You CAN Lose What You Never Had

When I was a growing child, I had an image of what love was meant to be. It was what most kids saw when we watched our Disney cartoons – the dashing prince saving the princess from some ludicrous circumstance and riding off into the sunset. We sat down in front of a television and watched the guy and the girl fight past all their issues and find their way back to each other. We read it in Harlequin books – the look that sparked in their eyes when they first met, the palpable sexual tension, blah, blah, blah.

But even then, as a kid, I grew disillusioned with love. I found it too tedious. It was fun to admire when looking at other people, but it just seemed like the kind of thing that wasn’t in my plan. I thought I was too mature to fall for that trick called love. It didn’t help that when I became sexually active, every guy I met seemed to use that term “love” like it was an easy card to get in. Like because I was a young boy, their professions of love should make my head spin, mad my heart swell and my loins drip. Suffice it to say that I never fell for it. Never went into a relationship and never stayed too much in contact with the guys I met except to shag and be done with it. I wasn’t a slut per say, but I was fine having my fun and I wasn’t willing to give it up. And I had this cynical view of sensing emotional bullshit when it came my way, and there was a ton of bullshit. The guys who moaned their love for me while in the heat of the moment on the first hook-up. The ones who spun words of what they were willing to do for me. Those that spoke of how mature I was for a teenager and how they wanted me to be theirs. It also just became a normal part of the queer sexual lifestyle.

I barely had friends as a child, never knew how to care and I never matured emotionally. I was smart, without a doubt. I knew about my sexuality by 12. I struggled, sure, but not like everyone else. I was just comfortable in my skin. I knew what I wanted and wasn’t afraid to pursue it. I was direct, to the point, never beating around the bush. And I was cocky. I was so cocky in what I thought I knew.

This was me till I got into the university. I began to work as a volunteer staff in an NGO, and it was there that I met him. He was there to see one of my colleagues at the office, and somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind, there was a spark, a knowledge that this guy was going to be different. He was in one word a unique specimen. Firm build, nerdy glasses on, and this shy air about him. I of course wasted no time engaging him in a conversation. By some hand of fate, the colleague he came to see left him waiting and eventually he had to leave just at the exact same time that I was leaving. We ended up heading to the same area and then we exchanged numbers and made plans to meet the next day at my place.

We met up and talked for awhile and just when it was getting late in the day, I asked. I had never been able to make the first move but he was down and it happened. It wasn’t good, probably because time was gone and it was rushed. But we made plans to see again. We met up later and got a room and it was phenomenal. His touch on my skin was like fire, his hands so skilled, like there was knowledge to my body that I didn’t know of and that he’d found. It felt comfortable, comforting, like coming home. I could barely get enough of him. We slept in each other’s arms, something I had never before been comfortable with, but which now felt natural.

However, despite all of this, I was still adamant that this was just sex. Phenomenal ground-breaking sex, but sex all the same. And so I went through my normal ritual and set him into the background. We’d lose contact but get together again, a cycle that continued for most of the year. Sex buddies through and through. I look back on it now and think that maybe I should have listened to the part of me that said, “Give him a try, see what happens.” But I wasn’t interested in being leashed.

By the end of the year however, the dynamics to our relationship altered. We had just resumed chatting again and for some reason, this time, I couldn’t fight the feeling that there was something there. It was fluid, more relaxed, and I was opening up in a way that I had not before. Emotions that I had so easily been able to control, shut in, became things I wanted to experience.

By the start of the next year, he asked if we could live together. I was skeptical. I had never spent longer than a full day with any of my fuck buddies, never felt comfortable enough to want to. In the end, I agreed and he moved in. We got along well, to the point where I’d walk with him to school and home with him. We’d spend nights in the courtyard talking about our lives and our desires. He told me about love and how people he loved always used or hurt him, and I wondered why. He was magnificent in my eyes, and all I thought was why anyone would choose to play with something that to me was good. He was so fragile and I was so ready to prove that he didn’t need anyone’s approval. He was perfect just the way he was.

Now in all this time, we were friends who slept with other people. I had brought up the conversation of us taking the next step but he was wary and asked that we keep things the way they were. And I agreed. I was fine with being unattached to him; this was mostly due to my fear that I would not be able to be monogamous. But eventually my feelings of sharing became one of jealousy. He was highly sought-after, something I had been aware of right off but had been unbothered with. We’d go to parties and I’d see the way people looked at him. His phone would ring constantly and I soon began to hate the constant ping of his WhatsApp. But eventually he stopped seeing other people and left me to do what I wanted. I got tired of holding back as well. We adjusted to being something deeper. We had crossed a line.

But in spite of this change in the status quo, there had to be a statement for me, a label, if you will. But we never had a conversation about it.

Then the day came when he was to meet a friend of his, this guy I didn’t like because I knew the guy wanted him. The moment he left, as fate would have it, a prospective shag that I had ignored for quite some time called and I agreed to meet him. I went over to his place and we hooked up. But the minute I was done, I knew something was wrong and that I had made a mistake. I went back home and ran into him as he’d just returned from school, just about to head over to his friend’s place. He asked me where I’d been and I lied. Something I had never done before, not to him anyway. I knew I had done something wrong and I was ashamed and scared. He knew I lied and he pressured me till I told him. And from that point marked a downward spiral to our relationship.

He was angry, not so much over the cheating but because of the lie. And that devastated me. I begged. I pleaded. I cried. But he was hurt and he began to avoid me like a plague. Till a night when he came back to the house with some mutual friends, and in the midst of drink bout, I poured my heart out to him. I wanted him to do anything – hit me, shout at me, anything, as long as he would just listen to me. And he did. He listened and then he let his emotions out. And by the next day, we were talking to each other again.

But he could never trust me again. Things between us had changed irrevocably. Conversations that used to be open became less so. Feelings that had been good and pure turned to ones of distrust and paranoia. I tried to bridge it but he couldn’t get past my cheating. I tried to get my feelings to shut down by seeking comfort with other people, and that was just futile. I loved him but I never got the chance to show it. I was broken inside. Every picture of him I saw alone left me in tears. Every song on heartbreak left me sobbing into my bed. We tried, but I had found what people in those books fought for, and when I couldn’t get it back the way it was, I made stupid choices. In a bid to try to go back to myself to stop my hurt, I kept digging a hole that was swallowing me whole. And I managed to pull people who were innocent into that hole with me. By the end of what was a really messy year, I knew I had to change. I had to stop pouring my misery on others. It didn’t help that he suffered a loss by the end of the year. But I was there for him because despite all, I could not stay away when he was hurt. I needed to be sure that he was fine.

So I talked to him in a bid to bridge our differences and show him that I was better, that I would not be the same person I had been. I was honest about who I was and I wanted to be better. But he was done. He could not take the drain anymore, and the truth was I couldn’t blame him. I had lost something good and I couldn’t get it back.

So now, I am broken, shattered, face to face with the reality that I’d lost what I never had. I am in my bed, sobbing as I write these words. It’s a new year and I am a mess. My friends tell me that it will be better, that I will get over it. But how do you get over someone that made you feel? How do you forget someone that made your day brighter? How do you find the ability to breathe when every breath feels like acid? How do you get up in the morning knowing that you have to learn to live with pain? Knowing that you didn’t know how not to love the one person that showed you what love is?

Written by BRYNIX