Letter three: What skydiving has to do with love
and other lessons from facing your fears
Dear Past-Micke,
Where does your story begin? With your birth? Your conception? When your parents met? Grandparents? I think that the only real beginning (that we know) it is the Big Bang. Everything since is part of the same grand story, that plays out everywhere. A story that we can only experience one at a time. It’s too much to take in at once, so we use beginnings and ends to split this story into pieces we can handle. We split those stories into even smaller pieces, sometimes for entertainment, oftentimes to make sense of ourselves and the world. Which cut-outs of our life story we choose to tell makes a difference for how we and others see us.
As I was writing the last letter, I re-read your diary for clues as to whether you feel like an adult. I didn’t find the answer to that, but I realized something about you that you don’t know yet: you’re awesome. I know you have no idea, because I didn’t either until that last read-through. I mean, on good days I see myself as awesome now, but I realize I’ve just assumed that this ‘awesomeness’ is something that grew over time. That’s not true. You have just as much of it, all that’s happened since is that it’s been refined and nurtured.
The stories you tell make me think of the parable of the farmer and the horses from Dao De Jing. I know you haven’t heard it yet. You’ll read it in “The Tao of Pooh” on a sunny Saturday in spring 2005, sitting in the back of the bus taking you home from work. You won’t really comprehend it, but it’ll resonate so much with you that the moment is still vivid in my memory.
A farmer had only one horse, and one day the horse ran away. The neighbors came to comfort over his terrible loss. The farmer replied, “Maybe, maybe not.”
A month later, the horse came home bringing with her two beautiful wild horses. The neighbors came to congratulate for his good fortune, “Such lovely, strong horses!” The farmer replied, “Maybe, maybe not.”
The farmer’s son was thrown from the horse and broke his leg. All the neighbors came to console, “Such bad luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe, maybe not.”
A war broke out and every able-bodied was recruited except the farmer’s son because of his broken leg. The neighbors came to congratulate the farmer. “Maybe, maybe not.” replied the farmer.
If I apply the moral of this story to your life so far, it’s like you tell your story skipping or downplaying the positive parts of it enough so that the negative ones are get to define it — and you, since your stories are what defines you. You make up for this by perfomance: by solving problems, striving to be perfect, and overachieving. You don’t yet realize that you can’t build a house on a rotten foundation, no matter how great the wood.
The negative stories are so sticky that it will take twenty years and several read-throughs of your diary before I can see past the stories you have chosen to focus on, stories of failures, shortcomings, and things you don’t have. You see your life as a war where you win more battles than you lose, and yet you feel like you’re losing the war. I’m glad that you wrote this diary, because it made me discover how intuitively smart you are.
You don’t believe that it’s much of an achievement to write this diary, let alone that you wrote the publishing software you use to write it, but you’re an early adopter; it’ll be another year before the term blog is coined.
You’re using writing as a form of therapy. When you put words to your feelings and experiences, you have to examine them if you want to tell them truthfully, which I know you do. The words allow you to label and examine what you’re experiencing. You’ve realized that you can’t stop the feelings from existing by ignoring them, but examining them at least turn them into the devil you know. Twenty years later, it’s easy for me to see that the darkness you’re dealing with feeds on the anger I wrote about in my last letter, but also on insecurity. Insecurity growing from questions you have yet to define before you can find your answers to them.
Profound questions about life, like: are you a real man? Are you doomed to unhappiness? Will you ever be able to find love? Will you have a family? (Yes, no, yes, yes, but that’s later.) At twenty, you know that you can never have a “normal” life, whatever that is, and the gay role models are non-existant. You have few concepts of what life at thirty could entail, and none about being a senior.
Then we have the question of career. The question may be “What do you do for work?” but the answer very often begins with “I am an …”. We are so involved in our careers and jobs that they become what we are instead of what we do. Growing up, you didn’t have many adults in your life to look up to, career wise; Mom’s circumstances in communist Poland did not allow her to go to university, but she made do in that way both of you are so capable of (don’t worry, she has a job she likes now, and an amazing partner). You had to find the answer somewhere else. At eight you wanted to be a hero fighting space-lizards just like Mike Donovan from “V”, but that too adult part of you knew that the chances for a space-lizard invasion were slim and never pursued it (fortunately — there hasn’t been one yet, but they did do a remake of “V” a few years back). At twelve, when you were a junior reporter at the local radio station, you idolized Jack Killian in “Midnight Caller” to such a degree that I still think “Jack Killian” before I think “Gary Cole”, whenever I see him. You dreamt of becoming a radio host, but Sweden didn’t have commercial radio stations yet, and no place for Jack Killians.
Remember the summer camp you were at between thirteen and fifteen? The one where you won two regattas, and were one of “Madonna’s” dancers in the talent show? I recently found the magazine the kids and councelors made. It had a short interview with you in it. Mike, the councelor interviewing you, asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. You said “lawyer. I’m pretty sure you got that from Law & Order, and I know it wasn’t a dream; it was a default. It was the only thing that seemed like one of the few real jobs that you understood and which you with your good grades could achieve. Everyone knows laywers have good grades, or so it seemed on TV. I can see how the praise you got both at home and in school for being a fast learner made you pick of one of the few intellectual jobs you had a concept of. But being a default, and not a dream, it faded quickly when you started high school.
If TV shows and movies showed you more or less feasible careers, they didn’t do much in the way of gay role models. Movies and TV series mostly treated unstraight characters as props, freaks, tragic examples or comic relief. So rare were positive portrayals of the lives of gay boys and men, that I still remember all the movies from your teens that had a positive impact on you: “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” and “Beautiful Thing”, in that order. That’s it. The premiere of the third, “Show Me Love” (“Fucking Åmål”), is still more than a year away. Even though it is about a teenage lesbian girl in a small town in Sweden, you will relate to her in a way you never related to a movie character before. The scene with the kiss in the back of the car, while Foreigner’s I Want To Know What Love Is plays in the background, will be so powerful to you that it echoes still, when I’m 40. That song was the soundtrack to your first, unrequited love in high school, and you can easily imagine this scene to be about the two of you in another universe. (Strange as it may sound, I can not.)
Where most of your peers had life-style and career role models, you had neither. To put it in other words, they had templates for their life-stories as kids, templates that you still lack. I think Margaret Atwood put it very well in an interview:
“You know, people keep using this word ‘worry.’ Young people worry a lot more than older people. And the reason they worry a lot more than older people is that they don’t know the plot of their own lives yet. They don’t know how it’s going to turn out for them. At my age — and I am starting to sound like one of those people who says “at my age” — at my age, I kind of know how the story goes. So, should I get hit by a truck tomorrow, the plot will pretty much have unfolded.”
And boy, do you worry. But you’re your mother’s son, and instead of succumbing to the blank, template-less canvas of your life, you start doing what you can. You tell partial stories, trying them out. You start applying design thinking to your life, but that won’t be clear to you nor me, until October 2017. But I’ll save the career talk for another time.
Back to the fragments of stories you choose to tell yourself. There’s a couple entries in your diary about Marcus, the guy you sort of dated for a brief while. I think that was your first perfect first date: gorgeous and smart guy, good food, wine, a movie, a walk (with hand-holding!). To be fair, you did write that it was an awesome date. But the overall arc of the story you tell of that event can be summarized like this: amazing first date, a cliffhanger, second date with sex, you wanting more, he didn’t. You feel used, and spend a considerable amount of energy painting him as half-villain, and yourself as half-victim. To another reader, this story is easily understood as one of personal failure on your part. But to me, who remembers this, there’s more to this story.
The night you met Marcus, you wore that horrible gold lamé zip-up shirt from C.U.M. Clubwear (that store still exists by the way, and I’m still unsure whether the name is a sexual innuendo or not). You and Christian, one of your best friends, were at this new gay club in the corner of Sveavägen and Tegnérgatan. The place was not what you would call packed, but it wasn’t that late and it might yet pick up. You had had your first beer when you went back to the coat check for something. As you got there, there was a really, really hot guy in line in front of you. In your head he was way-out-of-your-league-hot, but he looked at you, said hi and you both smiled. You felt a jolt of so many emotions, but before you had time to react he had gotten his coat and left with a last smile for you. That was one of those small, but very significant moments in your life. You thought “the worst thing he can do is say no” and ran out after him. It was a double win: you dared to ask him out, and you got his phone number. You could tell it like this, as a story of overcoming your fears. Instead you choose to focus on how much it sucks that you two never became an item, and tell a story where someone else’s preferences become your personal failure. If this is the story you tell yourself and others, you can’t expect them to see something else.
It’s funny, but most stories of your failure that you tell are about dating and romance. But there’s one story that you barely think about, let alone tell, because it’s loaded with so much pain. So much shame. Remember when you went to the US to visit your high school friend who also was your first (unrequited) love? He was one of the hottest guys you’d ever seen. You had so little in common that I don’t think you’d have become friends if you weren’t in love with him. I don’t think he ever realized that you were. Falling in love with him saved you, in a way. When you fell in love, when you realized that that was what being gay meant, you also understood that being gay couldn’t possibly be as horrible and wrong as it was made out to be.
If you couldn’t have him, at least you could become his very best friend. That led to a very weird dynamic, where you wanted to spend as much time as possible with him and he just saw you as another friend from school. When he took a gap year to study in the U.S., it was the kiss of death to your already waning motivation to be in school. You took a gap year too, and spent it working in the shoe store. The two of you kept in touch, sending letters back and forth, you more often than him. Had you not been blinded by your fantasy, you probably would have been able to read between the lines. He was too busy and focused on his new life over there to be more than sporadically invested in being your friend. But you decided to go visit him, and he didn’t actively disagree with your decision. You didn’t even take it as discouragement when he wrote that you unfortunately couldn’t stay with the family he stayed with.
You worked, saved up money and used it to book a ticket to Youngstown, Ohio, departing in February 1995. With two days in New York. Alone. At seventeen. That mom let you go is another testament to how independent you were.
The flight over the Atlantic had a smoking section where you sat, and a lady from first class came to use the free seat next to you to smoke. She ordered champagne for the both of you, and you felt exhilarated in that way I still do when I’m at the start of a journey. In New York, you stayed at a cheap hotel not far from Empire State building. The room had a window overlooking a shaft, which you felt was very pertinent, and you went down to the local diner to get breakfast. When you saw that they had pancakes that you ordered in twos, you ordered three portions, thinking they were the thin crêpes we call pancakes in Sweden. This were American pancakes, and huge ones even for those. Fortunately, you got them to go, or the staff would have a story about a weird tourist kid who ordered three portions of pancakes and failed eating two of them. Despite the admonitions from many a person in Sweden not to take the subway — I still don’t know if it really was dangerous, or if it was just exaggerations — you rode the train to take the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Waiting for the ferry was cold, the February sun had nothing on the cold winds. You got a coffee, and ate your first real donut. At Ellis Island, where you could search the names of people who had immigrated to the U.S. through that station, you found one person that shared your last name. The Statue of Liberty was not worth the walk up, but you liked the museum. You listened to “Zombie” by the Cranberries on the minidisc player you had borrowed from your friend Tomi, and enjoyed the freedom to smoke without having to look over your shoulder.
Two days later after arriving in Manhattan, you went to Youngstown, connecting in Pittsburgh. You had only flown once before this trip, but you could tell that the place you were going wasn’t big from the propeller plane you boarded in Pittsburgh. A cab took you to the motel you’d be staying at. I can’t remember if all rooms were smoking ones, or if you chose a smoking room, but I remember you smoking in there. When you had gotten settled, you called his house. The mom of the family answered. She told you he was at the hospital, but that it wasn’t serious and he’d be back home the next day. You spent those days smoking cigarrettes and watching Golden Girls in the motel room, not knowing what else to do. As he got better (I don’t remember if it was one or two days after your arrival), you took a cab out to visit him. I have very vague memories of the details of that visit, but I remember the revelation and the tangle of emotions that resulted in: he has a life here and doesn’t want you to be a part of it. You could never be his lover, and now you weren’t even his friend. You took a cab back to your motel room and comforted yourself with more cigarrettes and Golden Girls, and whatever snacks they had in the machines.
The flight back was interesting. The plane was almost empty, there were maybe ten other passengers in coach. There was nobody sitting next to you when you fell asleep, but as you woke up on approach to Stockholm, there was a guy sitting next to you. A pretty hot guy at that. Perhaps early-mid thirties, blonde, nice smile. You started talking and it turned out he was a steward on vacation, and while I can’t remember the exact reason he gave for moving from first class to coach — to a seat next to you — I remember you knowing it was bullshit. After small-talking all the way to baggage claim, it was obvious that he was cruising you. You ended up getting his phone number, and he turned out to be a pretty good lay.
You feel as if you were as much an adult during that trip, at seventeen, as you are now, at twenty. You don’t know what it means to be a man, but at least you know what a man isn’t: gay, a woman, a sissy, a girl. A little girl is the antithesis to an adult man in your head, and a teenage girl is not far behind. So to you, this story is filled with the pain of rejection and the shame brought on by acting like a teenage girl. Patterns, again. As an adult, you’re expected to have a relationship pattern of an adult man, not that of a teenage girl. But you never practiced relationships the way straight kids do. You knew you weren’t interested in girls and you were afraid that dating would eventually lead to sex, which was unimaginable and terrifying to you. You pretended to be interested in a girl, and since you hung out as friends a lot it made the lie credible. This lack of experience will continue causing problems for you ahead on many levels.
Untold stories hold a power over us. This story holds so much power over you that you barely tell people you were in the US as a seventeen-year-old, afraid it will lead to questions you don’t want to answer, and you don’t want to lie.
To me, this story is one about coming of age. A story of a precocious young adult who follows his heart on an adventure, of a high-risk gamble that didn’t pan out. But every chance you take won’t result in a jackpot. It can’t, by definition, because taking a chance means accepting the risks of failing, of losing, of being rejected. How boring would life be if there never was risk involved. You didn’t fail in Youngstown. You stumbled and fell, and from this you learned that you really have the capacity to fall down ten times and get up eleven. It would have been so easy to give up, and never take the risk of following your heart again. Then, at least you wouldn’t have to deal with all this pain and shame. But life, being the rollercoaster that it is, seems to follow the law of gravity: you need real lows to be propelled to real highs. Eliminate all the lows, all the pain, and you’re on the kids version. Some people may prefer that, but you like your life like you like your rollercoasters: high, fast, with loops and spirals pushing the extreme. So you lick your wounds and double down on trying.
That’s why you recently had that tattoo made: the flaming skull of the brand No Fear. That is a permanent reminder to you that the only thing that stands between you and your dreams is fear. Well, that and the fact that it was drawn by a straight co-worker you had a very deep crush on. It looks rather small and silly twenty years later, but I’ve never thought about removing it once. That deep understanding that only if you face your fears, only then are you truly free to pursue your dreams, is to this day one of the most profound insights of my life so far.
That tattoo is the last thing you will remember from your first skydive (solo, no less!) at twenty-six. Thinking of it is what makes you able to release your death grip on the plane for the split second it takes to jump. You will be so stressed from sheer, exquisite terror that you’ll have a heart rate of 172 according to the heart-rate monitor you’ll be wearing. The stress will be so extreme, it will trigger dissociative amnesia in you and you won’t remember anything between leaving the plane and landing the parachute safely on the ground.
Back to your story. If you extend this particular story to span over a longer period, the ending becomes yet another. Facing your fears in that airplane will be neither the first nor the last time you seek out your fears head-on, even if it’s the scariest thus far. It says a lot about your fear of failure, of not being a real man, that despite a fear so great that facing it gave you acute stress disorder, you will fake courage to do it again. You’ll pretend to be excited in the plane on the way up, but you will be scared senseless. 40-some times you’ll fake it, before the fear subsides and you start trusting the air to carry you. That’s when you’ll realize that skydiving can be really fun, and you’ll make 140 or so more jumps. At least one of them will be as amazing as the first one was terrifying. Five years after that, you’ll be at Stockholm Pride, and they’ll have bungee jumping. You’ll realize that skydiving does nothing for the very different fear of jumping off a 200 feet crane. But you’ll jump twice, and the second time you’ll attempt to make it scarier by doing it buck naked. And satisfy the exhibitionist in you, if we’re to be honest. Two birds, one stone and all that. Experiences like these will brand the lesson of not letting fears stand in your way into your being, much like the tattoo branded it into your skin.
Some fears require more practice than others to get over. Fears like the one you’ve already started to deal with: the fear of rejection. You must face it before you can practice getting rejected (don’t worry, you will get to practice that a lot). Once you get rejected enough times, it’ll dawn on you, the realization that it has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the other person. If you present yourself honestly and get rejected, it’s because of what the other person likes or prefers. Take Leonardo di Caprio for example. You really don’t see it and would turn down a date if he offered. But your rejection, real as it would be, wouldn’t stop him from being a dreamboat for countless other men and women. If you are the person you like to be, and get rejected, it really isn’t you — it’s the other person’s preferences. But it’s oh so easy to see yourself as the common denominator for all these failed attempts, and in your head you become the love equivalent of the asshole in the saying “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”
If this insight doesn’t seem like much, facing your fears is the gift that keeps on giving. In 2007, when you’re on vacation in Sitges with three gay friends, all that work will result the following story, that you will write down right after it happens:
Three days in Sitges — a feel-good story in five parts
Part 1: The Breakfast
I love it when life directs itself. This time, life directed a trip into a romantic feel-good movie, better than many I’ve seen. No movie is complete without a soundtrack, so press play before you start reading [yes, you will even make a soundtrack for this story, and a good one— you score this part with “La Complainte De La Butte by Rufus Wainwright”]
Male leads:
me and Arnaud (imagine a ridiculously hot French guy and you’re in the right ballpark)
Supporting roles:
Pascal (The Other Man)
Thomas, David and Patrik (my friends)
Part 1 — The Breakfast. Scenario: a Tuesday morning in July, on the mezzanine where the breakfast buffet is served, in a charming small hotel with twenty-five rooms, located at the Mediterranean coast.
Faithful to my habits this crazy week, I woke up a couple minutes before ten and went pretty much directly from bed, down to breakfast. The only things I took time for was putting on shorts, a t-shirt and splashing cold water in my face. The hotel we’re staying at is small, with little more than continental breakfast at twelve tables small even with Spanish standards. I was counting on being there alone, there were rarely people at breakfast and my friends were probably still sleeping. I had left the Sitges night in their capable hands and went to bed early (this too with Spanish standards) — more exactly at 02:08am.
When I get down to the mezzanine where breakfast is served, the hostess is putting things in order, but it’s not her I see; I see the beautiful man sitting at one of the tables, with intense focus on his breakfast. Curly dark hair, scruff, eyes that seem dark-green. My guess is that he’s Spanish. Then I realize that he’s looks tall, the table he’s sitting at looks as if made for a child. Maybe not Spanish, on second thought. The hostess greets me with a happy ”¡Hola!”, which makes him quickly look up and echo her in what to me sounds like very good Spanish. I respond with “Good morning”, get my breakfast and take a table on the diagonal from him. I try making some sort of contact, but get little reward for the effort. The only thing he seems to be aware of is his breakfast. It’s way too early, and I’m at least three cups of coffee short of even thinking of how to start a casual conversation with someone who maybe even doesn’t speak English.
A while later, he leaves, and I think “oh well, what’s a boy to do?” — but hey, this is Sitges and it’s full of almost as handsome men, and the plans for tonight include a foam party at the beach. I finish my breakfast and walk up to my room to get ready for a day in the sun. When I start putting on the sun lotion, I have already forgotten the mysterious stranger.
Three days in Sitges — a feel-good story in five parts
Part 2: Intermezzo
[You score this part with “This is the life” by Amy Macdonald]
Part 2 — Intermezzo. Scenario: the patio on the small street outside the hotel. David, Thomas, Patrik and I are drinking wine and playing Texas hold’em ( a paradox to all the gay things we’re doing on this vacation) before it’s time for dinner, bar round and the beach party. With foam.
“That guy over there is hot”, says Thomas as he points out a guy in red shorts and a tank top, walking towards the hotel. I look up from shuffling the cards and recognize the handsome stranger from breakfast. “Isn’t he? He’s staying here. I saw him at breakfast this morning.”
Of course it’s David, the fashionista of the group who already had scored all the gay points with great preppy outfits and flip-flops from Hermes, that notices the details “American Apparel shorts. Good fashion sense!”
The guy walks into the hotel, seemingly without noticing us. We go back to our game. I end up losing six euros.
Cut to early evening, with Spanish standards: we’re having drinks at Parrot’s and talk about getting the tickets for the foam party
We’re sitting trying to get over the two tank-tops in tight leather with camo patterns, one red and one blue, that passed earlier. Suddenly, a procession of white-clad beefcakes walks into the square. They are promoting the beach party (with foam). It is supposed to be the big thing tonight. We mostly notice the unflattering cut of their t-shirts. Those t-shirts would come into their own as night gowns on Yasmine Bleeth (which by the way is our nickname for all random beefcakes at the gay beach) . The Yasmines are handing out fan-shaped flyers for the party.
“It seems like you get tickets from the woman in the bar at the other side of the square”, says Patrik — who besides being the Samantha of the group also is our Spanish translator — after reading tickets mandatory on the flyer and asking our waiter.
“There’s Red Shorts from the hotel”. Again, it’s Thomas who first notices him. This time he’s walking next to a guy who looks like Dominic Purcell (Linc from “Prison Break”). We discuss whether they’re a couple or not while they walk into the bar on the other side of the square.
“Go talk to him”, I extend the challenge to Thomas, all in the spirit of the theme of the night: if someone challenges you to do something, you can’t say no.
“Nah. What will I say?”
“Ask if they’re a couple”
“They’re inside buying tickets for the party tonight. Go buy our tickets”, says Patrik offering Thomas a setup.
“Yeah, and say hi to them when you pass”, I continue. We give Thomas cash, and he walks over to the bar. Alas, our discussion about whether they’re a couple took too long. As Thomas is crossing the patio of the bar, Red Shorts comes out with the other man, and they disappear in the crowd.
When Thomas comes back with our tickets, we realize that we’ll probably see them at the beach party tonight. I promise more challenges, and we continue our bar round. At 1:30 we hop on the free shuttle that takes us to the venue where The Gay Beach Foam Party is taking place. The roofless building looks like a spaceship took off the top and threw a party. You can feel the anticipation of a fun night in the air. It will be legen — wait for it …
Three days in Sitges — a feel-good story in five parts
Part 3: The other man
[The score you’ll choose for this: Freemasons’ “Rain Down Love”]
Part 3 —The other man. Scenario: a little after 02.00 am at a beach club, that looks as if a spaceship landed on the beach and took off its roof. The party is just getting started and the anticipation is almost palpable. The house music is loud and drowns out the sounds of the waves rolling in on the stone beach. The crescendo (foam party) is still a couple hours away.
… dary. Legendary! This place is well planned. Far enough from town so that the house music booming out of the speakers won’t disturb people sleeping, close enough for a walk home. The disco lights are covered by small plastic domes, which makes them look as if R2D2 and his cousins from Star Wars were hung upside down from the scaffolding surrounding the dance floor.
“Alright, challenge. There’s an empty podium. Get up on it and dance for the rest of this song” David points down to the dance floor, situated in a large, drained swimming pool. “Easy”, I respond. I’ve never danced on a podium wearing only shorts. I make my way over and jump up on the podium and dance, dance, dance. When I get back, Red Shorts and the other man have arrived. They’re standing with their backs towards the ocean, making smalltalk.
“Challenge! Go talk to them,” I tell Thomas and Patrik. This rekindles the discussion that they probably are dating, which makes me lose my patience. Without finishing the conversation, I turn around and walk over to Red Shorts.
I open with “Hey guys, we’re staying at the same hotel. I saw you at breakfast this morning.” Red Shorts smiles and nods. We introduce ourselves. Red Shorts’ name is Arnaud and the other man is Pascal. I went straight for the heart of the matter: “Are you guys a couple?”
“No, we’re brothers. Half-brothers, actually.”
We make smalltalk. A party photographer comes up to us and asks if he can take a photo of the three of us. I give the guys a questioning look, and they both shake their heads. The photographer doesn’t give up easily, “I’m an official photographer,” he says, and shows a laminated card hanging in a lanyard around his neck, “you guys are very good looking”. The flattery doesn’t work, and he moves on. Pascal explains that Arnaud doesn’t like to pose for photos like that. When I ask why, it turns out he’s an actor in France.
Some more smalltalk later, Pascal tells me that Arnaud mentioned seeing a good looking guy at breakfast. He asks me about my room number, and I get theirs in return. “I’m going to check in on my friends. I’ll see you later,” I say with a smile.
Excited, happy and with my self-confidence boosted to the point of overflowing, I set out to see if the rest of the four musketeers are in the same spot I left them. They’re the perfect travel company: neither has any problems entertaining themselves. The past nights we’ve seamlessly glided between hanging out, parting and then hanging out again. There’s a freedom to being alone in company.
It’s still pitch dark around four in the morning. Hot. Intense. People are dancing, talking, flirting. The atmosphere feels charged. I talk to a guy who coincidentally comes from the same French town as Pascal and Arnaud. He’s flirty, handsome and direct, but I’ve had a taste of something that can’t be substituted with the temporary affirmation of making out in the club. I dance, and switch to water to be fresh the next day. As the foam starts filling the swimmingpool-turned-dancefloor, I move away from it and contentedly watch the almost kid-like joyful mood of the people in the foam.
I am offered a threesome with two hot guys. I politely decline and stifle the laughter I feel bubbling up; I’m imagining my straight friend Andreas in this situation: a party on the beach with hot, scantly clad women frolicking in the foam and offering a threesome, that’s something that happens straight guys once in a blue moon.
As the clock strikes five, the party is still raging. The foam is more than six feet tall in places, and even people who haven’t been in the foam get their share of it. I feel like I’ve had enough, and as I get a hug from behind from random soapy guy, I decide it’s time to leave. Daybreak is still an hour away when I get back to Sitges, where I see couples slowly dancing on the pier under the clear, starry sky, while a thunderstorm is raging over the mountains. It’s was the perfect postcard ending of an interesting day. I fall asleep trying to decide whether legendary or epic better describes this vacation.
Three days in Sitges — a feel-good story in five parts
Part 4: Crescendo
[The score you choose for this is “Your Sex Is On Fire” by Kings of Leon]
Part 4 — Crescendo. Scenario: Sitges, a charming and gay friendly seaside town outside Barcelona, a Wednesday morning in July.
[Scene 1: The lobby of Hotel Celimar, a charming hotel of the older kind with three floors with seven rooms on each]
It was past 1 p.m. After breakfast, I got a recap of the previous evening from the others. A lost shoes, barefoot mile-and-a-half walk, and an involuntary head-first dive into the foam — fortunately with pride being the only casualty — were just two of the stories, but those stories belong to others. In my story, I started feeling a little panic. I wasn’t sure about the last digit in Arnaud’s room number. In my visual memory, I had marked the room as “to the right of the stairs”, but there were three rooms there. Was he staying it room 205, 206 or 207?
I might not get another chance. The next day, Arnaud and Pascal were leaving for Madrid before returning home to Paris. I realized I ask the front desk, and three minutes later I knocked on the door of room 205.
I heard someone moving in the room, and shortly Arnaud opened the door. He stepped out into the hallway, looking newly awake as he rubbed his face with one hand and closed the door with the other. I saw Pascal still sleeping in his bed. Arnaud’s voice broke in that sleep-drunk way as he said “Hi Michael” with a smile.
“Hey. Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. I figured you’d have the don’t disturb sign out if you were sleeping”
“We don’t have one. Dont’ worry. Are you going to the beach?”
“Yeah, I’m just about to leave. I just wanted to formally ask you out. How about dinner tonight?”
“I’ll check with my brother about our plans when he wakes up. I’ll tell you at the beach, okay?”
”Alright. See you later!”
I thought about how we were supposed to find each other at the beach. The gay beach has hundreds of people under identical parasols, lying on identical sun beds. It’s not entirely easy finding people there. All I could do was trust life to keep directing this story.
[Scene 2: Bassa Rodona, the most central gay beach in Sitges.]
Just a week before this vacation, I had thought “I don’t have the patience for sunbathing. I can do fifteen minutes, tops, and then I have to do something”. I didn’t know myself as well as I thought, because this was the fifth day I spent on a lounge chair, drinking in the sun, heat and sound of the ocean. I was too lazy to read, even, and had barely gotten hundred pages into my vacation book.
One thing I was still learning was the swimming part. I get jumping in the water to cool yourself off, but what else do you do? I felt it was time to practice.
“I’m going into the water for a bit,” I told David and Thomas. The sand was incredibly hot and I jogged down to the water. I jumped in, and as I was standing in the water looking out over the Mediterranean, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around, and saw a smiling Arnaud in his red American Apparel shorts.
“Hi”
“Hello”
“Are you enjoying yourself?”
”Yeah. I’m still getting used to this,” I respond, meaning swimming.
Our conversation was a little fumbling, but not in an awkward way. We looked at each other and smiled. He floated around in the waves and we talked some more. He hadn’t checked the plans with his brother yet. We decided to catch up later.
“Where on the beach are you?” he asked. I pointed towards our spot near one of the edges. “We’re in the middle, just by the water,” he replied.
[Scene 3: same beach, later that afternoon]
The three popsicles were so cold that my left hand burned as I was walking across the beach, looking for a glimpse of red shorts and green eyes. I took two laps along the shoreline before finally capitulating to the thought that Arnaud and Pascal probably went to get lunch. One the many towel-marked but empty spots must be theirs. I noticed commotion a bit away. Two paramedics hurried past me towards the crowd that had gathered. I wondered what had happened, and thought that my presence wouldn’t make the situation better in any way. I walked back to David and Thomas and we ate the popsicles I had planned to give to Arnaud and Pascal.
[Scene 4: same beach, another while later]
I took another round to see if I could find Arnaud. This time, I did. He and Pascal were close to the shoreline. It was Pascal who saw me first as I came walking towards them. He nudged Arnaud, who sat up and smiled when he saw me. He scooted over on his towel a bit and gestured an invitation to sit down next to him.
The three of us talked for a bit, before Pascal tactically left us to go in the water. Arnaud and I lay close, talking. “Me and my brother are going to have dinner tonight, but he’s taking a nap at seven, and then we will have three hours together.”
“It’s perfect,” I replied and rested my hand on his bare shoulder. His skin was warm from the sun and coarse from the saltwater. He inched a little closer and put a hand on my leg. It was electric. We stopped talking and waited for the moment.
It wasn’t long until it occurred.
He tasted of salt and cigarrettes, but unlike his salt-coarse skin, his lips were smooth, soft, cooperative. The waves drowned out most of the noise around us, and we disappeared in eachother.
When we returned, Pascal laid sunbathing next to us. The bond between the two brothers was strong, and it was clear that this was their time together. I didn’t want to intrude. I said “I’ll see you at seven”, kissed Arnaud one last time and jogged down to the water to cool off.
[Scene 4: My room at Hotel Celimar, 9:40 p.m. that same night]
I looked at his silhouette in the balcony door, as he stood there and smoked a cigarrette. He looked at me with a smile and winked. That was one of the things that fascinated me; he darted like quicksilver between curious and reflecting man, and a mischievous boy. The sex had been like that too, in the blink of an eye it went from quiet tenderness to ravenous passion and back again.
I poured two more glasses from the wine bottle. It was still cool. We barely finished our first glass before neither of us could wait. This time, the salty flavor on his skin had been replaced with subtle sweetness. I don’t know if it was the spontaneity from of this whole encounter that made this so perfect, or knowing that our time together was short, but something had kindled a rare intimacy.
“Did you have a nightmare when you were sleeping?” I asked and explained, that while we were sleeping, I woke up from him restlessly turning on his back. He hadn’t made sound, but his breathing was fast and shallow, as if he had been running. I had put my arm around him and fallen back asleep.
“Oh, sorry,” he said. I was unsure what he was apologizing for. Instead of asking, I walked up to him and kissed him again.
We both had plans at 10. He with his brother, I with my friends. The three hours we got were almost up. We filled those last minutes with more making out, we finished the wine and outside my room we kissed one last time. As we walked out into the warm Sitges night, I realized I didn’t feel sorrow that it was over. I felt happy it had happened. This encounter left me with a feeling of expectation, the next adventure was always around the corner, because life would aways keep directing itself.
Three days in Sitges — a feel-good story in five parts
Part 5: Al Niente (epilogue)
[Score: “Everloving” by Moby]
Part 5 — Al Niente (epilogue). Scenario: a Thursday morning in July, on the mezzanine where the breakfast buffet is served, in a charming small hotel with twenty-five rooms, located at the Mediterranean coast.
Faithful to my habits this crazy week, I woke up a couple minutes before ten and went pretty much directly from bed, down to breakfast. The only things I took time for was putting on shorts, a t-shirt and splashing cold water in my face.
As I’m eating my breakfast, I see a sleep-drunk, beautiful man walking down the stairs from the rooms. He doesn’t see me. He carefully closes the gate behind him, avoiding to make any noise, walks out on the patio and lights a cigarrette. After he’s finished, he walks inside. His footsteps make no sound; he is barefoot.
He takes the stairs up to the mezzanine. We smile as our eyes meet. He walks up to me, kisses me and quietly says “Good morning”
We eat breakfast together. He shows that same caring streak, that same curious interest and mischievous, boyish charm I saw yesterday. We talk softly. It is as if all his senses are sensitive, not yet fully awake. When we’re done, we go out on the patio, where we continue our conversation while he smokes another cigarrette. We hold hands, pausing the conversation with intermittent kisses. The taste of cigarrettes on his lips is more intense. I don’t know if it’s because we’re on vacation, or because the smoking is the flaw that accentuates all the beauty in him, but I don’t mind the taste of cigarrettes at all.
“Well, Michael, I’m going back up…” he says and makes a motion to stand up.
“Dodo?” I ask. Yesterday, as we sat on the balcony while he finished his post-coital cigarrette, he taught me that that’s what kids in France say when they want to take a nap.
“No. I wish I could. I have to pack, we’re leaving”
One more kiss, and he disappears into the hotel.
I get my computer, order a cortado and sit down on the patio. I want to remember this experience. I want to take a Polaroid of it and keep it forever. The best way I know how, is to write. So I write.
The street is full of life, as usual this time of day. Tourists on their way to the beach, locals on social strolls. I’m in the middle of a sentence when I feel a hand on my shoulder. I turn my head just in time to see Arnaud lean over me. His suitcase is behind him, his brother is a bit away. This kiss tastes of cool, fresh mint.
“Thank you” we say simultaneously. I shake Pascal’s hand and kiss Arnaud one last time. I look after them as they walk away with their suitcases in tow. They turn around a corner and disappear.
I sit and sip my cortado. The computer is in my lap, but my thoughts are far away. They revolve around how beautiful life is if you’re open to it, if you trust it to direct itself. Around the rewards that can be yours if you dare to take the leap. I may lament this goodbye a few days from now, but right there, right then, I’m full of wonder. Wonder of how faint the sorrow that it’s over feels, compared to the bright, intense happiness that it happened.
See how different the story ends when you extends over a longer period? If you wish for the Youngstown story to never have happened, you also have to wish for the Sitges story to not exist. We may see our lives as a series of stories, but it’s really one single story that keeps unfolding for as long as we exist. It’s the greatest story ever told, because you are the hero in it.
If you don’t believe me yet, let’s extend the story eighteen years into the future.
Eighteen some years after that trip to Ohio, at thirty-four, you will meet an American guy (one that you, at twenty, would classify as way-out-of-your-league-hot, to me he’s regular hot) visiting Sweden for a few days. Yes, you are going to write about that too — inspired by your memory of Sitges. But it’s not only the writing that is inspired by the summer romance with Arnaud. The courage is inspired by it too. This is how you’ll meet your boyfriend, and my partner.
How I Met My Boyfriend — Episode 1: The one where it all began
Wednesday, August 3, shortly after midnight at Golden Hits in Stockholm:
“I’m going to kiss you“
“Where?“
“Right here”
We started talking fifteen minutes earlier; his name was Mike and he was visiting from the US.
I had noticed him earlier that evening. He was making his way up the stairs at Golden Hits when our eyes met. A slight smile gave his lips a nice curve. He looked like a young, more handsome Ed Harris, with a curious twinkle in his eyes and an open face. Later, as he stood in the bar a few meters away, I saw that he had very nice hands too. Our eyes met again, we both smiled and that was about where it was decided.
It was as if everything else became unimportant when we were kissing. My brain switched off and the next morning I was pleasantly surprised that I had invited him back to my place. This was the first time in almost ten years that I brought someone back with me after a night of (heavy) drinking. I was even more surprised that my hangover-induced angst wasn’t projected on him. On the contrary, his presence had a soothing effect on me. We ate breakfast and spent a couple hours in bed talking and making out.
–
Wednesday, August 3, shortly after 7 pm at Tunnelgatan, Hötorget
“I’m sorry that I was weird this morning. You kissing me in the subway threw me off. I’m not used to public displays of affection and got uncomfortable”.
–
Thursday, August 4, shortly after 9 am in my apartment:
“So do your friends and family know about you?“
“No”
He stood naked in my kitchen, washing the dishes after breakfast. I admired, and enjoyed, the scenery. He handled the bowls and glasses with a deliberate care. I noticed how good his legs looked. You could tell by the tan line that he had worn shorts that went halfway down his thigh. I walked up to him, put my arms around him and kissed his neck.
–
Thursday, August 4, 10:55 outside Kulturhuset:
“Brace yourself, there’s going to be a public display of affection. I’m going to kiss you.“
“Okay”
A couple seconds later:
“So, I guess this is it?“
“It’s not the last time we see each other“
“I hope so”
It didn’t take long to reset my brain for the first seminar of the day. Perhaps it was equal parts focus and escapism. It wasn’t until early evening, when lack of sleep and the tiredness after a day full of seminars at Pride House kicked in, that the sadness that he was gone hit me.
How I Met My Boyfriend — Episode 2: Where the summer romance ends
Thursday, August 4, outgoing message:
Hey Mike! My thoughts exactly. I wish you were here right now. About the onslaught of feelings: Sometimes I guess that we’re… aligned for lack of a better word. Aligned both in feelings and openness. When two people who both are aligned meet, and you add that awesome attraction, both mentally and physically, that’s when the stuff that good stories are made of happens.
—
Thursday, August 4, shortly after 9 PM, on my way to Bögjävlarna’s underwear party
There were many similarities between my movie-like summer romance with Arnaud, but this was different. Maybe it was the fact that we got more time together. Maybe it was because we met on my home turf. Maybe the attraction between me and Mike simply was stronger.
I was hoping the story would continue, but my rational side knew that it was over. What could we do? He lived in Cleveland, I lived in Stockholm. It’s not like you cross the Atlantic Ocean to visit a person you’ve seen for 35 hours. The first step one of us had to take to stop this story from fading as summer became fall, was simply too big.
On the other hand, what were the odds of us meeting? He was attending a wedding in Copenhagen, and took the opportunity to visit Stockholm for three days. I was at Golden Hits for the first time because they happened to have a pre-Pride party. He happened to pass by and saw the rainbow flag, which made him go inside.
I make a decision to be happy for what we had instead of grieving that it was over.
—
Sunday, August 7, incoming message:
“Just told my friends that I met a great guy in sweden. They were happy for me. The wedding was great. I’ve decided that I will be seeing you again, no maybes.”
He came out to his friends by telling them he had met me? This was bigger than big. Sometimes it’s not the length of the meeting that matters, it’s the intensity.
—
Monday, August 8, incoming message:
“Sitting in the airport and dreading the fact I am traveling so far away from you. In good news I got upgraded to first class.”
—
Wednesday, August 10, outgoing message:
“I have the tickets. Will be at Cleveland International on the evening of the 1st. I hope you’re not too tired today. Talk to you after you’re done with work!”
This was no longer a summer romance. It was more than that. The rational part of my brain was desperately screaming that this was emotional madness, but I didn’t care.
How I Met My Boyfriend — Episode 3: where the cheerleader starts to play
I’ve always considered myself a brave person, and I have acted bravely in many situations. No matter if it’s jumping out of an airplane, telling someone to put out a cigarette in the subway, or giving a lecture for 200 persons, I’ve rarely hesitated and almost never backed out. I’ve always preferred to do and participate instead of watching and theorizing.
It was very painful to realize that I, when it came to relationships, was the antithesis of my ideal self; I was the scared spectator. I confessed to Sofia, one of my best friends. “When it comes to relationships, not only have you been sitting on the bleachers. You’ve been reviewing the people playing, and you’ve been the cheerleader chanting ‘I told you so!’ when someone fell and got hurt”. It takes a good friend to say something you don’t want to hear, but need to. The anger and shame I felt when hearing that statement were a validation of it. I realized how often I’ve used logic and rationalization to control, explain and justify my lack of showing other emotions than anger or happiness
I pretended to be Spock in Star Trek when I really am that guy who wells up when the strings begin to play.
Suddenly, everything seemed so clear. I saw the pattern: that I never cried in front of other persons, that I didn’t tell the persons I love that I do, that it’s easier for me to have sex with people I don’t have emotions (other than lust) for.
No matter what happens between me and Mike, this is one of the best things I could have learned at the age of 34: it’s not logical, rational or a show of strength not to show emotions, or to control any show of emotions other than anger or happiness. It’s like always wearing a dark suit when you really want to wear a bright red t-shirt, because you’re afraid what others will think.
I’ve been trying to figure out why it’s so easy for me to accept and act on my feelings for Mike. One reason, perhaps the major one, is that there is no judgement between us. Another reason is that the language creates a distance, an airbag of sorts, which makes it easier for me to handle the feelings. A third is about our individual experiences — it’s as if our backgrounds made dents in us that the other smoothes out in the exact right places.
The cheerleader in me had reluctantly accepted that I had left the bleachers and wandered out on the playing field, but when I two weeks later changed my Facebook status to “in a relationship” he totally freaked.
“What are you? A fourteen year old emo? What will everyone else think? THIS IS BEYOND IRRATIONAL. IT’S MADNESS!”. As per usual, I was my own harshest judge. But I am out on the field, playing, and it feels way too good for me to quit and return to the bleachers. Sure, there are lots of people sitting there, reviewing my game. They judge and criticise me, ready to say ‘Told you so!”. I don’t mind. Either they’ll stay there, watching life instead of living it, or they’ll go out on the field and start playing — and then they will understand.
If you tell the story like this, it becomes a story of a seventeen-year old who follows his heart to Ohio, but fails. Eighteen years later, he follows his heart to Ohio again, and this time it ends well. But you can’t tell it like this if you never practice telling it at all, and so far you haven’t told anyone the real truth about why you went to Youngstown, Ohio at seventeen. With friends from high school who knew you both, you always implied that the reason you didn’t hang out more was because he was in the hospital. You won’t tell anyone else the true reason for that first trip for eighteen more years. This has taught me something about dealing (or rather, not dealing) with painful experiences. When an experience is too painful to deal with directly, you compress it much like a trash compactor does with garbage and store the bundle in the darkest crevices of your mind. But that doesn’t contain the pain and shame in those memories. Like toxic fumes they rise from them memories, morphing into a monster that festers and grows, tainting the memories even more, until it’s impossible to tell what is what. The more you avoid the monster, the more powerful it gets, making you want to avoid it even more. It’s a vicious downwards spiral that is so easy to get caught up in.
The only way I have found to deal with that monster is to tell the story, to yourself or to others, as much as you can at a time. In eighteen years, when you tell the story for the first time to one of your best friends, it’ll start loosening the powerful hold of the monster enough so that I can write the story down for the first time ever, in this letter. You know what the funny thing is? Opening that compartment of memories was like opening an ancient tomb. There had been a monster in it, but it had long since died and become mummified. It disintegrated into dust when I examined the crevice it was hidden in.
Now I can tell the story with this new, awesome ending. The part that tickles my brain, and I know it does yours too, is that in giving your story a new ending, mine got a new beginning that made it even better.
When you say “I love you”, you start with “I”, but you have to wait for the next word to know what “I” is doing. When you say “love”, you know that “I” “loves”, but you have to wait for the last word to know whether it’s pie or you. The present redefines the past. — Alan Watts
I’m phrasing this quote, which I know you would have appreciated, from memory. This part stuck with me from the first time I heard it, and now I know why.
Love,
Me
This is a semi-finished chapter of a book I’m writing called “Letters From The Person I Needed When I was Younger”. Once it’s finished — the planned release is in 2018 — it will be available as paperback, e-book and audiobook on Amazon. All chapters will be available for free here on Medium, and if you want to support my writing it (and support keeping it available for free) you can help me in any of these ways:
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