There's this vintage photo posted on Reddit the other day. Shows two guys in lifeguard shirts, seemingly from Coney Island or somewhere similar, and the back has a note dated 1949 that is pretty definitively a love note.
You see things like it pop up all the time: little things from the past that seem to float the message, "yes, there was love, even when it wasn't obvious"...
I keep looking at it over the last few days. Not because the guys are cute - I mean, they are - but because of what it signifies. And because I know it's something I won't have.
That's not to say I haven't been there. I've had moments in the past that are snapshots in my mind. A face laying in my lap in a back seat as streetlights flash by. Walking down the boulevard holding hands during Pride weekend. Hearing a song come on the jukebox, and turning to see him smiling as he comes up the stairs towards me.
But the truth, the real honest truth, is that I haven't had anything even remotely in the same class in 20 years, almost half my life. And given where I am, what I'm doing, and the specifics of my life, I'm not likely to have it again any time in the near future. There's a certain kind of attitude and approach, a certain kind of no-strings, just-enjoy-the-moment that is the core of how I approach romance but seems completely alien to anyone over 30. Maybe that means I'm childish; it's not unreasonable. Maybe it means the rest of the world is just too serious. Maybe it's just that I haven't looked in the right places or hung out with the right people.
It's just a momentary bit of loneliness. It doesn't hit often. Maybe it's being magnified by this whole quarantine, though to be honest my life hasn't changed all that much since the quarantine started. I'm not going to give up my longer-term goals or change much of how I'm doing things at the moment.
It'd just be nice, you know?
1 comments:
It's not the point of your post, but the love note from Tommy to Buzz fascinates me. What happened during the times they spent together?Why did he write it when he did, not at the end of the summer? Was one of them going to go to college? Had Buzz become engaged? Was the love uneven and it took Tommy nine months to work up the nerve to write? It looks as if he added "All my" and "Your" after he had written the rest of the note. Buzz kept it.
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