He did that head thing and gave me such a look when I accidentally used the word boyfriend at the table in front of his mom.
I kept the Marilyn Monroe tshirt he gave me for years, and while it slowly deteriorated from use and time that hole in the front was always there. We were smoking his sisters pot, good pot, and he'd rolled a good size joint. We were both done before the joint was too far gone but kept insisting on passing it till I couldn't hold it. I tried not to take it, but he was insistent as only a pothead can be. I dropped it, and before I realized it had started to burn my stomach through the hole it had already burned in the shirt.
I've been listening to random mashups over at the YouTube, and I came across this song, and it's put me in a sort of retrospective mood.
Both these songs meant something to me then, the Nirvana song because of the time and my place in it and the Dead or Alive song because he loved it and played it and found a seven inch copy of it one day when we were hanging out. The song always reminds me of him.
He shared the same name as another guy I'd kind of been hanging out with. We'll call them C1 and C2, C1 being the one mentioned above.
C1 was younger but had obviously figured out he was gay much earlier in his life than I or C2. We were fumbling along trying to figure stuff out while C1 rolled his eyes that we still didn't know. I never really was able to deal with either of them in an intelligent way because I just didn't know how at the time, and before I was ever able to make sense of it I was gone.
I got a chance to leave Atlanta and took it. Charlotte was far enough away so that I could be myself, or so I thought. And it was a number of quite random happenings that even opened the door for me to take the sudden flight to NC in that maroon Volkswagen that day.
Thinking back now it's almost as though I had competing sides, the long term punk rock me that was into something not unlike the personal punk rock nihilism I'd grown to think was cool versus the wanting so to emerge me that was gay and just wanted to be. He didn't see much sunlight for a long fucking time.
But what if I'd stayed?
See? it just don't bear worrying about.
