Quarantine Crush (Because of Course) Part 2

In all my years of therapy, I’ve done so much thinking about how my body keeps a physical record of trauma, but once in a while it hits me that I’ve got a record of so much love in here too.

In early drafts, I started listing off times that Quarantine Crush seemed like more than a friend back then, but I kinda want to keep them to myself, partly because they’re dear and partly because I’m petrified of being fact-checked. This story ends with me tangling myself in a made-up version of present day events, and that’s enough having-the-rug-pulled-out-from-under-me for now.

When I was twenty-five, my search for love was absolute, all-encompassing, and unapologetic. I perpetually fretted aloud to my in-the-driver’s-seat friends about this-or-that crush, or lost love, or bottomless, nebulous yearning. I worried SO HARD that I would never find The Right One, and I kind of admire that ability to be a messy romantic ball of need all the time—now, visits to that place in my heart just tend to make me feel powerless, trapped, and jittery. (Though in fairness that could just be cabin fever.)

Anyway, there were long, quiet, questioning moments, at least on my end. Times when I thought “Maybe?” or “Why can’t it be THIS one?” It’s possible I even DID try to start something and was rebuffed, but I don’t think so. That would have been braver than helplessly and somewhat peevishly waiting for him to make a move.

Now, sheltering-in-place and deprived of most everyday touch (Besides hugging the cats and Sweetie) my body gets quiet enough to remember the physical pleasure and comfort of those young friendships, especially with him. It seems, back then, like it was so, so easy to get myself held. Or to do the holding.

Anyway, for about a year and a half, all of the poets were with me almost every day, writing with me, cheering me on, helping me rehearse, indoctrinating me into the magic of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and always, always, just so casually sharing their whole selves with me. QC and his venue-running-partner (Just the cutest little newly-out Christian gay guy in the universe) stole and kept my heart the most.

Their venue was/is my favorite, a place where I always felt like everything I wrote was brilliant but that if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter because my poems and I were so gently and thoroughly blanketed in unconditional love. Life among those poets, especially within QC’s venue, was truly the deepest and most uncomplicated acceptance I’d yet felt.

So of course, in this timeline, a few months ago when life became about fear, isolation, losing most of my work, and my mom refusing to social distance, I joined that same venue during a Zoom call. Miraculously, it had persisted for twenty years, and it was profoundly, comfortingly, welcomingly the same.

And there he was. Almost never with his camera on, but still.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First we’ll have to talk about leaving California, (On literally a midnight train, okay it might’ve been 12:30), about 9/11 and Sweetie and QC Dobblering a boombox playing “In Your Eyes” in Sweetie’s and my wedding ceremony at my request.

But for now, I’ll leave QC and myself in 2001, occasionally falling nebulously into each other like the kids we were, fluffy and soft as sunset clouds.