Letters To Jon - 1. A Letter To John

Jon,

I'm quite sure you will never read this letter. I'm writing it barely 10 feet from you as I sit at this little desk in the hotel room and you sit over on one of the beds next to Adam, one of your teammates; but you might as well be a thousand miles away. Maybe the space between us would be better measured in years. Maybe you just don't feel any connection to me at all, I honestly can't tell.

I'm a mess, though I hide it well from you and the rest of the guys. I'm broken, like an old pendulum clock might be, with my cogs or sprockets rusted or fallen out leaving loneliness, emotional exhaustion, and a rather pathetic feeling of purposelessness inside this shell. The only thing that fills that void at all these days is the weekend days I spend out with all of you - and you in particular - but that's never a fix as it always ends too soon and I realize I wasn't fixed so much as temporarily numbed.

Right now you're engrossed by some television show about big snakes, which means I can look at you openly for a few moments without you looking back, catching me in the act of staring. I can't see them as well from this distance but I still love to look into those eyes of yours, brown inside around the pupils but blending to a beautiful earthy green around the edges. Your face is classic "cute boy", narrow with an angular chin but soft in all the right spots. Your blond hair is shaggy and getting long - I bet your mom think you need a haircut - but I think it's just right. I need to stop looking at you now. I've risked it too long already.

I don't know if you're into girls, or guys, or both. I would never ask - it wouldn't be my place if we were simply friends and with the relationship you and I have, it would be downright inappropriate. But you're soft-spoken, sweet, kind, and without a trace of macho demeanor, so I like to dream that just maybe you fall into my side of the attraction spectrum. I've seen you blush in a nervous but adorable way when someone asked you about having a girlfriend...does that mean you're embarrassed about the topic? Could that mean you're gay? Or maybe you have no experience with girls yet...it's not unheard of for a guy to be in college, and still be a virgin. Whatever the situation, I suppose I'm better off not knowing, either to avoid being impaled on the spear of disappointment or so I don't gather some ridiculous hope that you might be interested in me.

Because, truth be told, you seem to have little use for me at all. I don't mean that as a rebuke, and I'm sorry if it sounded bitter; I just mean that when we first met, we seemed to interact more and now, you hardly make eye contact with me at all, never mind starting a conversation. I know you're shy. I know I'm nearly a dozen years older. I know that's plenty reason enough for you not to have much to say to me. It still hurts, though, because I look at you and see the physical beauty that first caught my eye, and the spiritual glow that I glimpsed as I got to know you more. I would love to know even more - to sit and talk about anything, everything, music or biking or needlepoint for all I care. But that's not going to happen, I think.

You're laughing at something on the television now, and your smile lights up the room, or maybe it’s your eyes. Or the raspy-deep sound of your chuckle, a sound nobody would expect out of that slender frame of yours. That's a sound I want to hear when I talk to you; but for now I have to settle for hearing it on the sidelines as your friends or that stupid glowing electric box strike you funny.

So as I said, you'll never read this. I'd like to think you'd take news of my sexuality in stride and perhaps even accept my attraction to you as flattering and not too disturbing, but if I want to keep my job, nobody in the group can ever know; not that I'd be fired, but I think the trust would be broken and the vibe would turn decidedly awkward. I was hoping that writing this letter out would help me purge some of the feelings I have and make it easier to cope, but I think putting it all down on paper has just put a finer point on it all, exposed all of the thoughts that were milling about my head and essentially given me a laundry list of all the ways that I am a sad, obsessed little boy in an old man's body.

I'm going to end this here as I take one last glance over at you, drink in the vision of youthful manhood that you embody, and then suppress and compartmentalize all of these feelings one more time.

I love you, man, even though you'll never, ever know it.

-J

P.S. - I was going to change your name in this letter, just in case it was ever found by someone, but I couldn't come up with any other name that felt right on my tongue while thinking of you; I had to leave it alone.