Well Bottom Blues

Gay zoned, a particular space in the friend zone in which she says, I loved my gay friends. It was so safe there. You could be yourself. You could be sexy without worrying about someone trying to get into your pants. She said this after I confessed again it wasn’t her cheek or forehead I wanted to kiss. Forget about that, she said, and I felt for a moment like one of those balloons released to heaven now deflated and left hanging from a fence.

Another just wrote in a letter: One of the things I appreciate about you is that I can actually tell you scary things safely. My partner, whose body has put intimacy off limits, who knows my intentions and professes to understand and if not approve at least give permission, says it’s because I am A Nice Guy, that I somehow exude safety, something women rarely find in men. [He gazes wistfully into the distance and sighs.]

I wanted more than that with her, not just to peel down her panties but to get deeper into her life, into her head, into her heart, to hold her in a way she’s lost touch with. It took her a week to say no to my first advance and so my wanderlust-struck shifter is stuck in Park. I know I’ve made a place in her head and her heart, and that has become a joy in my life. I wanted to give comfort and I’ve accomplished that, even if it’s not the sort of comfort I sometimes dreamed about at the edge of sleep.

Perhaps I just have to accept this as a new wrinkle in what has followed me much of my life, what I will now call The Curse of Saint Francis of Assisi Is A Sissy, the one which brought children left alone at McDonald’s playground to my table to tie their shoe, brought any number of mad or homeless people into long conversations, the reason I can walk in the park and not startle the green heron. I never set out to be sainted. I burn guiltily like Saint Augustine with memories of lovers like the fires of, well, not fires but Dante’s second circle haunting mirrors of my desired sin.

Curse the gods who made even nice guys like horned goats with the desire to service a herd, to be fruitful in that Old Testament way, a player like David. Curse Pan and all the satyrs and that Priapus guy. I think I need to pay a visit to Dionysius, but just us two for a drink down at the back bar of Nepenthe. Keep the damn Maenids out of it for now.