Icarus

Tonight I lost my temper with one of my oldest and dearest friends, and worse: I did it in an internet chat room where your tone of voice is entirely dependent on your listener's mood... his mood was part of what I lost my temper with, and the resulting interpreted tone of voice is not something I'm happy about having been a part of... let me attempt an explanation, and an apology.

This man was, no *is* the man who made me realise who I could be if I made the effort, and more: made me realise how small that seemingly impossible effort is, once it is made. As an example, he's the man who (quietly and matter-of-factly) took me to WH Smiths in the St. Nicholas Center one afternoon in 1998 to buy my first ever gay men's magazine. Nothing smutty you understand, just attitude but the fact I can say "just" is entirely down to him: until that day the idea of owning my own sexuality in public like that filled me with a kind of fear I can only describe as soul-numbing, and in the few short seconds when he handed me the magazine and gestured self-confidently toward the till, that fear evaporated forever. His quiet grin that afternoon is branded on the hide of my memory, and is always the first image that comes to mind when someone says his name.

He's not been in such a good way the past couple of years: Life dealt this friend a series of really shitty hands over the years, cards he was bluffing with even back then, and eventually the dealer shut him out of the game. I know, and anyone who really knows him knows, that he'll get back to the table some day soon, and that his luck will change, but he doesn't know it. He fears his own life, in much the same way I once feared a newsagent check-out, and instead of gesturing at the right time, and grining quietly as he finds his own way through that fear, I get impatient and angry. I miss the confident companion who I grew wings to fly beside, and instead of raging at the sun which singed his feathers and sent him (temporarily) tumbling to earth, I mistakenly rage at him.

I know that this is his stuff, and that he has to find his own way through it at his own pace, but I'm impatient, and angry at myself for not knowing how to return the unreturnable favour, or give my grounded friend back the sky. That impatience broke through my fingers and onto the keyboard this evening, and for a few short seconds it spilled through the tenuous technological connection between us: an exasperated sigh at this end of the connection amplifed to hurricane force at the other.

I'm sorry. Take all the time you need: the sky isn't going anywhere, and niether am I.