Sitting In The Dark After The Storm
The Moment I Knew
This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.
Journal, late February 2006
Ryan began to wonder how long they’d been huddled on the kitchen floor. He tried looking at the candle and remembering how long it was when they lit it, but he could tell no difference.
“I couldn’t believe that tree we saw,” Ryan said.
“Yeah, and that one garden was flattened,” Morton said.
They didn’t like the silence. It wasn’t like the quiet you hear when you’re just about to fall asleep or when you’re along in the house. The house felt dead and cold and the boys huddled around Morton’s dog, Samson, who lay calmly on the terra cotta tile.
“So, when is your Mom supposed to get back?”
“I don’t know, what time is it?”
“I don’t know.”
They both looked around the dark kitchen. The sun had set and the crickets were chirping out in the dewy grass. Samson began to whimper in his sleep.
Neither boy was afraid of the dark.
Years later, Ryan would wonder what happened after Morton’s mother returned and found them asleep and curled around Samson’s heaving form.
Whatever it was, it made him sad.
The journal entry above is a fictionalized retelling of the last time my childhood best friend and I spent time together as kids.
I’ve thought a lot about this event throughout my life. Several times tried writing it down when I was younger, failed at doing so each time. This minimalist, fabulist version was the closest I got.
So. I’m trying again.
I came home from spending time with another kid, maybe even the girl who I would eventually date throughout high school because, well, change is hard. A story for another time. Anyway, a storm was brewing on the horizon, a deep burgeoning gray, a mass that felt like it was going to fall down on top of you.
My mom told me that my friend had called and asked if I wanted to come over. I was elated. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, been even longer since either of us spent time at each other’s houses.
I’m blank here. Logistically, it was several hours before I was taken over to his house and by then it was late afternoon and the storm had hit and it was powerful.
Driving through his neighborhood the storm looked like it really hit them hard.
Now I’m at his house, the same one where I’d spent the night on the lower bunk of his bunk bed, played Tiger Heli on Nintendo and Mortal Kombat on his Sega Genesis, jumped on the trampoline in the backyard.
His parents weren’t home but his older brother was; their mom was out and would be back later. Unbeknownst, neither my mom nor I knew they’d lost power at their house. My mom dropped me off and left.
My friend, his brother and I ended up walking the neighborhood, surveying the damage. I now know that they were likely hit by a microburst, which made everything look flattened. But there were also trees uprooted and debris everywhere.
Another blank.
We’re back at his house and suddenly his older brother, who was in high school, is leaving with his friends. My friend and I will be home alone. There’s an assurance their mom will be home soon. The older brother drives off and we go inside. The power is still off so the house is silent and still.
I don’t remember what we got up to at the beginning; we couldn’t play video games or watch TV or a movie.
The house was quickly growing darker. The upstairs hallway a black maw our eyes couldn’t penetrate. Even the living room with the vaulted ceiling and bay of windows seemed threatening, as there wasn’t light from outside fixtures and neighboring houses to illuminate it even faintly. Our hearing is heightened and every creak, every knock panics us.
But we’re…giddy? Am I making that up? Excited to be terrified together?
We somehow end up in the kitchen, sitting on the tiled floor with his dog panting beside us. We found a flashlight or small electric lantern but its light barely covers our immediate space…
…and it was fading, I think? And we’re stealing glances at each other as we look around at the blackness enveloping us? I vaguely remember his eyes glimmering when we dared to use the flashlight. Did I see him smile when he looked at me? Did I smile at him?
Suddenly, the lights flash on and we can see everything and the house looks normal again and we both get up and whoop and holler and my best friend runs into the living room and the lights suddenly go out again. We both gasp and I yell for him to get back in the kitchen, get back to safety and we’re back on the floor with the dog, our hearts quickened, breathing a little hard.
There’s something else here. Something else happened.
I don’t think the power was on by the time his mom came home. I have no honest perception of how long we’d been left alone. An hour? Two hours? She took us to get McDonald’s, I believe, and by the time we returned to the house, the lights were on and everything looked like it should.
Maybe we were never best friends.
We went to the same schools all the way through graduation together, despite his family moving out of the school district, despite the district opening a second high school and each member of our class having a choice to attend whichever they wanted. We went to the same school events and games and, at the end, did the same end-of-senior-year activities together, but that was communal. We didn’t sit together at lunch, didn’t say hi to each other in the hallway, never really had a conversation after that night.
“He was trying to find out what he was, and he was afraid of what he would find…All through his life, he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware and ashamed, but which he did not understand.”
T.H. White, The Once & Future King
We “friended” each other on Facebook in its halcyon pre-boomer invasion days. Rarely if ever said anything to each other, just gawked surreptitiously from behind a screen, at least that’s what I did.
After seeing his periodic photo updates of fraternity life and travel during our college years, I felt compelled to reach out to him. I had moved west for my first job but came back to visit family and college friends. Using FB Messenger, the exchange was basically,
“Hey, I’ll be in town this summer. It’s been a long time. Wanna grab a beer?”
“Sure, let’s do it.”
I’m sure part of me hoped we would talk about that night, about why we drifted apart, about…
…about what? Did I know? Of course I knew.
We went to a non-descript bar in a strip mall. We had a few beers together. I honestly don’t remember the conversation except that he brought up how he’d meet a girl in college who ranted to him about a guy we knew growing up who was a jerk then and apparently a jerk to her more recently. In an attempt to reminisce, I’m sure I brought up that time he fell out a tree he was climbing while on a Boy Scouts camping trip while confidently saying “I’m a master tree climber.”
But that night never came up. We were awkward and tense, at least I felt awkward and tense and he looked like he was awkward and tense. Long silences. Strained conversation, not helped by our difference in politics (his conservatism came out soon after we started chatting).
I’m certain our parting words were akin to:
“We should do this again, man.”
“Totally, next time you’re in town, let me know.”
He ended up going to law school, as his teaching degree showed him he had no interest in teaching. Then he went into working for athletic departments at colleges, even one relatively close to me. But we never met up, didn’t even reach out about meeting up.
What would I even say?
About 10 years ago, he was back near our old stomping grounds. He posted a picture of himself with another man at a baseball game—my friend behind him, close, chest to the other man’s shoulder. And the post read something along the lines of how grateful he was to this man for being so special to him.
People read between the lines and similarly wrote their comments between the lines, saying how happy they were for him.
Did I comment? I think I just liked the photo. Again, what would I even say?
Even as he’s come out more in the years since, he’s kept it discreet. Any photos of him with the guys he dated—when he rarely posted them—usually looked like nothing more than two friends just out for drinks or dinner.
Two years ago, he and the guy in the photo with him had rings on their hands with raised drinks. “Now you’re stuck with me forever” or something similar accompanied the photo. I commented my congratulations and how happy I was for him.
What would I even say?
I made the embroidery shown in the photograph at the beginning of this missive for the same reason I have tried, once again, to write about that night.
Like that journal entry from years ago and probably like everything I’ve written here, it’s likely not completely accurate. Neuroscience has revealed that the more we recall a memory, the more it erodes, corrupts, fades. I can’t ignore the gaps, the suppositions, the wild guesses.
So I stitched the tatters of what I have left into the stretched fabric just as I have stitched letters and words and sentences and paragraphs together. Guessed colors, how we were sitting, where the dog was laying, whether the moon was out and visible from the window. In all honesty, those details aren’t important.
Just like that journal entry, I need that embroidery to hold it all together for me. To be a repository for the memory and the sadness it conjures. Because I can’t do it on my own anymore. It’s slipping away, increasingly out of my reach. And I don’t want to lose it, don’t want to lose the moment I knew who I am, what I am, and was too afraid to express it.
Coming in next week’s newsletter…
I share a rant I wrote in response to a biphobic queer man on social media but I never had the opportunity to post. Sadly, it’s still relevant.
This Is a sad and somber story, but your writing is absolutely captivating. Thank you for sharing.🙏⭐😎