Monday, February 29th

We'd talked online before I first met you, and then we talked on the phone. You were hard to pin down online; your voice came from many different parts of you. One day you'd play sarcastic and describe feeding your children jelly beans for their dinner. Another day you told the story of how you met your dog. I think you slept beside him on the floor his first night home so that he wouldn't be sad. I found the dog story fantastic; the jelly beans confusing. There was no single message that hooked me; not like your profile of what you wanted from me.

Then we talked on the phone. You told me later that you knew we would be good after the conversation flowed. It did. Your voice was....deep. I like a man's voice to rumble and catch on my ears when I hear it. I like to imagine the throat that makes it, the masculine skin vibrating with the sound. Your voice worked for me. You sounded Midwestern, because you are, like me, which I know we discussed. Ohio, you said. Wisconsin, said I. Not quick or glib or really sarcastic, which I admit to also understanding. I've lived on the coasts a long time, in LA and DC and San Francisco. I've met many people from Jersey and SoCal and NoCal and Philly, and I find something familiar in them all. At this point, I'm comfortable on the coasts. But a Midwesterner...they say I am that, at heart, many people. I have no accent, I am told, no Wisconsin drawl. But throughout the years, now and again, someone will look at me, a taxi driver or one of my friends, and say that I seem Midwestern. I am polite. I let people finish sentences. At heart, I like to play it straight.

You did. In our first conversation you told me you liked talking to me, it was easy. I was....startled. The dating response to this? Was there a flirty thing to say? Could I conjure up some meaning from it somehow?

You too, I said. My overly wordy coast-living self anchored by my Midwestern response, brought into the beginning of something.

If you and I were to talk today, what would I tell you of my day? I'd be straightforward. I feel awful, I would start. My head aches and I keep coughing and I have no energy. My throat makes a sound like a sexy frog. You'd say that you were sorry I was sick. You'd say with sincerity, and a touch of firmness that would put me a wee bit on guard, that I needed to go to bed early. Then if I was in the mood and you were in the mood, you would go ahead and be creative. You would tell me that I really needed a handsome silver-haired man to come and rub my feet, that that would make me feel better.

It really really would.

Thursday, February 26th

I first met you in the flesh in an Irish bar. Or, on the sidewalk outside the bar. We walked straight toward each other from opposite ends of the block, and I could tell from half a block away that I would be overwhelmed by looking in your face. Your white hair gleamed and your eyes were sharp above your cheekbones, beaming at me, smile wide and direct and straight on. It was loaded. I couldn't look back. I rushed through the last 10 feet, looking over your shoulder to get through, and put my arms around your to to hold myself down. You were delighted. You called me a hugger, later, the many times you remembered the moment. You said that he knew I was good for you then, when you realized that I was a hugger.

But I'm not always a hugger, which you learned later. I hugged you, and on first sight. I hug people I like, many when I'm happy, but I don't always hug everyone. I love that you loved that about me, and I think I love it more because the hug grew in part from fear. You turned it into something purely loving. I'll take that now. I felt false about it before, in the first years of knowing you. But now I think that's what happens, with love. Things grow, between people and across years. I don't feel false about it now. I hugged you because I'm a hugger.

We had a good meal in the Irish bar. You were courteous and very careful. You asked at one point if you were boring me as you talked about your work, something about medical products delivered to bleeding soldiers in the field. You were definitely not, as I didn't find bleeding soldiers boring, and I was sincerely listening. I was learning. I told you this, also sincerely, and you seemed sincerely relieved. You seemed not to have been sure that my liberal writer self would take a deep interest in military things. I might not have, if you'd not been sincere. But I felt myself wrapped in the topic, studying it, and I liked it. You had places within you that I could go and I could find new things.

At the end of the meal we stood up from the table, and you considered me carefully. I considered you back. You leaned toward me in a sure steady move and kissed me on my mouth. Warm lips, soft, firm on mine. You leaned out and considered me again. I looked back, a little less considered, a little more put in motion. And we turned like comfortable companions to go.

You and I talked much more that night, but one thing I will mention now. You said, "I like you. A LOT. I want to have a RELATIONSHIP with you." A therapist once described that as a red flag, that you said this to me in the first hours. I know the abstract analysis of why she  said it. But it doesn't matter. I know it was a green flag instead.

I love you. Good night. It's 10:34.    

Tuesday, February 23. 2016

Michael John Beaulieu. Mike. I met you five years ago, in the late fall of 2010. You had posted online on a dating site, Chemistry, which matched you as one of my potentials. You were an Executive type, I believe, with Explorer tendencies, and I was labeled a Nurturer/Explorer. I will admit now that you looked very much like someone else that I had dated, down to similar life facts. A military guy, take-charge job. Several children. Gray hair, clean-cut look, easy smile. I in fact labeled you his look-alike.

But your written profile was you, although not about you. It was sincere, so sincere. You wrote what you wanted out of life, out of a relationship, out of a person to be with you. It wasn’t flowery, or witty, or particularly exploratory. It was not all about trips to Paris or similar tastes in wine. It did come from your heart. And it showed that you really wanted someone to really be with you. You described a person who would listen, who would be kind, who would be open to working with you. You described a partner. You set a very high standard.

I read it through, several times. It struck me, two points. I noticed that your voice wasn’t quite like mine. It wasn’t the voice of a writer. Your thoughts lined up…rather in a row, forming a memo, not a letter. There were no catchy little anecdotes that brought a quick face to the words. This confused me, a little. I had been reading many profiles of many erudite men, and I had gotten a bit giddy with the richness of their words. Your profile made me stop and rewire the way I read your words.

The second thing I noticed was that, after I read your profile again, and stared at the spaces between the words a to be sure they really were as sincere as they seemed, was that I understood it. Very well. I believed that I was very much like the person in the profile. I read each point. Yes, I listened well. I cared about it. Yes, I felt I was kind. That was important to me. Yes, I felt I had always put a high priority on working well with others...(what was that life in the college co-op about, if nothing else?). It wasn’t a quick recognition on my part, to see myself there in the description of your relationship outlined on your page. But when I saw it, I also felt it. It made me feel like a sincere and loyal person to respond to you. It made me feel good.

So I wrote something of that nature to you in one of our first emails. That I understood your profile, and what you wanted. That it made sense to me. That I felt I was what you had described.

Mike, five years later, with so much behind us, I know that I was. And that experience, of stopping and seeing myself in a sincere and quiet place? You gave that to me.

I’m going to stop writing now. I’m not going to cry. It’s 11:33, as you would say it, for you always told me exactly the minute of every message you ever left. Army time. Time for bed. You’d be long asleep, or asking me to come in. I’m going to picture you now brushing your teeth over in my bathroom, because I don’t want to forget how you would do it. Hand on hip, right hand straight in, maybe a little brushing upward of the gray hair at your crown. Look at yourself now, handsome cheekbones in my mirror. You see yourself. I see you.

Sunday, Feb. 21

I’ve cried twice today already, and it is only noon. I haven’t talked to you much yet. Yesterday I couldn’t bear the crying, and I was driving, crying hard, so I changed the crying to talking, and that also helped. “So I’m crying,” I cried, “please help me. I need help and I don’t want you to be gone. Don’t. Be. GONE” and that helped the crying a little. I heard my mind make your voice up in my head and the voice told me that I needed to drive. You were calm and clear, like you really could be, and you were a very good driver. I appreciated it. I swallowed, made the turn, and started nodding back to you, that yes, I could drive, I could do it. I could. Damn it all to hell, I could.

I talked to you another time yesterday. I talked to you running around the lake, under the pink sunset and before the reeds where we saw the swans. I said that I hoped you were okay. To say it out loud, to speak to you, meant I talked past all my doubts and certainties about death. But I don’t really have a choice. I have no idea what I think about death. The afterlife. Any of it, but it’s here now forming my life. You knew what you thought about death. You were, are, a Catholic in your soul. So I give it up to that. It’s your death, and I’ll be there for it. I’ll talk to your spirit, and my wandering humanist soul will be the better for it. Fine.

So I’ve been talking to you. When I called out yesterday, it was just in my mind. I was running around the lake, and what came to my mind was that I hoped that you were okay. I want that for you. I don’t want pain and confusion and more of what killed you here. I want something more. Then my mind or my conscience or some part of my something told me that you were probably still struggling, that you probably still had things to do. You were concerned for us, for how we would handle your loss. You’d want to span us all, all of those who cared, and it would be hard. You might not be unable to be with me all the time. You’re also handling your kids. I swallowed and choked and said I was all right. I nodded. I said I was strong and I would be okay.

Michael John Beaulieu, I was right and I was wrong. I am strong, more so because I had you. I miss you with so much strength. And I will be okay, but I’m not there yet. Not nearly. I’ll need to have you around for a long time. As I write this my chest physically aches, so strongly, it just wells up in me, to make me feel such a sensation of you, and my overly intellectual abstract humanist self has no idea if I’m having any kind of thought about the after-life, because I am still so unwilling to know that you’re part of it, the after-life. Your forearms. I loved them. They slayed me. I cannot hear that they have no life, for they had so much for me.

Now I have cried a third time today.

Saturday, Feb. 20

I cried five times today. I cried with the car radio, twice. I cried while I was running, the tears streaming down my face. I cried very hard in the parking lot outside Starbucks. And I cried while I stood before the reeds on the side of the lake, between the running path and the pink setting sun. We had walked there before, in brighter light, and we’d seen the swans. Two trumpeter swans, lazy in the reeds, and they turned and watched us with small inscrutable eyes. You stood with me, watching them, holding my hand the way you did the last years, just a little too tensely for the moment. The swans were only swans. They weren’t momentous, or frightening, or even very beautiful. They were a little dirty, in fact, but something to watch, for they were unusual in the reeds of our lake. My neighbors were all twittering about them. But it might have been just that about them, their surprise, their unusual quality, that gave your grip that edge. You were struggling, trying to hold on, and perhaps the new in any shape had become painful. Or perhaps that made them even better to you.

I thought about you all day. At times I would forget, very few times, but then I would remember and my mind would scramble to have any idea what to do. I could feel the panic in my head, hovering up somewhere above my eyes, as the truth came back to change everything. At the end of the day when it flooded in harder, and I was afraid of being alone in bed with it, I told myself I could lie back to it. I made up a story, several stories, enough until I felt better, about what I would do to keep you coming back. What I would say if we were five weeks back, and the phone rang, and you told me all that was wrong. Or if I asked. How I would tell you to get all your things together, a change of clothes, your medications, and drive on up to me. How I would put you to bed in clean sheets and lay all your pills out in order. I would have you take them all. And the careful combination, all the chemicals given in just the right way, would work the change and keep you here. And I would hold your face, and just once again I would see in your eyes that you heard me, heard me, the person I am, when I asked you to stay. Here. In life. Till the end of days.

And thinking this story let me sleep.