message in a dream

I had a dream this morning. I was walking through an area with warm, low Frank Lloyd Wright type buildings, live oak trees were abundant and old, their limbs like hundreds of big strong arms hovering near the hilly ground and high into the sky. It was a sunny day but it was cool and shady where I was.

I heard someone say my name. I recognized it as being C's voice, a friend with whom I've recently had the third and what seems like final falling out (in the course of our short and very intense relationship). I turned to look and saw someone who looked like him but wasn't him.

"Did you call me?"
"No," the stranger said, "That was just C pointing you out. He went inside."

That sounds about right, I thought to myself, considering what we've been through recently. I turned to leave the area and saw litter on the ground. I picked up a clear plastic bag and put the litter in it as I walked toward the exit. I dropped the bag in a big trash barrel. There were bottles and cans in it, but I didn't see a recycling bin, so I didn't bother separating them. At the end of the sidewalk, there were several recycling bins, organized for the different items. I went back to the trash barrel to retrieve the recyclables. There were ants coming up from deep within the barrel. And then there were bees and wasps hovering around. Every time I looked away and back, the ants, bees and wasps had multiplied exponentially.

I tried to pick out the bottles and cans, but the flying insects were thwarting me. I saw a shovel on the ground, it was covered with the bugs as well. They were flying in my face, scaring me a little. Finally I put down whatever was in my hands, said to myself, "Better to just leave it alone," and walked away.

Better to just leave it alone.

It was one of those message dreams, pertaining no doubt to the stuff I've been going through with C. I was the one who instigated the separation, but it wasn't really what I wanted; it was what I felt like he wanted. I expected my email to sting a little - I was in Paris, feeling very alone, feeling like he was responding to everything I said from a very selfish place, not seeing what I was going through, not being the friend he had been the previous two months. I expected to get a response from him the likes of when I canceled out on a meditation retreat after our second falling out. That time he had written, "It makes me me very sad to hear that."

Apparently, this was exactly what he wanted to hear. His response to my "Letting Go" email was, "I think this is for the best." He went on to tell me that our relationship now "brings up confusion and an agitated heart" for him.

Maybe it was foolish of me to write that email saying "I feel like I need to let go of this relationship." (Be careful what you ask for, comes to mind.) But I was in a really sorry place in Paris, and I felt like the focus had been on him in our recent interactions - and come to think of it during the whole relationship, I decided in the moment before I wrote the email. I kept it on my phone a whole day, rereading it, editing it a very little, making sure it said what it needed to say, before I sent it.

He had never had a close gay friend before me. (Whenever I repeated that back to him, he was always quick to correct me, saying that he had never had a close gay male friend before; he had lots of gay women friends. Whatever.) Suffice it to say there are things in his past that make him a bit leery of male companionship at all, and particularly with a gay man.

But that was what this relationship seemed to be about in the beginning, about him working on getting over some of his issues. It was about that for me, too. It has long been my desire to be friends with a man in which sex is not a consideration. We discussed very openly (at first) all of the things that were coming up for us; it wasn't hard, but we were determined to press on, to figure things out. We even had a therapy session together!

And now I'm left with my own confusion, agitated heart, and a softball-sized pain in my belly. The only difference is I'm still willing to try to work it out.

I've outlived my father by six years so far. He seemed so old when he died at 39, so grown up. I know he had his problems, but he didn't deal with them in the big way that I feel like I am dealing with this loss. I cried all day long yesterday and the day before. Not constantly, but when I went outside to deal with the laundry or turned the corner into my bedroom, or somehow the wind changed, a great sadness would suddenly descend upon me and I was unable to move for a few moments, except for the movement of my insides, my pounding chest, my pounding head, my tears, my gasps, my anxiety. I don't feel like a 45-year-old man; I feel like that same boy in the eighth grade who cried in private and had no one to understand him or help him figure things out.

All of this is not C's fault. --Okay, is any of this his fault? We got a little too close to his edge; he got very scared; he ran. I understand that need sometimes.

But he said he wouldn't. Over and over again, I expressed my fears of being abandoned; again and again he said he would not do that. He said he was there for me. He said "I love you," he called me his "dear, dear beautiful friend"...

What do I do with all of this? Where do I put my sadness? C came strong into my life shortly after Timmy my cat died. And now for some reason, the sadness of Timmy is back. Day before yesterday I was drawn to his grave and just sobbed uncontrollably for 10 minutes. C was a nice substitute for the uncomplicated love I had for and from my cat. The love C and I shared was always complicated, but it was as deep as any love I have felt for a man, and special because it was not sex-based.

There were trust issues on C's part because of my sexuality. He seemed more sure and confident of my sexuality than even I am. He seems to have some stuckness around what that means, what it means to him, what it should mean to me. I've tried to work through these things, have tried to process all of my fears and anxiety through him. He said he was open to that, said "bring it on" in so many words. And so I did.

And then he pulled away. And now I feel abandoned. I've printed out our email and text correspondence - 43 pages of 10-point Arial typeface. I'm trying to figure it out. I wonder if one last therapy session with him would be possible or even a good idea?