Men I've Known

You were handsome, and nothing like me.

After meeting you one night when I was out with someone who barely passed as an excuse for a friend, I later spotted you drinking alone in what would become our hangout, your place of work, and in the end, the place I ran screaming from – but not because of you.
You, who when asked to share something interesting said, “Well, I’m bisexual” whilst gripping your pint as we played pool in the empty, secluded upstairs of the pub.

And then that night, after the pub shut, you came back with me. Sharing secrets, comparing notes and laughing over nothing, you lied to me and were caught out. I don’t recall what the lie was about but, for a long time afterwards, I had trouble forgetting that it had happened. During our friendship it loomed over me, seeming to warn me that I couldn’t trust you, which of course I could.

Months later you told me, when pressed as to your motives, that you had been uncomfortable, distracted and not thinking straight. More than that, you said that you’d never been as turned on as you had been that night with me where nothing happened (that nothing that continued to happen for the rest of our relationship) but you thought it might.

I loved you and your easy way with the world. I loved your honesty, which regrettably I always questioned. I don’t think you were the brightest, and there was plenty of stuff that escaped your interest, but you were never dull. There was a great stillness to you. You seemed to be secure in yourself, which of course you weren’t, but this appearance sprang from the fact that you valued a simple, uncomplicated life, someething I would only years later come to understand. Being in a relationship mattered to you a lot too, as did our friendship, to both of us. We had nothing in common, but we shared it anyway.

There’s a part of me that regrets that we never made it further than friends, but I know it would’ve destroyed our friendship, however, since I haven’t seen or heard from you in years, I wonder how much that matters now. It could’ve happened that first night but like the other encounters I’ve had, it’s kind of terrifying hitting on an ostensibly straight man. Of course later, I found out that not only would you have reciprocated, but that it was our only chance, as the more we got to know each other, the less simple it became; the idea of us having sex was clouded over with baggage and a darkness that then would’ve overpowered me.

I miss you, and since I left you’ve been in the back of my mind, haunting it with your smile and your patter. On my most recent trip back, the previously mentioned not-friend told me that you now lived above the Chinese take-away. After I left for good, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t remember your surname or the name of your road, so I couldn’t google you. Of course, there was a part of me that didn’t want to, still sore over certain things and your memory was still tangled up with the dump we lived in, but most of me wanted to find you, and now armed with the information that had my unfriend had casually dropped into the conversation, I was agog that I had already passed your flat on the drive to the chipper. You were hiding in plain sight again, much like we had from the world back then. We worked and paid our taxes but didn’t care for it. We were younger then, and life was about those moments without grown-up restraints or responsibilities, without college, without the weight of expectation, without the future. We craved and shared most of our spare time together; us being the bubble twins who had no need for those around us, our friendship sustaining us. All that time, and the day that I find this out, that I’m actually there, I don’t even have a spare hour – it being an impossibly short visit where the following day, I was gone. On my next trip over, I’m going to camp outside your door. I’m going to take a photograph to replace the blur of you in my head. I want to hear all of your news. I want to hug you, and more than anything, much more important than any ephemeral sex, I want you to know that I loved you, and that you were my friend.

And that I know that it was because of our friendship that you never showed up to say goodbye to me. It wasn’t that you didn’t care, the opposite in fact, it was that I don’t you knew how to part. For so long, it was just me and you, and you found it hard to make friends. I knew you didn’t say goodbye because it would’ve meant admitting to yourself that your only real friend was going and never coming back. I hope that’s not true. I hope you have great friends, and a girlfriend (or a boyfriend – which is something I can’t quite imagine for you, but who knows) who loves you, and a better life.

Finally, I remember the day when I hugged you; not a greeting hug, but a proper hug, where the idea was just to be in contact with, to hold and to be held by someone else. Terrified by men, and having previously been lost in the bosomy embrace of girlfriends, you were truly shocked when we hugged and it felt good; your brain left momentarily unable to process. It was like a hug from a woman you said, careful to point out that you weren’t calling me a woman, but that you were amazed that hugs from a man could be “feminine”, and by feminine, you meant safe.

There’s a part of me still in that hug; a younger, less confident part, lost in exile and struggling through. You felt safe, whereas I felt loved, maybe not on a conscious level since back then I’m sure I was still equating love with sex. A whole period of me, an era, that I am no longer, that I’ve moved on from, has been immortalised in that hug, as have you, and my memory of you. My closeness to you.

You were handsome, and nothing like me. I hope you still are.

The first time I met you, I was carrying a knife, which isn’t something I’d done before (or have done since), but I was the epitome of a nervous nelly back then, worried as I was that my end would come in the undoubtedly seedy world of internet dating, or more specifically, meeting people off the internet, of which you were the first.

I don’t remember that much about you. You liked me fine, and I liked you back, but I think your heart was a bit bruised from someone who came before me. You weren’t knock-down attractive, but you were nice, and that was something I sorely needed at the time; living, as I was, in a country of unforgeable connections.

I don’t remember why we stopped seeing each other, or even what the sex was like. I remember you driving me round a neighbouring town in the dark; this was the first time we’d met, a get-to-know-you cruise around a dead-end village.

What sticks out about you was the story of your landlords; a gay couple, one half of whom was cheating on the other. There was drama, and intrigue, and lots of near-misses, which you recounted somewhat vicariously. I didn’t tell you at the time, but I had been propositioned by one of them a week before, which I was glad I had turned down, considering your place was annexed through theirs; a granny flat across a small patio from the kitchen, a room that was all bed, with a small television, a small fridge and full-length, heavy curtains; your house may have been on their grounds, but you weren’t. Despite all this, you liked it there.

The knife was a kitchen knife; a butter knife. I had put it in my shoe, just in case you were the psycho-killer that the world wants you to believe is hiding around every corner, but you weren’t. I wish I could remember more about you.

Four long, terrible books later and I had run out of things to do on the first family holiday I had been on since I was a kid. So, thinking back to those days, I went exploring.

The best time to do this is at night when there’s no one to distract you so, at 3.30am, I crept out of the apartment down to the nearby beach. The town was strange; as industrial as Dublin, or London, except warmer. It looked normal until we turned off the bland motorway, where we were treated to a beach area from out of nowhere, a perfect sandy cove.

3.30am is the time when the fisherman finish setting up their lines and sitting on the empty beach, all I could see were lines and lines of fishing rods; their bases lodged in the sand, their bait in the sea. It was beautiful; the rods were huge, a good ten feet high, and they were luminous, so all along the beach, every few feet was a thin green stick pointing at the black abyss of the sea.

3.30am and I’m staring into this abyss and I’m calm. I’m an adult; there’s nothing scary here. I stare into it and feel like I could be consumed at any moment, but I know that there’s nothing to be frightened of. I wish you were here with me to see this night.