The Ring
An attempt to communicate my sadness to my friends who look at me as if I have lost my marbles when I express the most basic human need – to feel loved.
Graduation was coming up, and I had decided to just forego the graduation ceremony and not walk across the stage. The cost of the cap and gown was $75.00, and I did not have that much money. Besides, my parents were feuding, as they had done for many years since before they divorced, and the idea of gathering them and my extended family together on the same day in the same place to give them a stage on which to perform their drama just was not appealing whatsoever. Nah. I sure as hell was not going to borrow the money only to have them spoil the day. So I let them steal the experience from me altogether.
But redemption was at hand. My friend Marc, who had graduated from Texas A&M as a Doctor of Veterinary Science had acquired a beautiful gold class ring, with a star on top and a diamond in the center. I was captivated by it the moment I saw it. It represented his achievement, his station in life, his future. I had to have one exactly like it. After all, he had love, and a great family, and a great girlfriend, and a great car, and a great house with a pool. I miss his mother, Charlotte. She knew how to make you feel as though you were the most special person alive. She died so young.
My family had preached to me since I was a toddler how important it was to get an education. They told me that with an education, I could be whoever I wanted to be, go wherever I wanted to go, and do whatever I wanted to do – things they perceived themselves as unable to accomplish. I now see that this was a symptom of their inability to give themselves and each other unconditional love. As much as they tried to make me feel loved in their dysfunctional way, it was perfectly clear to me that there were strings attached, and for some reason I continued to try to meet their expectations so that maybe, someday, they might love me.
My experiences as a youngster left me feeling empty and unloved at every turn. I was a small, thin, book-wormish, socially inept, homosexual castaway. It was perfectly clear that I was not going to secure a feeling of being loved from the general society around me. For that, I would have to have been a straight, muscle bound, football-playing ladies man. In school, I felt as though I was definitely several tiers below the “upper crust,” and somehow I failed to accept that my instinctive knowledge that my desire to feel loved was not going to be met by that world with all those conditions attached. It was sort of a mirror of my smaller reality, the one with my immediate and extended family. I was awash in a sea of souls who steadfastly refused to provide themselves and each other with unconditional love. And I took the bait, hook, line, and sinker, and continued to try to secure that for myself by striving to meet everyone’s expectations.
So after having completed the college education, naturally I assumed that I was now ready to have unconditional love bestowed upon me. After all, I had fulfilled my end of the bargain. It had been hell. Ten years of working and going to school part-time while battling life-threatening depression. But it was over now. I was ready to claim my love.
I planned the purchase of my ring with great care, and was sure to go to the campus store so that I could see it and touch it and feel it in my hands. I obtained a quote of its price, and then sank away into my dreary world to begin the weeks and months of saving the money to complete the purchase.
No one was more surprised than I to find that on the day I went with the cash in my hand to make the order that the ring was on sale! I saved hundreds of dollars off the original price quoted. My heart was just racing! I could not believe my stroke of luck! So the countdown began to the day it would arrive and I could finally slip it onto my finger, so that everyone could see that I had fulfilled my duty and was ready to accept their love.
The feeling of actually opening the box and putting on the ring can only be described as Cinderella being fitted with the glass slipper. It seems criminal to me now that all the societal institutions around me, my family, my parents, my college, my coworkers, could allow me to expect that my life would change and that I would feel loved with that ring on my finger. But I eventually learned that this, too, was not going to provide the hole in my heart with the filling it needed. But I kept wearing it anyway.
I had friends who were so excited for me and who congratulated me. A couple of them were straight guy friends with whom I was in love. Of course, that love was unrequited because they were not gay. I think my sister dated one of them. Neither of them ever finished school. One had two marriages end in bad cocaine and methamphetamine abuse. One came home from the Navy tattered and scarred, but managed to get married to a girl he met at one of those enormous dance clubs overflowing with 20-somethings, eardrum bursting music, smoke, beer and vomit. I wonder what has become of them.
I began to question the portrayal of societal events, to question whether they were actual celebrations of love or just excuses for everyone to fool themselves into believing they were loved. I saw couples around me who made such big deals out of Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s Eve and birthdays and Thanksgiving and Christmas. But on other days they felt free to fight and argue and spread their bad energy among us onlookers. It never added up. After a while, I stopped counting those special days as they passed year after year after year, and I remained single and alone, feeling unloved and empty. I mean, after a while there is no point in celebrating one’s misery when all attempts to secure the unconditional love associated with those days have failed. So they just became like any other day on the calendar, only to come and go and to be crossed off with a big, black X.
The first place I wore the ring was to this gay dance club in Dallas called The Wave. It had a swimming pool out back. I remember a guy jumped in and swam from one side to the other in his underwear one day, and when he got out and stood up, the other patrons turned toward him and applauded. I am pretty certain it was because of how he looked in his wet underwear. I was soon disappointed to learn that even with my ring, unconditional love escaped me. Funny, in all the years that I went to that club and to others like it, waiting to be noticed by someone who might love me, I never perceived that the other people at the club were finding love either. But they were supposed to be looking there and finding it! Or so everyone said.
Soon after graduation, my mother came home and announced that she had end-stage renal disease and would require a kidney transplant. She had apparently been walking around with this knowledge for months, in complete denial, and had refused to utter the words out loud. Over the next 6 years or so, she went on to lose her job, to get a home dialysis unit, and since I had not found my “career” position yet, I took two jobs in order to keep a roof over our heads. I told her that I would take care of the finances no matter what, and that her only job was to get well. I did, and she did. During the process, however, my friends started falling by the wayside one by one as they felt slighted by my inattention to their daily gay bar dramas since I was busy working and could not go out or spend my time frivolously as they did. I wondered if they had ever truly loved me in the first place, if they were unable to see the enormous burden I was carrying, or to assist me with my needs at that time in my life. Alas, but this fit perfectly into place with all the other puzzle pieces that seemed to paint a picture of be being unable to secure the feeling of being whole and loved no matter what avenue I traveled, so I resigned myself to their departure.
Later, after my mom recovered and had gone back to work, a job in San Francisco landed in my lap. I accepted, even though I had never even been there. I was delusional enough to think that I would find there thousands of other guys, just like me, who desired companionship, a partner, and who would offer unconditional love. Instead, after placing a personal ad describing such a thing, I received hate mail telling me to “go back to whatever Midwestern town I came from, because this was San Francisco and we just have sex here.” After getting over the initial shock that everyone around me had segmented their lives to the point where sexual activity was no longer associated with any sort of honor to the spirit, or with love and devotion, but had been reduced to that of animals on the prowl, I decided that San Francisco was not the place for me, so I headed south.
That was 8 years ago, and since then, the ring was stolen when I left it in the washroom at my office building in downtown Long Beach. I accepted the loss, and was pleased to be rid of the illusion that wearing it might actually enable me to receive unconditional love, because it never did quite live up to its promise, as my family had told me that it would. Eight more birthdays, eight more Valentine’s Days, eight more New Years Eve’s, eight more Christmases, all passing like floats in a parade, portraying fun and happiness and love, somewhere I the distance. Maybe in some far away, future place that the floats are traveling to, as the parade turns the corner.
I do try to remain centered and calm and detached from desire, but sometimes it is too much. Sometimes I am overcome with the feeling of loss, the desire to feel loved, the desire for touch, to be held in warm arms all night, the desire for toe-curling, mind-boggling sexual union that can only be known by two lovers with a conscious intention to merge with the Divine Source. And yes, I have been surrounded by people who loved me unconditionally, as I learned how to create that for myself, since I was not taught that skill by my family, God Love them for trying. But there remains a plateau that I have not yet reached, the place I have envisioned myself ever since I was born, and it beckons me. I know not how to get there. No mountain I climb brings me peace; no mental State cures the pain and emptiness. There are days when I don’t feel I can go on any longer, and then I struggle to shake the frame of mind so that I can begin to live again. I can only describe this feeling of emptiness, in an attempt to purge it from my reality. I feel as though no one understands, but maybe they do, but are afraid to admit it because it is such a deep, dark place. I am not sure. I still somehow believe that the entire reason I was born was to have someone find me and tell me that they Love me, and mean it. Forever. That is my intention, to tell them the same thing. And to mean it. But I am not meeting anybody who thinks this way, who is attractive to me and available to me.
This is the last fairy tale I have to overcome. Prince Charming. He has been written about through the ages. He is Who We Are. If only we would allow ourselves to be.
