I colored this picture a while back with the idea of posting it here along with a bit of prose I wrote in 2002 for a site called “Purse Stories.” Unfortunately, when I went to copy the prose, I discovered that, while the site still exists, those stories are now merely referenced as part of a project the artist* did; the actual stories are gone. I reached out to her to see if she’d archived the stories and if so, could I have a copy of mine, but I haven’t heard back from her.
I’ve searched decades of my writing to see if I had a copy tucked in some folder or binder. No luck. It’s a little lost story now. I did find a lot of other poems, short stories, songs, and fragments of all those. They’re a reminder of how I’ve been writing all my life. Sometimes they feel like a record of time squandered on toxic relationships. While I can’t reclaim those hours, I acknowledge that their hurts, losses, and disappointments are not only part of me but are likely woven into the characters I create.
A writer’s characters are a rare subset called “friends who are always there when needed.”
These dolls, who represent a couple of my characters, have been posed on the dresser in the writing sanctuary for a while. Every day, I check to see if they’re still holding hands, because I’m always going in and out of the dresser drawers or stacking folders of writing notes, sets of pencils or gel pens, and other stuff all around them and could easily jiggle them apart.
They are still holding hands. It makes me smile every single time I see that.
*Strange-but-true story. The artist, who I met through a mutual friend, has the same three names, with the same spellings, as one of my characters. While that character has been around since the early ’70s, I gave her that name in the 1980s. I didn’t meet the artist with that name until sometime after this millennium began.
One thing I never did during the ten years Chris and I were in a relationship was hold his hand in public.
Do you wish you had? I’m not at all demonstrative in public, BUT, that being said, I can vividly remember reaching for Tom’s hand to hold on two occasions: once at a good friend’s funeral service, and once on our first flight after 9/11 because I was overwhelmed seeing National Guard and also because the attacks amped up my fear of flying a lot.
No, I don’t think so. The only places I would do it is in Soho and the surrounding areas, but Chris wouldn’t even do that. I think we stood with his arms around me in a gay bar, but that was it.
What I resent is that I feel unsafe holding another guys hand elsewhere. Straight people probably do it without thinking.
Yes, definitely done without thinking because showing affection is not a risk.
I may or may not have told the story on here before about an epiphany I had at a concert once because of this exact thing. Sometimes we can pinpoint precise moments when our perception shifts and we recognize injustice for what it is.