Rest in Snuggles, Pagan Boy

 

I so, so wish I’d written him his High Fidelity paragraphs before he passed away from Covid-19 two weekends ago. I think he’d have liked them, especially the smutty parts. More than anything, he deserved to know how important he was to me, how he has built and structured my life since I was 19. I miss him so, SO much. I’m having a rare moment of not knowing what to say.

 

Pagan Boy and I dated (though I don’t know if we’d have called it that) on and off from roughly (ha) 1993 to 1995. I think? I met him during the Perfectly 1993 Guy months and he gorgeously helped me to pick up the pieces after Perfectly 1993 Guy was gone. (Well not all the way gone. They seldom are.)

 

Some decade-plus amount of time later, Pagan Boy moved to the same town as my sister, so he and I sometimes got to have flirty coffee when Sweetie and I were visiting the family. I was delighted to learn we had both grown up to be poly, though I think it stuck a little better for him. He was always the same, so giant, so warm, such a twinkle in his eye—it’s no wonder his pagan friends called him “Pan.” He was like a walking Tom Robbins novel but without all the pesky gender essentialism. Or something like that.

 

I love(d) him so, so much, that slightly sparky friend-love that has run through so many of my friendships with guys.  When we dated, the connection was undressing-each-other-on-the-way-up-the-stairs-to-his-apartment passionate, but the connection between us could never quite gel, could never really decide what it was. I realized years later that we’d both been navigating depression brains, without the words or resources to deal with depression that we would both eventually find. We were both so sad and so in love with life at the same time—what if we’d found a way to lean on each other? I guess we sort of did.

 

Anyway back then, we’d spend lighthearted hours having sex or watching Mystery Science Theater, but also so much time in a semi-stupor wrapped in blankets on the living room floor in front of the TV. The curtains were so often drawn against some sunny day I felt like we should be out in. We were the living enactment of what The Smiths meant when they sang about “spending warm summer days indoors,” and you know I’ve been known to commit some frightening verse.

 

As lovers (sorry, there’s not a better word) we were (comet) Pluto-a slanted orbit out off kilter with each other, emotionally and physically in the same solar system but also not. I wanted to be a real girlfriend, I did try, but something always held us both back. He broke things off with me the same day I painted him The Moon Card. We were The Moon Card. When I’m done writing this I’ll Google and remind myself what that means.

 

It’s weird (or not, see also: Sweetie) to begin with such a sense of naked, confusing turmoil and end in such a place of certainty and grace. Here in 2021, we were texting through bad movies together. I was wondering if I could also ask if he’d like to sext. (A fellow switch, I know he’d have been GOOD at it.) The last thing he sent me, after rescheduling a movie plan during his Covid treatment, was one of those Messenger heart things that explodes into a bunch of floaty hearts when you open it. It was exactly perfect, exactly him.

 

I have this picture, a selfie of him and me at my mom’s Christmas party in 2014. You can see the warmth and softness pouring off of him, the calm happiness in both of our faces, maybe partly because we were both full of my mom’s Christmas toffee. (It’s a lot of loss in one selfie, a lot that the last six years have taken away.) Toffee or no, you can see the warmth in his eyes, a love that wasn’t just for me or my family but for everyone and everything in the world. Outside our mopey post-teenage years, I’ve never seen him look at me any other way.

 

He is SO handsome in the picture that I wonder a little what kept me from being with him. We weren’t good for each other, but also, we were. I love and miss him so, so much and I know I’ll have a lot more to say.