dissolution
ultimately, there was evidence of fourteen affairs, starting around the late 2000s, and who knows how many others besides. edward was number eleven. it turns out dad lived a strange, unseemly, lurid life that he hid from everyone who loved him: his parents and siblings, his family (us), and edward, too.
one of my more caustic friends puts it in a way that makes me laugh: "all i can say is that it's extremely cool of you to have a dead, deadbeat gay dad." thanks, alice.
am i being too callous? there's all this distance that he put between himself and his family, and it's with this increasing distance that i think about his life. i'm a stranger with a gender and sexualities minor peering into the case of a man who shares her cultural background, and the man is caught between his desires and the expectations of the regressive culture he has lived in his whole life.
and then the stranger thinks, i am spending too many cycles thinking about what is basically my dad's sex life? should i think that this is weird and inappropriate? but since it's not bothering anyone, least of all her, she concludes that this is fine.
so the stranger goes back to her rumination, noting down with anthropological interest the differences in the life the man lives with his traditional and oblivious family, and the life he lives with the loving and oblivious man who wants to build a home with him, and the one he lives in the darkness between the two. occasionally, she feels a burst of tenderness towards the subject of her research when she stumbles across particular things:
- a photo of him casually sipping a beer under the neon purple lights of a sign that says "bear bar", shoulders loosed and relaxed, looking perfectly at home.
- a love letter that addresses him as "my baymax", with a doodle of the character blushing and waving shyly taking up the bottom third of the page. baymax is large, like he was. he is also gentle and protective. is that how others saw him?
- an email he sends to a lover he has ghosted: "I am not the kind and genuine person you think you know. You are young, and it's best to forget about me."
the tenderness is detached. she has never known this man.
a few days later the stranger gets a text from edward. edward says, "Jenn, I am grateful for you for being by my side during the most difficult time of my life. But now I know that Emerson is a very dishonest and promiscuous person, and now all I feel is shame. He told me that he wanted something exclusive, but even the day before his death, he was seeing other people behind my back. I am sorry but I don't want to keep any part of him anymore, I will send photos of all of his things and send them to you if you want anything. I feel so disgusted and humiliated and used."
and something already weightless dissolves into nothingness. so much for that impossible fantasy of that house in redacted, occasional weekend visits, seeing dad happy and settled in a new domestic life, barefoot in the kitchen and preparing the whole steamed fish just the way his daughter likes when she visits. in retrospect, it was a stupidly heteronormative fantasy, yeah? men and women, gays and lesbians, different planets, different worlds. i'd describe the aftertaste as bitter disappointment, but the fantasy didn't even get a chance to solidify before its dissipation, so imagine like, the lacroix version of that.
there's a pocketful of stories i can tell you about what led up to that message, and everything that's happened afterwards - some absurdly funny, some pathetically sad. but they are floating, loose fragments and i am at the end of what i have processed, and probably it will take another six months before this yarn's anywhere close to ready.
there is a pile of new facts in front of me. they are jumbled up. i don't want to touch many of them, but touching them is required if i ever want to make sense of them. i wrote some of them down but couldn't even bear to put into words some other ones, and i don't want to show any of them to you. so they will live in my obsidian notebook and you will just see a blank section below where an incomplete list of bullet points exist.
give me half a year, and then take me out to a nice bar and order me a whiskey sour or three, and perhaps i will tell you some of the rest of it then.