UNBREAKABLE ROPES

“I die of love for you, but keep this secret:
The tie that binds us is an unbreakable rope.”
- Abu Nuwas (c.755-c.815)

If I could string every moment we found each other - an arm satisfied around a waist, a cheek fitted without resentment along the curve of a neck - into a necklace, wear it always like something lucky.

The men I love are leaving this week, some for longer than others. A cruel coincidence. The reasons are various: studies abroad, visiting relatives, a music competition…

Time has a way of casually taking what you have and waving it in the air above your head.

You become a child again, jumping up and down to claim it back – indignant, powerless. Like a child, you also cry.

If your heart were a smooth purple amethyst stone I kept in my pocket, I would remember to reach in to hold it, soak my fingers in its cool.

I have had one night stands. Too many of them. All the time I was waiting for a sudden drop of light to fall on one of their faces, so a voice would echo for the first time within the empty house of me, “Yes, that’s right – this is the one who will give you peace.”

I found love and it was not what I had hoped it would be.

I met them one after another in the span of six years. In time, “where”, “when” or “how” failed to matter, except in anecdotes we would recollect fondly, while a head lay balanced on the other’s rising chest, memories we recited like hushed prayers in each other’s arms to ward off the dark.

Even names fail to matter, except as doorways to whole lives leading back to you.

How I miss my men.

If the necklace had not been broken, the beads disappearing under furniture, fallen into the grass, racing to the drain and diving through the grate.

I found not just one such love, but four: a singer, a filmmaker, a photographer and a man grounded by politics and faith. I am asked the same question by those who do not know us, “Is he your boyfriend? Or just a friend?” And then there is that other question, “How can you love more than one man?”

These men could never be friends.

Friends are lovely. They listen and they commiserate. But they are travellers too like you, on their way to somewhere else. When they arrive at where their lives have taken them, you may visit them if you like. You will always be a guest.

I never thought I could find love like this. I never knew I would be loved like this.

If I bend over to pick up a memory, would you wake up to the dream of a kiss grazing across your cheek one morning and think of me?

One after another, they stopped me in my tracks, fondled my hair, and whispered, “Stay. Don’t go. You complete me in ways neither of us may ever understand. Now promise you’ll never leave.”

Time ties knots you cannot undo, like a master in Japanese bondage. These knots decide who you are, what turns you on, who you may love and why. All we can do is love the rope biting into our skin, exposing all the vulnerable parts.

I am counting the days till the day my men return. There is pleasure in this too.

If you came back now, I would lay you on my bed, sing you songs of longing that will taper off to a whisper because your thumb would still my lip.

If my family never loved me for who I was, my heart had never found a home.

These men became more than my family. For every fault we discovered in each other, we loved even harder. Together, we understood we did not have to live in the same house like a marriage in order to haunt each other’s dreams.

Vienna-born, social and political thinker, Ivan Illich, once said, "I cannot come to be fully human unless I have received myself as a gift and accepted myself as a gift of somebody who has...distorted me the way you distorted me by loving me."

If you came back now, there would not be a word between us that had not already been said.

“But how can you love more than one man?”

My answer: “If being gay meant you broke a rule, how many rules are there left that we have not broken because we are afraid?”

For the sake of convenience, I might tell you that so-and-so is my partner, when the truth is each of them inserts a quiet into the centre of my being. How rare it is that two people wander down the corridors of each other’s eyes and find what they are looking for.

Even rarer still it is for these two people to tell each other, “Yes, this is it – I am home.”


(Written for Manazine, Oct 04)