me, prove to me that he cares. I don’t need him to do that anymore, it’s been eight years. We care. I don’t want him to feel bad about the past, I want him to feel good, to be happy. I want to have a small, tiny role in his life. One where I get to see him once or twice a year and we get to have fun and then we go back to our corners. I want that. Wow.
“There’s this idea that the only love that is pure and worthy of representation is a love that is forever, a happy-ever-after story. But I think for so many of us there are people that come into our lives that are incredibly potent, and sometimes people who are in our lives for six months can have as much of an influence as somebody who we would spend 15 years [with]. I don’t think there’s a time capsule that you can talk about the ratios of how much power you’re allowed to exert on somebody. It’s not a question of time; it’s about the intensity of the connection. And sometimes the connection is stronger because you know that it isn’t going to last forever. I think it’s absolutely extraordinary, the speech he has about love being awful and painful and all the other things. To my mind, it’s a very responsible, human representation of the way love presents itself. It’s not just wonderful, saccharine and all-consuming.”
— Andrew Scott on The Priest, to Rolling Stone, June 14, 2019
