My Other World
October 9, 2007
I stand in the door dumbstruck for what feels like several minutes but is probably just a few seconds. I hope that doesn’t mean my sense of time is going wrong again. A more likely reason is that I just can’t believe that Taylor’s there, all but apologizing to me. He may not have actually said the word sorry or apologize, but he rarely does. Still, I can see those very words written all over him. It’s enough for me.
“Come on in, I guess,” I finally manage to say, the words barely above a whisper because I still feel like the very sight of him has knocked the breath out of me.
He shuffles into the room behind me, just close enough that I can feel his body heat on me like a warm, comforting shadow. He hasn’t been that close to me in a long time and I’m halfway tempted to stop walking, or at least slow way down, so that I can draw him even closer. But I don’t, because I know how coordinated we are. We’d just end up in a pile on the floor, in the least sexy way possible.
So I don’t do that. I just continue on into the room and sit awkwardly on my bed. For some reason that I can’t understand, we each have two beds in our hotel rooms and for a second I’m worried that Taylor will sit on the other one. But he doesn’t. He sits down on my bed, about as far from me as he could be and still be considered to be on the same bed.
“I was going to order room service, if you want anything…” I offer, trailing off just because I don’t know what else to say, and it’s a pretty weak attempt at being friendly anyway.
He shakes his head. “No. I’m not hungry. You know why I’m here.”
I nod. “You want to hear about my other world. But I already told you about that.”
“I want to know more,” he says, insistently, scooting closer to me to emphasize his point. “I want to know what it was like. I want to know what your life was like, when you were gone.”
I lean back against the headboard and close my eyes, trying to draw up all the memories I have of that other world. It’s been like photo negatives, peeled apart and held just a few millimeters from each other. I could flash between each set of memories in an instant, or feel them both in me simultaneously, never sure which one is quite right. It takes a while to really focus in on the whole, right picture.
After a while I open my eyes and see that Taylor is closing in on me even more, ready for my story. “Okay. Well, I woke up with everything gone. A year of my life not in my memory, my wife walked out on me, and my brother…you… dead.”
“I know all of that.”
“I know, I know. I’m just setting the scene.”
He leans his head against my shoulder. “Go on. I’m listening.”
“Well… it felt like my entire life was collapsing, literally and figuratively. I came to believe that time was fractured, like it was a living thing that was happening all at once and had gotten itself in the wrong order. I still believe that somehow, the combination of my wedding, that accident, and us pulling away from each other had a profound effect on… well, everything.”
I pause to see how he’s taking that sentiment, and although he stares up at me wide eyed, he doesn’t say a word.
“I had this awful urge to fix things. To put things right. It’s so self-centered, but I guess I always have been. Somehow, I did. I kept blacking out, like how you found me at the piano, and imagining I was back in this world. The last time it happened, the accident happened. So I got you back, but…”
“But you didn’t.”
“But I didn’t.”
He closes his eyes and considers that for a while, then pulls back to look at me straight on. “What was it like? What did you feel?”
“Like my world was ending, I told you. There was this hole in my very being. A part of me – several parts of me – were gone. Don’t get me wrong, I missed Kate too, but she was still there. It was like a warning; I always held her at a distance, and now she was really at a distance. A distance she didn’t want me to bridge. And you… you were gone, completely. I didn’t feel like I could ever really be me again without you.”
Taylor’s face curls up like he’s in pain, physical pain. He starts to cry. “That’s how I felt, you know. When you were gone.”
“But I wasn’t really gone.”
“You could have been,” he insists. “That’s the point. And just like in your world, where you thought you could save me… in my world, I knew I couldn’t save you. I just had to wait. Wait for something to maybe, someday change. And the whole thing, I kept thinking it was my fault, but that didn’t mean it was in my power to fix it.”
Like mirror images, I realize. Like my metaphor of photo negatives. Maybe that’s why Taylor and I fit together so well. I grasp his hand, but I don’t hold it. I just hold it out in the air in front of me so that I can press my palm to it, to see how they compare. They’re different, but somehow the same, too. Just like us.
I have to take the metaphor further. I lean forward those few inches between us and press my lips to his. I’ve never paid so much attention to the detail before, never taken my time with him. In this, too, we’re similar bit different. His lips are softer and thinner than mine, but they seem to fit. I guess maybe everything about our bodies is this way, and I don’t want to stop until I’ve explored all of those possibilities and inches of flesh.
“Zac,” Taylor gasps out, pulling away from my kiss and cupping my face in his hands. “I don’t want to lose you. I wish you could see how you’ve been slipping away from me.”
“But I’m back now.”
“Are you?” he asks, tilting his head to the side. “You’re married. You’re going to be a father. You don’t know how much that will change us. Maybe more than it did when I had kids.”
“That’s why you’ve been so angry.”
He shakes his head. “Not angry. Just lost. Just afraid.”
He looks like such a lost little child, and I have to pull him tight to me, still feeling all the subtle similarities and differences in the way our muscles lie, the smooth and rough spots on our skin. I hold him for a while before speaking into his hair, “You’re not losing me. You don’t even see it, but I follow you everywhere. You’re so much a part of me, Taylor. I couldn’t be away from you if I wanted, and if there’s one thing the last year has taught me, it’s that I don’t want to be away from you for even a second.”
Taylor doesn’t answer me with words. He just presses his soft lips to my neck. It tickles, but I lean into it anyway. Even if it hurt, I wouldn’t shy away. That’s just the truth of us. That’s just the way I am, for better or for worse.
At some point in the night, we both end up naked but we don’t have sex. We touch and kiss and explore each others bodies inch by inch like we’ve never had time for before, but we don’t have sex. We just sort of exist in almost the same space. And it’s beautiful. I imagine that I could go on doing just this for hours and hours, or maybe the rest of my life. But that’s a foolish thought and eventually we do drift off to sleep, drunk on the way it feels to be together.
I don’t know what tomorrow holds. I don’t know if we’re going to stay together like we’ve promised or not. But I don’t think that’s the point anymore. I’ve come to realize that the point of me and Taylor is the wanting. It’s the constant struggle, both mine and his, to be closer to each other. We can never get enough, not even when we’re together. It’s just a struggle. And there’s a kind of beauty in that, a beauty that I’ve never seen before.
In the end, we know that we can’t be together in the way that anyone else is together, and maybe that’s why it’s such a bittersweet, longing thing. Whatever it is, whatever this thing is, it’s our thing. As long as its ours, it’s enough. His front pressed against my back as I sleep is enough reassurance for me that we’re two parts of the same picture. Without each other, we’re incomplete. And that’s all the comfort I need to know that, though we may stray, we will always strive to be back together eventually.