The best actor tonight reminded me of you; I thought to speak this but then remembered your cruel insanity and the way you cut me before cowardly running away to your drugs; your marriage of lies and pain, denial and hope, sadness and despair.
I wanted to invite you to our party, the way I always reach out and invite you, but having removed yourself from my life I can’t extend the invitation which you confusingly attested had never been offered in the past… even though I always welcomed you and sought to join our worlds together.
You called me the night that your father died in October 2011, and when I inquired, you said he’d have been happy to have me there, but then there were no words or information given.
I invited you camping for a night in 2016 and you agreed but then your future fiance blackmailed you into staying behind.
You asked me to take photographs of a famed NYC locale which I spent a day reaching to amuse you, only to share them with no response whatsoever.
I invited, again & again, and you cancelled, made excuses, ignored or hid for no reason I’ve been informed of.
Every time I reached out, you were grateful, but refused to touch.
Until the night came of The Body Politic when you accused, expelling your poison laced accusations with no possibility for my response, despite years shared in conversation, dedication and nearly 16 years after the most perfect kiss that I’ll have ever given.
That night I chose not to follow you. Not again. I will not chase you simply because you’ve chosen to run. I will not struggle through your shit just because you feel like being an asshole.
If you reach out to me I will be there, but I don’t have the strength to force you to see reason or remember how I have championed you.
If I’m lucky I’ll hear from you again someday but I suspect I will only hear of your untimely end.
You were out of your mind on junk the entire time I knew you but I just couldn’t see it.
I see it now and no matter how much I try I can’t stop loving you.
The only difference is I love myself now too and I deserve better than to suffer for the choices that you’ve made.
He whimpers and I wonder if I ever dreaded such desire so much or so unconvincingly, but then as waves of shimmering memory crash down upon us I know that I was once as fearful and thirsty as this unsteady stripling cursed by his impetuous prick.
The tremble in his voice tells me everything.
How many times have I heard that quivering?
Enough to know what will happen next.
Enough to know that he’ll kiss me for the first time before we leave this place and that his world will never be the same, although others may never know.
I wonder if he’ll be clumsy, fearfully failing and requiring my lessons?
I’ve never been a very good teacher.
But I needn’t have worried. His inaugural kiss is all skillful struggle & instinct; like he’s remembering a previously forgotten lyric which he sings into me, the movement resonating with my own dimly recalled early fumblings – old ghosts coming to light and making experienced virgins of us both.
Part II:
Years unfurl before us and we continue to cross paths, if not swords… never quite friends, but never enemies either.
We are could-have-been-lovers who never really liked one another… or maybe I want him desperately but have never admitted it to him, never admitted it to myself, and I protect this secret with a feigned indifference.
Perhaps he wanted me too once, but the injurious nature of his initiation was too overwhelming; too persistently all knowing, causing him to deny any self identified failing as commonplace as an honest, inexhaustible, uncontrollable lust.
The night I find him in the cemetery with a new student he actually drags the boy over to me to tell me that Ian is dead.
He kisses the boy goodbye, all casual and masterful now before he tags along with tears captured in his long black lashes.
When he reaches for my hand, I allow this silent sign language apology… as we stumble through a midnight city that once witnessed our virginal beginnings.
And as the sun threatens to wake us from our surreal remembering, he pulls me to him with eyes closed… desperate to feel the familiar, if shockingly innocent touch of my skin on his, rather than the aching emptiness our former brother once inhabited.
I don’t want this, I think, this isn’t how I’ve wanted him at all… yet I surrender to him like the tide pulled unfailingly by the moon and his sway.
A killing kindness that murders us both.
Part III:
16 years and he doesn’t recognize me on the underground.
I can’t blame him; I actually don’t recognize myself and I lack the reflection of his distant, unchanging gaze.
I watch him watching others but feel no need to illuminate him as I flow out and beyond him… Like I’m someone who never drowned in those icy depths.
I pretend and become a formerly drunken sailor, now sober, awake, and ignorant of all that took place that long night before, save a few vague images and the phantom bruising smudge of a lingering question, raised by the harshest of realities.
We once lost and found ourselves within each other… within the loss of innocence and the commingling of grief, but now, here in this place beneath a sea of inspiring destruction, what we discovered in that stilted, tilted, ordinary wonderland has been forgotten.
We drowned in the flood of all that came after, and though we may find ourselves again (and again) in the eyes of flaming strangers, the fire which burned within us has been lost forever, save in dreams which melt away every day as we wake.
Your frame holds me down as I wake with you on top of me, having been let into my locked house by a concerned grandmother.
Your game is a fucked up, fear based, 1995 ancient history lesson which is now clinically insane.
Your name is Gene Warrick and I met you in September 1994, months before you raped me, expecting this would cure me of any doubts I had in your love for me.
There is no statute of limitations on pain, no easy way to describe how I can forgive but still fear you… yet my words are just as true now no matter how many years it took me to say them.
His name is Gene Warrick and if it bothers you that I’ve told you so and you hold my rapist in such high regard then follow his advice and stop struggling: it will hurt less if you don’t struggle.
Written by Jason Wright November 28, 2017
Inspired by Erica Mapp
This was not written as part of the #metoo movement, but in response to someone who believed that women choosing to speak up years after the fact were wrong to do so and that using their rapist’s names was offensive. I was so angered that I wrote this response and read it directly to her in front of a group of people that heard her express these views. I’ve been working for nearly 2 years on an essay about my experiences with rape; this is but one example.
