Longing

Greek mythology mentions the fates that whisper to your conscience from the very back of our minds. They are the voices of the psychological trials and tribulations that humans walk every day of their lives, from happiness to grief and from love to love lost. I'm sure I heard them one day, and as legend foretold, their voices are powerful.

My breath left my body when I first saw this man walk into the break room. Amidst the half-hidden faces of living through a pandemic, his piercing eyes struck me first with their warm hazel brown and perfect almond shape. He was a bit awkward at first, with strange quirks in his socializing, but he had a voice of warm honey that inspired a desire to speak to him. We seemed to hit it off pretty quickly, and by midnight we had established pet names for each other.

Over the following weeks, we continued to talk, and finally, we were considered work friends. The conversations we have ranged from basic emotions to religion, human nature, psychology, and everything else in between. The exact moment when friendship evolved into idealized longing, I cannot say, but when the shift came, it was apparent. After seeing more of his wonderful personality and his intellectual mind, my feelings for him eventually deepened. It began to infect the beginnings of the friendly relationship we had barely started once we started seeing each other outside the workplace. We went to grab a few drinks at the local bars, and I came clean about what I was feeling for him. He understood what I had admitted and was honored that I felt this way about him. My attraction to him didn't make him uncomfortable in any way. If he was attracted to men, he could see us potentially developing something, but this would not come true. He is straight. So I made an effort to block that last statement from my mind. Even so, the reality of the situation came like bricks falling from the sky, and the sadness that followed was palpable.

While we walked into the next bar and took our seats at the counter, I ordered a couple of gimlets before everything around me melted away; I was stagnant in the middle of a landscape of barren trees, dead grass, and overcast skies. The distant thunder is a bittersweet death knell to the raging emotional storm that tore my chest to pieces—this infatuation would all be over one day. Maybe it will end soon, or perhaps it will be later, but the end will come.

He shook me back to awareness. The gimlet, half-empty, is sitting on the hardwood bar in front of me. He sat to my left on the barstool, his drink long gone, and asked if we were finished for the evening. I had wanted to say no, and go to another bar with him, but I knew he had other obligations. He accompanied me back to his apartment to give me a wonderful gift of a Celtic tree printed on metal as a housewarming gift for my new apartment. I spied a small note on the counter written in elegant script, complete with a lipstick kiss and the woman's name. He had told me about this woman he had been seeing, and try as I might, I could not get the image of that note out of my head, and I left that night thankful but laden with melancholy. Once I got home, I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to make sense of the swirling emotions in my head, and found only more confusion as my mind raced to and fro. Waylaid by the gratefulness of his presence in my life as a friend with whom I can delve the deepest depths of mortal passions, and on the other hand, the desire to completely intertwine my being in his. To memorize his body, to explore his mind, and to make myself completely and utterly vulnerable to him. To drown in the black velvet of a shared emotional world of kindred souls and share ourselves completely.

Alas, here I sit in the reality of my life. He has his sights on a woman, and I will sit back to watch him share himself with her. The emotional fracture is laying bare my duality; I will be happy because I want happiness for him, even if it is not with me. That feeling will always be with me until it is barely a whisper with time. I can not make him feel what he doesn't, and so I retreat to the innermost part of myself to wait for the sweet relief of time.

The three voices compel me to reach out, to do something, anything to get an ounce of time from him. I see them when I close my eyes, and they bare my face like some twisted mask. I can't give in to this impulse because he knows about my feelings, and he'll see my desperate antics a mile away. I need to leave him alone. I need to let these feelings go, but they fight me at every turn.

I am back at the hardwood countertop of the bar; I croon to myself along with the music. The stool to my left is empty now. A dry martini sits before me, the skewered olive gently bobbing in its medicinal bath. I feel the squeezing in my chest, my breath leaving my body in short bursts, and the cold sting of tears blocking out the din around me.

I raise my glass to him and drink the medicine; it's dry fire creeping down my throat. My mind drifts away from him, the voices of the fates fade, and maybe the longing will go with it.