The Daily Write: Photo #4 (June 4, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Photo #4

The two of us were like peas in a pod, well, except for our obvious differences. He was a tall drink of water with red hair and gold rimmed wire glasses, older than me and far more experienced. I was a short, portly over-eager sophomore. He was erudite, I was excitable. He wore a Palestinian black and white scarf with short fringe around his neck and tucked into the collar of his sophisticated and very grown up trench coat. I rarely wore a jacket, even when it was freezing and wet outside. He scowled, listened to Maria Callas and laughed sardonically. I guffawed, liked The Cure because I wanted to be as cool as the punk rockers in B Dorm, and had to make myself seem smarter than I felt in order to match his wit and intellect. He walked with a long stride so fast and sure I could never keep up.

We met in drama class and fell in love the way awkward friends do, deeply and immediately. He was a college version of my teenage friend Joel, only instead of listening to Manhattan Transfer harmonize in doo-wop, or Carly Simon croon as she lay draped across a baby grand like I had with my earlier unrequited lover, he schooled me in opera, told me about his life as an outcast and intellectual, and made me feel that being a lesbian was the most important thing I could do.

 
He became my fast confidant and sexuality cheerleader, encouraging me to be myself, come out, and eventually co-coordinate the Lesbian/Gay Resource Center on campus. We were a match made in heaven. Except that fall, when we started working as student coordinators together, he became good friends with Phillip, a gaunt man getting thinner by the day with some unnamed disease that, although not acknowledged, was frightening enough to carry an unspoken stigma. Phillip didn't like me, didn't have time for  my new found lesbian feminist reactionary foolishness and was smarter than most of his friends, except our shared and adored mutual best friend.
 

I was, in fact, a product of the 80s, focused on my female strength and unsure where to pledge my allegiance during a time when "gay cancer" was more of a rumor than a known fact, at least to us college students out there in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. I didn't understand the nuances of a not-old man, ravaged by a disease during an era when the president wouldn't utter the words, let alone help the dying. I was wrapped up in my own oppression and budding sexual awakening, quick to respond, slow to understand the horrible complexities of a time that would bring my gay boyfriends to their knees and then graves.

My friend and I eventually had a falling out from which we never recovered. It involved Phillip, a woman he worked with, a joke "defacement" of her photo  and my inability to understand the nuances and take sides. He thought me stupid; I thought him arrogant. He thought me reactionary; I thought him sexist. He thought me myopic; I thought him elitist. By the time I understood what had happened, years had past, the gay community had been ravaged, and our relationship had been ruined.

He lived; we died.