In the Broadway play “Passing Strange,” the narrator Stew says, “You know how one morning you wake up as an adult and you realize your entire life is based on a decision you made as a teenager?” If that description applies to you, Cancerian, 2009 will be the best year ever to do something about it. In the coming months, you will have the power to correct errors or misjudgments you made way back when. You’ll be able to figure out how to start over in an area of your life that you’ve always assumed you were doomed to accept just the way it is. You may even find that you can, in a sense, change the past and reconfigure your memories.
—Cancer Horoscope for week of 18 December 2008, Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology
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DEPARTURE
“Atherton? Did you hear me?”
I started just far enough out of my reverie to realize that my boyfriend, Gavin, was asking me a question, but did not turn to look at him as I nearly croaked, “No. I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”
His hand on my left shoulder. Further realization that I was leaning far forward in my airplane seat, neck craned into the window’s porthole, eyes fixed on that which was growing ever smaller beneath the roar of the jet’s engines: LaGuardia Airport. Queens. Brooklyn. The East River. Manhattan. The Hudson River.
New York City.
“I asked you if you were all right,” Gavin apparently repeated.
My gaze never wavered, now trained on the towers of the World Trade Center, slowly receding from my view. “Aren’t you going to…to miss it?” I whispered into the window’s surface. Both hands clutching my seat’s right arm rest. Knuckles white.
I felt him remove his hand from my shoulder. Heard his familiar derisive chuckle.
“It’s just a city, Atherton.”
“Just a city…” I repeated, as tears began to stream, unchecked, down both of my cheeks, and the towers of the World Trade Center vanished behind a line of thick morning clouds.
It was at that moment that I began to hate my boyfriend Gavin.
THE ART OF COMPROMISE?
Gavin and I had been together nearly four years when we flew out of LaGuardia Airport together on that final flight in the summer of 1998. We had become a couple during his freshman and my junior year of undergraduate college in Westchester County, and had been nearly inseparable ever since that first evening (The Coming Out Dance, 16 October 1994, me rolling high on ecstasy, determined to capture his smile and his light for myself). A veritable Campus Institution, Gavin and I became well-known party promoters, DJs, and academics: the friendly Latino and the bitchy blond gay boys whose first initials matched those of an Italian fashion designer, and whose combined knowledge of comparative literature and philosophy spanned ten genres, 27 countries, and five continents. We were hot. We were hip. We were happy.
We also had a deal.
The deal was this: following my graduation in the spring of 1996, we would move into Manhattan, and I would take a job to support us while he finished college and I took a year off from academia to prepare for entering a doctorate program in comparative literature. Once Gavin graduated in the spring of 1998, the roles were to be reversed: I was to quit my job to focus solely on what I was confident would be a program at Columbia or Yale, while Gavin was to enter his oft-romanticized industry choice of public relations and provide for us until I acquired my Ph.D. and a tenured faculty position at our alma mater.
Except it didn’t happen that way.
I fulfilled my part of the agreement, working in the book and magazine publishing industry for two years while studying for my general and literature subject GREs in whatever spare time I had, until Gavin graduated. But when Gavin graduated, he decided that he had had enough of New York. New York was “too hard,” he said, “too expensive,” he whined, and “just not fun anymore,” he cried. So when his graduation arrived in the spring of 1998, my dreams of a life in New York, of a career in academia, of being constantly surrounded by all of my friends and family in the city, were darkened by a single decision on Gavin’s part: that after his graduation, he was moving back to his home to be with his family. In Denver.
It suddenly became painfully clear to me that the art of compromise does not always work both ways; that, as time goes by, as people and as relationships and as lives change, so does any prearranged agreement or compromise. And that, in my case, I would be the only one making any sort of compromise. Of course, it was my decision. I could have chosen to remain in New York by myself, to break up with Gavin then and be done with him, to move on with my own life, onward and upward, etc. It was not as if Gavin was particularly begging me to accompany him back to Denver. But after a month in Denver with him and still another month in Chicago with my mother, during which I nearly left Gavin, I chose him over my life. And followed him to Honolulu.
And to a life together that would continue to be all about compromise: mine.
And even though I was following him, even though I knew that there was no one to blame for the decisions I was making but myself, I grew to hate Gavin ever more.
THE RUSE OF SACRIFICE
I loved Honolulu for the first two weeks of my time here, lounging poolside at Gavin’s sister’s palatial Kahala home, dining at the finest restaurants, inserting myself, with Gavin, into the gay nightlife scene, and looking for jobs in what was at that time in the autumn of 1998 one of Hawaii’s worst economic periods. Eventually we found jobs that we enjoyed (or, if not enjoyed, then at least tolerated due to their impressive compensations); in time we moved into our own one-bedroom condo at the 2333; and finally, Gavin and I settled into a safe, predictable Honolulu…routine. We furnished our condo. We forged small and intimate circles of academic and gay friends. We threw parties not dissimilar to those we used to throw together during college, trading the DJ tables and the plastic beer cups for MP3s on the iMac and canapés and martini glasses. We were…happy.
Yet New York never left me. And although my new career of graphic design was a constant source of inspiration for me, the spectre of my lost academic career never left me, either. Gavin and I took vacations, which despite my suggestions of returning to visit our old college friends in New York, always seemed to be his choice: the wedding of his childhood friend…in Denver; Madonna’s “Drowned World” concert tour…in Washington, DC; always, forever, some place other than New York, until I wondered if I would ever again see the runways of a New York City airport rushing up to greet me.
The events in New York on 11 September 2001 symbolically marked the beginning of a downward spiral in my relationship with Gavin. We began openly flirting with other men, both online and in real life, in front of each other. We stopped having sex. We reached the point at which it seemed as if we were nothing more than roommates who shared finances and the occasional conversation, both doing all he could to spend as little time as possible with the other: Gavin working in his office until ten or eleven in the evenings, and me crawling into my Internet world with two bottles of wine for hours every evening. I began to consciously resent Gavin, to resent him as the cause of my presence in this Hawaii that I now loathed because of him, and to hate him as much as I had hated anyone in my life.
Because sometimes it’s difficult to know when one has crossed over from the land of compromise…and into the more dangerous land of sacrifice. But when one realizes that one has done just that, it is far easier for one to jump, either consciously or subconsciously, from accepting responsibility for one’s own decisions…to blaming someone else for them.
Four weeks following our break-up conversation in the spring of 2003, which I had initiated, we crossed the threshold of the condo that we had shared for the past four years for one final time. It had been an amicable split, for the most part, with very little emotion displayed by either party. Until the moment at which I turned around in the hallway and pulled the door shut with a decidedly firm thud. I slid the key into the deadbolt, and stopped when I heard Gavin whisper hoarsely behind me.
“Don’t you want to say anything?” he asked.
I turned to him, smiling, my left eyebrow arched. “Whatever shall I say? About what?”
“About us,” he nearly croaked, tears already making their way surely down his cheeks, “about all of this. It’s ending. We’re ending. About our apartment. About this place that we’ve shared for the last four years.”
I turned my head back down to stare at my hand on the key in the deadbolt, too-long blond curls falling into my face and obscuring the metamorphosis of my lips from wide smile to cruel grin. And all I could hear were his derisive chuckle, his dismissive words, of years before, spoken about my city.
So I repeated them to him.
“It’s just an apartment, Gavin.”
I heard his sharp, shocked, pained intake of breath behind me, flipped the deadbolt locked, removed the key, and turned to strut purposefully down the hallway without looking back, leaving him to remove the knife that I had just stabbed so firmly into his side by himself.
And suddenly…I did not hate Gavin anymore.
ARRIVAL
It’s been five years since Gavin and I broke up. After an initial period of attempting to be friends, Gavin chose to cease all further communication with me, save for recent indirect communication in the form of juvenile games played on the field of Facebook that are more suitable to a boy of 12 than to a man of 32. There have been many men for each of us since our separation, our lives have grown and matured, and I have even heard whispers of his own return to the mainland this week…back, once again, to Denver. I do not hate Gavin anymore. I no longer resent him, nor blame him for the decisions that I made to leave New York, to come to Honolulu, because they were ultimately my own to make. And because they all, ultimately, good or bad, taught me about love, about life, and about myself.
I thought about Gavin a lot this afternoon, following the final booking of my own flight back home, to New York, exactly one week from today. If he did not bring me here, to this place, then he certainly exerted enough of an influence on me that he inspired my decision to come here. But I have only myself to thank for the decision to return, ten years hence, to the city I left for him. I will not be returning to the same city, nor to the same life. Those twin towers I watched vanish behind our plane ten years ago are gone forever, as much a figment of memory as my once cherished dream of a career in academia. But I have no interest in returning to that same city of my past, no interest in pretending that the preceding ten years never happened, and picking up where I left off. I do not want to change the past, nor do I want to reconfigure memories.
I do not want to be the boy I was supposed to be.
I want to explore the man I am, through the eyes, through the experiences, and through the lessons that the last ten years in Honolulu have given me.
Since moving to Honolulu I have often been asked, “What on earth brought you to Honolulu from New York City?” I usually answered with the vague nutshelled version, “I moved here for a boy.” I suppose I wrote this today in order to record the more complete story. For it is within this story that the rather simple answer to the other question I have been asked of late, “Why on earth would you want to leave Paradise to move back to New York City?” lies: because it is where I belong.
It is home.
And this is what I will be remembering, seven days from today and ten years from yesterday, when I once again see the runways of a New York City airport rushing up to greet me.
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