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brooding over what was to come. Ever affectionate, even when he was aching inside, his caring and the warmth of his embrace never failed to come through, his tenderness never faltering.
I worried when he would contemplate the nature of our world and our place in it. I was forced to see the pain that he was in. I knew and felt that pain, but I was too young to realize the path that he was on. Though his thinking was often severe, he was always gentle with me, warm and tender. He worried about what our future would become while I was delighted thinking about what our future could be. His feeling that he had been abandoned by everyone, even God, made him the most alone that he could ever be. I didn’t see it at the time and didn’t know what he may have intended. When he spoke of these things, there was nothing impatient in his manner, quite the opposite. The silence that followed should have been more worrisome to me. But looking back, it was as if it was perfectly understood, but it wasn’t.
It was times like this that I was truly troubled for him. I loved what I had found in him, in us. But I tried to reconcile his concerns, concerns which seemed to be above my maturity level, with the joy of having found him. I was young and innocent but with a bodily ache that drove me. It was times like this that I wanted to touch him, not with an outcome in mind but with an ache, to make him feel better; an ache which drove me to him and which he felt, too. When I put my arms around him and pressed my body to his, it was to satisfy my ache, but also to ease his pain. Pain that he was sometimes able to let go of while we were together. Just hold me, he would say. And I would, for as long as I was able.
We would embrace for a long time, our kind of physical contact, never seen in public, impermissible; the same touch that would elicit disapproval, scorn…hidden from the eyes of others. And it would upset him so. The need to remain a secret. Not for us, so much. But for all the others. It was times like this, when he would suppose the future, all the ease we had enjoyed