The gap in between
“Not really sure how to feel about it, but I want you to stay”
The Coen Brothers are famous for building up comedic moments through repetition. Little things that happen more than once in their films become pure gold comedy. My boyfriend should be famous for the opposite: building drama through repetition. I remember the first time I couldn’t bear but to cry during our relationship. It was based on the repetition of the way he would avoid any sort of intimacy — the sexual and non — whenever I looked for him.
Now, that’s sort of a difficult thing to cope with, since queer relationships are viewed by society as such like one is the man and the other the woman. That is not the case. Despite of who’s bottoming and who’s topping, the feelings are equally mutual and important to each part. And of course, based on that, I was the first one to fall into love, witch also means, the first to suffer from it.
It was a rainy sunday, and as I write, I remember it as it was still going on, when after a few attempts to have some sort of intimate romantic — even sexual — moment with him, I gave up, based on his constant — somehow brutal — denialism. That’s fine. Everyone has its moments of wishing or not, but it wasn’t the first time it happened. And as a first, I felt the burden of it. I lay down in our bed, facing the wall, back to the love of my life at that point, and couldn’t hold the crying, that deep rough cringe in your gut, the tears you can’t keep inside. He laid beside me and went back to his phone, looking for random things, while I felt the distant gap between us, the gap between how we felt about each other.
And then, after several minutes in complete silence, the rain falling down outside, I asked: do you really like me?
That question still resonates, as I was not trying to force him or anything, just trying to make a statement about where we were in this relationship, as individuals and together. And the gut punch answer changed us forever.
What followed was a deep cut conversation with many silence gaps, where we understood exactly how unfair it was the drama we were building up. I was both a romantic emotional man who was insecure about not being liked as much. He was a pragmatic not sentimental guy, who disliked talking bout his feelings. He told me it was unfair for me to stay in the relationship insecure about how he felt bout us, since he couldn’t see himself finding ways to demonstrate wherever it was that he would actually feel. Both this things are okay. People are different, and we both probably felt really deep about each other at some point, but at some other, we would probably never have been in the same page on our relationship.
So I asked him if I should stay or go — after all, it was his house. He told me I shouldn’t take the bus on a rainy day, but couldn’t bear to decide to ask me to stay. So he did not asked. I wonder if things would be different, haven’t I called an Uber to go home and stayed for the day, even after some mood-changing-heart-breaking conversation.
If he would just say the words, like Rihanna did.
