Sparkles: Son

Hey, mom. Long time, no write... for me at least. Completely and totally my fault, how does five months pass so quickly?

I came out to myself in 7th grade as liking other boys, though I masked it as simply being bisexual. I came out to everyone else in 9th grade as liking other boys, and I was no longer able to simply brush off reality. I was gay. I knew it.

Ever since I started making gay friends, it was the city that called to us. It never mattered what city or where, but we were sure it was not here and we were sure it was not within 500 miles of where we lived. It was far, away, perhaps New York, perhaps, Miami, perhaps Chicago, perhaps San Francisco... perhaps anywhere. Just not here.

Like a hallowed object, it stood on a horizon, our own green light, our own shimmering, glistening, sparkling place that we could be free; that we could be ourselves.

Romanticized, we told each other tales of people we barely knew who had escaped and gone off and truly lived.

Because, as you know, no one can truly live in a small town.

When I decided to leave for college, I moved to a smaller town near a larger city. It wasn't a particularly glamorous city -- "glamor" and "Cincinnati" rarely meet each other literarily except when a host of negative descriptors are chained amidst the rhetoric -- but it was a city, and I asked my parents to drive me through it on the way to school. Sitting in the back seat of the van, I was wide eyed enthusiasm. Here it was. The big city, laid out for me. My own urban playground with sites to visit and events to enjoy and people... and gay people. My own people. People I could be myself around. I would eat it up and spit it back out and make it my own.

I did.

And then it ate me.

It is hard to separate, now, the events of the past two years from the city, that sparkling legend of urban life that I embraced whole heartedly. It's hard to look on the same streets, or sit in the same bars, or talk to the same people, without feeling my own devastation.

I wander the same streets, perhaps drunkenly or perhaps just under the haze of the humid summer days in the Ohio Valley, and wonder where the sheen has gone.

I could have been the casualty of the city life; rather than a tale of joy and making it we told and retold in the smokey rooms of coffee houses in my younger years, I would have become one the sad, "he could have been something" stories you whisper about. Tortured poet, tortured soul, left to die in the streets of the city... but, they may add, not the city, certainly I had just found the wrong one. All the same, I would still be lost.

Perhaps I still am, lost, but if happiness is not where you are, but who you are, then the greatest lesson to be learned is not to let the sparkles blind you. The goal becomes, rather, to sparkle for yourself and then let the city glow in your wake.