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Crosscurrents - 36. Epilogue
I stared off into forever.
The night was black. A full moon shone down upon the water.
The tide called to me with its hypnotic, incessant song, as I watched it kiss the shore and fall back, over and over and over.
"More Than Words" repeated itself endlessly on my boom box. Beth's boom box, actually. My sister's portable player was the only one I ever brought to this place. I thought about that first time and smiled.
The fire I'd lit flickered in my peripheral vision, and if I'd had company, they
he
might have asked me about the streaks that the fire illuminated. The ones running down my face from my eyes.
It was the song, really. The Extreme song, and the memories of first hearing it down here, and the memory of the awful year that had led up to that night on the beach.
A year I produced and directed to punish him for loving me enough to go where I was, even though it wasn't first nature to him.
But it wasn't only those memories. There were so many others, and I'd been soaking in them.
All week long, I'd lived him. I'd lived us. I'd traveled back in time.
Back to the Endless Summer.
Back to my earliest, scariest longings for him.
Back to our first days together, and on through time to the current ones.
I'd been us all over again, at all our ages. And with every memory, I looked at him intently. I listened to his words carefully.
And I loved him through all those memories as if I were living them for the first time.
And I felt him loving me. More clearly than I'd felt it the first time around.
Soaked in all that, I tried to make sense of the road that lay ahead of me.
The desperately rational part of me saw long odds, dim prospects, and no realistic way to guarantee that we had a future together that in any way resembled our present.
But life without him was unthinkable.
So why did I keep thinking of it? Why did I keep dreading it? Why did I keep assuming it as the default inevitable future?
I knew there had to be an answer for me. Some peace for me.
For us.
And I knew the answer lay in those memories.
Rich and inexhaustible, tenacious as Matt himself, the memories had accompanied me every hour I'd been here.
Branding me. Marking me.
And there on the shoreline, on the final night of my stay, a quiet understanding came to me as I gazed out into the Gulf of Mexico.
I'd walked into the condo at the beginning of the week prepared to load all my past with him into my mental museum. To remember with love...and then to release. To go back home and enjoy his love until our lives diverged, and then to let him go. For his sake. So he wouldn't have to figure out what to do with me as he moved into his future. A conventional future that had no room for me.
Over the five days that I'd relived my memories, though, I got a better look at him than I'd ever allowed myself before. The time didn't flash by. I could slow things down. Replay them. Live in them again.
And I discovered that my memories had pull. Even more surprising was that they had intention. They weren't interested in merely providing a mental playback of my life with Matt.
At first, I'd resisted the conclusion they'd been urging me toward. Not because I didn't like its contours or content.
No. It was because I wanted to be responsible, and loving, and to do the right thing, and I'd been stubbornly committed to believing that what he needed was a return to the conventional life. Pressuring him to carve out a space in his conventional life for me felt selfish and self-centered. I didn't want to keep dragging Matt back to me if and when life called him forward.
Called him away from me.
But as I stared out into the Gulf, the things he'd been saying to me over the last year rearranged and repeated themselves in just the right order and at just the right level for me to hear them.
As if for the first time. As if I'd never heard them before.
And when I listened...
I understood that preparing for us to drift apart wasn't necessarily an act of love. It was an act of self-protection.
And I understood that--just maybe--the highest love I could give him would involve summoning the courage to trust what he'd been telling me.
You are my fuckin' life, Andy. You've always been.
I played the words over and over in my head as the sound of the waves against the shore soothed the anxiety that was trying to rise up in me.
This week, this concentrated immersion in Matt and all he meant to me, brought me to a point of decision.
It was time to decide whether his words meant anything or whether I'd always think I knew better. Whether to soldier on in monster-slaying mode, or whether to risk getting hurt for the sake of trusting a promise that as yet had no shape.
A promise that was as essential to my life as it was to his.
I took a deep, cleansing breath of the salty air.
And then I went to that mental door, the one with his name on it, the one through which I'd been so frantically anticipating having to shove him and my memories of him.
It was standing open. And, oddly, given that I'd decided to make the place a museum, the room was still empty.
But it seemed like a different kind of empty. A waiting kind of empty.
I closed my eyes as the deepest aches and yearnings and hopes I lived with swirled to the surface of my consciousness.
And a conviction broke through the swirl.
There aren't any monsters under beds. There's only you, and the roads you walk, and the choices you make. And you are loved throughout all of them. And you are asked to love throughout all of them.
I don't know which part of me that internal voice was, or whether it was someone else, or whether it was just something convenient my subconscious tossed up.
But it was as clear as a bell, and it felt like some kind of final word.
I took another deep breath, and my mental eye looked up at the nameplate on The Door of that room.
This time, it read "Andy and Matt. Room Reserved For Part Two."
I opened my eyes. Nothing looked different.
But everything was.
I breathed in once again. Deeply. Gratefully. As I exhaled, years' worth of fog dissipated, and the diamond-hard clarity of the night brought this place home to me once again, giving me an opportunity to experience it--at last--with an unclouded mind and a heart free from crosscurrents and cross-purposes.
I grabbed handfuls of sand and put out my fire with them. Then I picked up my belongings and began walking back toward the condo.
It was time to go home.
THE END
I finished it, Sean. This is for you. It's always been for you.
--Adam
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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