Blue Is The Warmest Color

 I miss the feeling of newness. I can't remember exactly when I stopped feeling butterflies when I found something or someone new. It happened without my awareness and one day I started to realize that nothing brings me any kind of joy or excitement anymore. There is still some lingering anticipation that I blame heavily on my anxiety, but, for the most part, the thrill has long been gone. Which is kind of sad when I think about it. All those times when I would get caught up in a feeling and float around on an endorphin high, thinking about what ever it is/was that was rocking my clock. Sometimes I get jazzed about cooking or listening to new music, but nothing has really been able to replace the feeling I used to get from absolute joy. It breaks my heart.

I remember how I used to feel whenever Jay was in my orbit. The first time he walked into my life, with his goofy grin, pearly white straight teeth, and overflowing machismo, lord help me, I overdosed off of the pheromones' that he was releasing. Being with him was intoxicating as much as being with him was toxic. He said and did a lot of things that had many different meanings. He wanted to make sure that he pleased everyone in his life, so that they would love him unconditionally, but he was loose with his words and was hardly ever held accountable for his actions. That's what happens with beautiful people. We always overlook their flaws and bad behaviors because being in their presence is rewarding and self-defeating. There is a little madness that comes along with it as well I suppose. I fixated on Jay the moment he said hello to me. His deep voice echoed in my ears. His bravado and sexual prowess was fuel to many, many fantasies that I had back in the day. Jay was the kind of man that everyone wanted something from, if not only for the privilege's of being his arm candy and object of desire.

Jay had a certain type. Which always threw me for a loop, because I was not that type. We had chemistry. There was electricity between us. Had I not been with someone the moment that Jay and I met, then he would have most definitely have been my first boyfriend. I wanted to experience everything with him. I wanted the family portraits, the holiday get togethers, the commitment and eventual marriage ceremony. I wanted him to be my best friend forever. Jay, on the other hand, had a wandering eye and couldn't really make up his mind what he wanted. He made a lot of promises to a lot of people, men and women alike. When something didn't go his way, he saw it as an act of betrayal and held people accountable for it. We had a do as I say, not as I do situationship for many years before I met someone who would change my mind about what I was looking for in a man. Jay's heart was always in the right place. His dick, on the other hand, had a mind of its own.

Jason used to ask me not to tell him about the things that other men did with me. He didn't want to know that the pleasure I enjoyed from time to time came during his absence in my life. Sometimes it would be months that he and I would go without talking. Sometimes, it was the right amount of time, between this guy and that guy, that I saw Jay for the who he actually was. He was hopelessly flawed and terribly insecure about who he is/was as a gay man in society. He wanted his parents approval to be the gay man that he was. He wanted absolute devotion from the men that he dated/slept with. He even wanted a few women to believe that, in certain circumstance, he could be the husband/baby Daddy that they were searching for. He also had anxiety. This was not something that I fully understood back then. He was fearful of things around him. He could smell things and hear people when there was nothing and no one around. When we were out in public, if someone caught his eye as we meandered through the public, if the look was hostile, Jay would bark. He was like a dog in that aspect. Bark, bark, bark. I blame the Marines for that behavior. 

There are times when I think about Jay and I wonder what it was about me that he found interesting. I wonder if he really felt anything for me. When Steven and I were at the end of our relationship, Jay was the one who I turned to for guidance. All it took for Jay to say was "leave him, come back home to me, you love me, I love you, be done with it" and if I hadn't been so emotionally confused I would have gone back to him. Everything about Jason filled my heart with joy and pain, but hearing him say that he loved me caused both of those feelings to hit me all at once. What was it about kissing him that made me feel alive? Why, when we were alone together, did innocent touching of fingers feel like an eruption of exuberance. I admit, for me at first, it was his masculinity and muscles that peaked my lustful behavior.  While both of those things remained a dominant fixture in my attraction to him, other things about him made me smile. The way he would over-sing a song used to make me laugh. When he would get a new car, he would drive it fast like he just discovered speed. He wasn't a sports guy or a movie nut, but he had an old school charm to him that made anyone want to be in his company. He wasn't annoying. He wasn't clingy. He was Jay, take him or leave him, and he was a protector. He would do anything for those that he cared about. 

We spent many years reliving the Chris and Jay show. I am pretty sure that the cast of characters, Jay included, were all in my head. I remember periods of time when I didn't hear from Jason. Before the invention of cell phones, we all relied on landlines and pagers to get messages to one another. Even as online chat rooms started to become popular, it was hard to keep in touch if you didn't have a computer. The internet created a slew of other problems and hurdles between me and Jay. He would spend his days off in chatrooms, looking for little twink Mexican men (his ideal type) and he would spend hours getting to know the "person on the other side". He couldn't keep his stories straight about what he wanted out of life. It always changed depending on how it affected his dick. I would leave our apartment in the mornings, feeling good and wanted, by the time I got home, his vision of me and our lives together would have changed again. We promised each other we would go to California and spend our days living our lives to the fullest as the gay men we were. California only ever happened in weekend trips where we would get lost in one another from one hotel room to another. If he had lived until we got older, I am sure there would have been a more perfect storybook ending to it all. Instead, he died young and beautiful, clinging on to everything that made him a beautiful disaster. I missed his funeral and hated that I wasn't with him in his last hours to hold him as he slept. However, he died peacefully in his sleep and if I had been there, I would have suffered a deeper trauma than the one that I suffer just knowing he passed. I miss how his lips felt on mine. 

It's been 16 years since Jason passed. I carry his picture with me and look at it occasionally when I need to be reminded of the butterflies he gave me. It's a hard story to tell when I think about the things that never happened, that should have happened when we were younger. The matured part of my brain would have approached his behavior differently. I would have known how to fight better with him. I wouldn't have felt so controlled by him. I would have made sure that I took the first steps and made the bold gestures instead of waiting for him to be my white knight. Because, even though he wouldn't admit it, Jason wanted to be rescued by his own white knight. Even though he was "the man in the relationship", he was very vulnerable and defeated when it came to his emotional well being. We spent many nights, in the dark, talking about how we felt and how we felt toward one another. We talked until we eventually passed out from exhaustion. It was a challenging time. I am sure that I would have taken him in my arms, like I had many times before, and whispered in his ear, like I had many times before, and said "breathe Bubba, it's okay, and I love you and I always will, just breathe." I couldn't save him. I don't know why I still think that I could.