Don't Make Me ...

... go back home.

There had been matching gold and black onyx rings. He bought them. We wore them on the Underground but what would happen when ...we got back to America? What would happen to sleeping together? What would happen to every fucking thing?

He went back to grad school in upstate New York. I waited table. The letters continued, picking up steam, and we called every night at 11 p.m.

On his infrequent visits we'd break away from our parent's houses and go parking. One of us would keep an eye out for cops and the other disappeared beneath the dashboard. He'd leave again. While I obsessed, his casual air drove me even more crazy. Leave "Que Sera, Sera" to goddamn Doris Day.

Midnight on Route 46, he pulls out a folded piece of paper.

"Here."

Written in a scrawl with two different colors of ink, it looked like he'd stopped and then come back.

"I hereby pledge and swear that we will be together forever, through thick and thin, smooth and chunky, whatever. And I will never leave you. This is for certain people to hang on their wall so whenever they start to feel lonely or insecure, they will know what's in my heart."

I took the train to Potsdam to see him on a weekend he was free. I could be free any weekend for him but, well, I'd take what I could get.

He met me at the train station and it was a scene from VJ-day. "The Way We Were."

"The Clock."

He whisked me off to a motel -- his close circle of friends would surely have found us out -- and we made love for the first time in the States. He came back from taking a shower and saw me lying on my side, stretched out, my back to the door. "You look like a panther," he said, and laid his cool, wet body against me.

He wasn't wearing the ring and I didn't say anything. Nothing was going to ruin this.

Like everything else, I took a breath and it was over. Back to the train station. Waving a hankie as my train pulled out. How long could this go on? The hiding, the lying. Something had to change or we'd both blow up.

We made plans to live together. He initiated it, he picked out where he wanted us to move. It was time, at last. This was a huge step for him; it meant coming out to his mother - whom I particularly wanted to see burst into flames - and deconstructing the persona he'd created all his life; Golden Boy. Well fuck it, he could be Golden Boy with lavender backlighting. He planned to come home and tell them the weekend of Halloween.

I saw his parent's car lights pull up the driveway and I ran outside.

"I've got something to tell you," he said as we stood in the darkness. Tiny ghosts and witches and princesses floated by with their shopping bags. This was it, I thought, he's told them.

He held my shoulders.

"I love you, Doug --"

"Me too, you," I answered. He looked at the gravel.

"But I don't love you the way I said I loved you."

The grass swung up in front of me and my knees buckled. Once it was said, there was nothing else to say. You can't debate it.

"I'm sorry. You don't know how sorry I am. And I hope that we will always --"

"Just leave," I said and went inside before he could see me shut down. This wasn't some teenage crush to write about in my diary, or the bittersweet, inevitable end of an affair. This was the world. This was the end of everything.

When the numbness began to melt I didn't want to be inside. I went to the backyard and stood, pushing against the huge oak by the garage. Then I finally gave in and grabbed the trunk hard and let myself cry. It was uncontrollable. My mother found me and came out, but stood a ways off. She had always known about me -- about him and me - but this was not only irrefutable evidence of her fears, but also her watching her son's heart break.

When we went back inside she sat next to me on the arm of couch.

"I can only say - when your father left me, and left his three little boys, I thought -- I'll never get up again," she said, standing. "Do you want me to stay?"

"No."

"I'll see you in the morning," she said, and her hand brushed my shoulder as she went by. "You get up."

I remembered the Auden poem Rick and I had found one rainy night in London:

"He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”

A year later I found out he'd married a girl he met in church at a bible study. He'd not only left me, he'd found a woman to live with.

And Jesus.