Story of Matt, Part 4 - waiting for spring

I wasn’t about to mope my days away after Matt left for Europe, though to the same degree, I was not prepared to let go of our relationship. I took a more positive stance. I set about improving my life and filling it with new activities, getting ready for some distant date when he would return and I’d have much more to share with him. If it didn’t work out that way, at least I’d have new interests and experiences to launch me on a new path.

I joined a gym and tried to build more muscle, not that that did anything for me. My body was probably preprogrammed for muscular dystrophy, though I had no idea at the time.

With my friend Chris Bearchell’s encouragement, I also began taking on news feature journalism assignments with The Body Politic, the first pieces of public writing I had ever done. I joined Out & Out, a gay outdoors club, the month he left and in November I was elected president of the club. I no longer had any time to be idle.

I wrote to Matt every week, eager to have as much news to share with him as he would have for me. But the weeks passed without a letter from him. This was before internet services, when letters to travelers had to be sent to “Poste Restante” to wait in whatever city they would arrive in at some later date. I couldn’t be sure he would ever get them, but I knew I would always be here to receive his.

I was determined not to resent him for abandoning me. It made no sense to, but feelings are not logical, and a pattern of betrayal and abandonment had echoed through the past years of my life. So I resumed the meditation exercises I had once done years before, always placing an image of him in white light in my mind as I did them.

On the advice of friends, I also began seeing an energy worker who worked with magnetic polarities, usually focusing on my digestive ailments. He always tested to see where my opposing poles were first, to know what my body was trying to heal on its own. One day he paused after doing this, muttering softly “That’s interesting.” I asked him to explain. Well, one pole is at your right lung and the other is on the left frontal lobe of your brain, he told me. The lung indicated sadness and the left brain indicated that I was thinking about a man. The pole being on the front lobe of the brain meant that I was worried about the future.

He asked if I knew what that was about and I told him about Matt. But I wasn’t feeling any resentment for him leaving, I insisted. Who said anything about resentment, he replied. It was sadness I was avoiding and he told me his treatment would help me feel it more clearly. Would I want to feel it, I asked, and he just chuckled, “Of course you would. It’s part of the healing process.”

Sadness had seemed like a dirty feeling to me until that point of my life. It repulsed me. I associated it with weakness and helplessness, a state without hope. Perhaps that is why I had always masked it with anger. But life had never promised me an easy course so I let him treat me.

It took a few days, but I woke to the sadness one morning. At first I thought it was just the power of suggestion but it stayed with me off and on for several weeks. It was a healing sadness, not the wallowing, self-pitying kind. It rose from very deep within me, from so far back in my past that it might have been from another life. It rose like an artesian well, brimming on the edge of my eyelids and threatening to spill over. It made everything sparkle with beauty and vulnerability, a sadness that told me that everything is beautiful, but that everything will also pass. It filled me with awe.

Matt’s letters began to arrive. The first arrived at the end of September. He related how he crossed to the north coast of England and caught a boat to Bergen. On the ship he told a man who asked if he had a wife or girlfriend at home that he was gay, something he would never have dreamed of doing when I met him. In Bergen a ruggedly handsome sailor came onto him. I felt an unaccustomed pang of jealousy until he added, to his disappointment, that the sailor was so totally a bottom that he left his footprints all over the ceiling. He also related the story of his trip through the mountains to Oslo, where he had picked up the half dozen letters I had sent to him so far. At one point there were three long, winding, unlit tunnels close together. When he emerged from the third one he realized, to his profound shock and dismay, that he was at the entrance to the first tunnel heading back towards Bergen. He eventually figured out that he got totally turned around in the middle of the second tunnel.

His stories thrilled me to my core. I so wanted to be with him that I asked in my next letter, which I sent to Berlin, if there was any way I could join him somewhere on his route. I had to wait weeks for his answer. He first headed east through Sweden to Finland where, during a drunken party, he agreed to catch a ride with some sailors to Gdansk, Poland. He spent at least three weeks touring Poland. While the Poles were very friendly, food was in terribly short supply that fall, except for tomatoes. They could scarcely satisfy his voracious appetite, so he was relieved to make it to Germany without losing too much weight.

In my letters I asked a multitude of silly questions that would help me imagine what his life on the road was like, questions like where did he shave or shower when he was camping or how did he communicate with others in non-English speaking countries. He never bothered to answer them. He made up for it in other ways by telling me about experiences that did matter to him. And also by agreeing, without a firm commitment, to meet me in Athens in the spring.

The sun shone all that winter, at least in my heart. I followed his accounts that arrived sporadically, every six weeks or so, with intense fascination. The series of forwarding addresses he gave me included Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Marrakesh and Tunis. He described in his letters how he had slept in orchards scented with orange blossoms, and how it was the poor farmers, not the rich or middle class who helped him when he needed it. He wintered south of the Atlas Mountains in southern Morocco, where the local children threw rocks at him for fun, from cliffs high above him. If any of them had hit its mark, he probably would have died.

He also met a woman working with CUSO in northern Morocco who fell in love with him. To my surprise he let her seduce him and was her lover for a couple weeks. She followed him across North Africa to Tunis where he finally left her. From there he crossed to Sicily and across to the heel of Italy before catching a boat to Greece.

I made my plans for my first overseas trip ever, getting special permission from my employer for an extended six-week trip. I made arrangements fly to London, and then three days later to catch another flight to Athens where I would meet Matt. From there I planned to go to Egypt and Israel, hopefully with him, before returning to Greece and London on my way home. I told my friends simply that I would be spending my vacation in Europe, Asia and Africa.

But with the vacation booked and my non-refundable tickets purchased the day of departure fast approached with no word from Matt. It was painful and infuriating time but I had no choice but to continue with my plans alone. Finally, less than two days before my flight, a postcard arrived from Italy saying he’d try to meet me Syntagma Square in central Athens at noon, four days later.