Fini

After an exhausting day of e-mailing treatises and awaiting replies, everything has been said. Only the most truly negligible details are left undiscussed, and to be Rilke-esque, I have to say that whatever has not been said now, will not be.

He knows everything. We have agreed that I am moving on, that he understands why I cannot come to his wedding, and that we want each other to be happy.

But before this, things were rather bad. He did not respond well to Sarah's initial e-mail, and for a few hours it seemed that his last impression of me would be that I was a disingenuous phony...someone who proffered a face of friendship, while really just biding her time, hoping simply to win his heart. His reply to Sarah was scathing, and not a little mean.

I understood why he might think those things of me. I have wondered if this was not true, myself, in the past. But I could not let that be the standing account of the last six years of my life.

So, I had to write him and set the record straight once and for all. I explained the painful duality of caring for him very much as a friend, and caring for him much more deeply than that, never being able to let that twain meet within myself.

His initial reaction was the very reason I lived in fear of ever saying anything. Loving men has always been tantamount to losing them... And at the end of this, what I am left with are his wishes for my best, and the thought that he thinks I am a brilliant writer and poet...in fact a better poet than he is a painter.

And that, my friends, is what six years comes out to.

I suffered him to have him, and now I don't have him, yet I suffer.