The couple of days I spent staying with QC before heading
back east are two of my favorite days of ever—like a charmed bubble of time
when I could love and be loved, be nowhere and everywhere. It was the distilled
feeling of being perfectly free and perfectly cared for.
His arm around me that night as we sat on his front
stoop looking up at the few stars we could see.
His hand warm on my shoulder.
Dozing in his bed next to him listening to bluesy
songs.
It was perfect. It was perfect love. That I could only
let myself love him all the way once my bags were packed and waiting in his
living room, I guess that says something about me.
Like the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow story, that weekend
means so much partly because it was so (in this case vexingly) chaste.
To be treated with such care.
To be given absolutely every heart thing by a man who
expected nothing in return, who let me just lay there next to him and be.
To have let myself do the same.
I have to believe that feeling can exist again out in
the world for me, but with someone who isn’t just-friends or star-crossed or
whatever. (And with constant kissing and him knowing all the knots.)
I would definitely ravish now-QC if it were possible,
(It isn’t, for a variety of reasons.) but even if I had Sex Tardis technology I
wouldn’t change any little thing about that weekend in 2001. I can’t think of a
more perfect example of love-from-a-masculine-person—I’d never rewrite it.
And then QC and QC’s Adorable Co-Host took me to the
train or the bus or whatever and said goodbye. I looked for signs and poems in
the midnight lights as I rose away from unconditional love, and toward it, too.
In a few days, my brother would pick me up at the
Small East Coast City bus station, lugging my life and a box of tomatoes from
our Iowa Grandpa. I’d move into my sister’s old room at my mom and stepdad’s
house, to live with the three of them until I figured out what to do next.