I can tell how unsettled my head is, by how odd my dreams get. 

Last night I was in a large vacation home with other random friends from various parts of my life.  We’d all gathered there for some reason I couldn’t remember.  You were there too, but in an upstairs room all by yourself.  Of course after yesterday I had to be having a dream about you last night.  I didn’t want to disturb you.

My friends are all stringing Christmas lights around the door frames to their rooms…it seems like some sort of project we’d all gotten ourselves into…everyone is decorating their doors with Christmas trimmings.  I am trying to untangle a favorite set of Christmas lights from my school days to put it up around the door to my room.  But the others all keep telling me to just grab a new set from the stack of unopened ones in the corner.  I am wasting time trying to untangle mine they all say, and they probably don’t even work.  But I know my old set still works because it is lit up…even though it isn’t plugged in yet.  Which is strange but sometimes you just accept strange things in your dreams as though they’re perfectly normal.  And the new lights are that style I just hate…all transparent wiring and no colors.  My old set has all the colors in it.  But try as I might I can’t get it untangled from the knot it’s in.

Then I notice my old collection of 45rpm records was scattered all over the place and I start gathering them up off the tables and chairs and off the floor and putting them back in their carrying case.  A friend walks over and asks me if I want to take them back home with me now and I tell him not yet, because you hadn’t heard them yet.  I tell the friend they can listen to my 45s too…all they wanted…but they needed to take a little better care of them because they could get scratched up and broken laying around like this.  That earns me a shrug.

Then I start hearing footsteps from the floor above us.  Another one of my friends tells me that it’s probably one of my co-workers at the Institute getting up for a meeting later.  My co-workers are here at the house too…some of them…and we all have a conference to go to later that day.  I can hear them walking around upstairs now, getting ready to go.

Suddenly I’m worried you’ve left the house and I didn’t see you go.  I walk upstairs and I’m relieved to see the door to your room is still closed, which means you’re still here.  But I don’t knock.  I don’t want to disturb you.  I just want to see you before you go.  I’m waiting for you to walk out of your room, so I can talk to you before you leave.  You’re still here, but the door is still closed.  I notice there are no Christmas lights strung around your door.

I see some more of my friends milling around in another room and more of my 45 collection scattered all over the place.  So I start gathering it back up and stacking them neatly.  A friend walks over and asks why I’m doing that and I tell him they need to be more careful with my records.  Then I notice some of them laying by a window in the sunlight and I move them away and tell my friend not to do that because they’ll warp if they’re left laying in the sunlight.  I’m starting to get a little pissed off at the careless way my friends are treating my 45s.

And then…I wake up…

Sometimes, you just have to figure a dream is your mind’s way of sorting out the clutter of your day.  Of course you were there…after yesterday’s conversation you pretty much had to be…and I get the closed door and the fear that you were already gone, and the relief that you weren’t…yet.  I think I get the Christmas lights.  But laying in bed this morning I couldn’t figure out where my 45rpm colleciton fit into it. 

Then I remembered…

I look at my record collection from back then…mostly the 45rpm singles I bought in my middle teen years because back then I wouldn’t spend the price of a whole album unless it was a band I really liked a lot, and I see almost nothing but love songs among them.  Granted, that’s mostly what rock has always been.  But there was a lot of it back then about life and politics, the war and the struggles our generation was going through.  Songs I loved like For What It’s Worth, and Incense and Peppermint…and interestingly enough in retrospect, Hold Your Head Up.  

And if it’s bad
Don’t let it get you down, you can take it
And if it hurts
Don’t let them see you cry, you can take it

Hold your head up, hold your head up
Hold your head up, hold your head high

And if they stare
Just let them burn their eyes on you moving
And if they shout
Don’t let them change a thing what you’re doing

Hold your head up, hold your head up
Hold your head up, hold your head high

I don’t think I need to analyze very much why I liked that one.  But the songs I turned to again and again alone in my bedroom were the love songs, and what is amazing to me about that in retrospect is that at that age I really didn’t care much for all that gushy love stuff.  I was going through my stacks of 45 rpms  the other day and it just floored me how much of it was surgery sweet love songs.  As I remember that part of my life, I didn’t have much interest in all that love stuff.  But then, nobody told me I could fall in love with a guy either.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the lyrics in those songs, but something in the music itself spoke to me, in a way that the lyrics, speaking only to the straight boys in the audience, never could.  I would connect with it instantly when I heard it on the radio, and like a flash I was down to the record store to by the single.  It would be years before I would find myself listening to the lyrics.  I had to grow into myself as a gay man first, and then learn the trick a lot of gay guys have to learn in this world, of mentally changing a pronoun as I listen…

You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
[Girl], we couldn’t get much higher
Come on baby, light my fire
Come on baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire

I never really paid much attention to those lyrics at first.  Just the music, and the sultry sound of Morrison’s voice.

You are all the [woman] I need, and baby you know it,
You can make this beggar a king, a clown or a poet.
I’ll give you all that I own.
You got me standing in line
Out in the cold,
pay me some mind.
Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
Long as you love me, it’s all right
Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
You got the power to turn on the light.

Something in the music spoke to me, in a way the lyrics just didn’t.  My record collection is full of these kinds of songs.  Bubblegum pop mostly, as they called it back then.  In another world, there would have been some that spoke directly to gay guys, or at least was gender neutral enough that I could have taken the lyrics to heart as much as I did the music.  But even back then, well before I came out to myself as a gay man, I had a soul for sweet love songs.  Perhaps…a tad too sweet. 

Okay…now the 45s make sense.  Especially the part about my friends (the ones that were there in the house anyway…they weren’t all there…), treating them so carelessly.  That was my heart they were treating so carelessly.  And of course, what I was trying to save for you.

You said over and over to me yesterday that a relationship between us would happen someday.  "It’ll happen", you said.  "It’ll happen."  Over and over you said that.  But "now isn’t a good time".  It was more then I’d ever expected to hear from you in my wildest dreams.  Okay.  Fine.  I can wait, if that’s what you want.  Whenever you are ready, I’ll be here.  But I think something else needs to happen too.  You need to love yourself.  There’s nothing wrong with you.  There was never anything wrong with you.  "Maybe after we’re retired", you said.  Waiting for age to take desires you’ve always hated having away isn’t a plan. 

Okay…I had a crush once upon a time.  Okay…I guess I still do.  Back then you knew how to push my buttons.  And you did.  And I loved it.  Even if I didn’t have the words to say so back then.  Life was sweet…so very very sweet.  But we went our separate ways, time passes, the universe expands, and now our lives are what they are.  I understand this.  I don’t want to complicate the life you have now and I’m not a home wrecker.  But I guess coming back into your life has complicated it after all and I’m sorry.  I just had to find you. 

All I wanted now after all these years was to just be friends, at a distance, since you have your life where you are and I have mine here in Baltimore and nothing can change now without causing a lot of problems for both of us and the last thing on earth I’d ever want is to cause you hurt in any way.  But I figured maybe I could come see you and chat over lunch or dinner or something every now and then.  But you’re afraid of what might happen.  And I was afraid that might be the case.  But…as it turns out…you’re not afraid of what I might do, so much as what you might do.  Let me guess…you don’t want to turn a friendship into something dirty.  Where have I heard that before?

I’m a grown man now and so are you and we both understand the risks here.  That’s why I’ve never suggested anything more happens then we just remain friends at a distance.  There are perfectly good reasons for me to stay away.  I know this.  I accept it.  But there is nothing wrong with you.  Or me.  There are plenty of very good reasons why I should keep my distance now, and maybe even forever…but that isn’t one of them.