The Ex

Several years ago I found a porn movie starring my college boyfriend. I was at a movie store where my friend worked, just wandering around, and back in the "adult section" there it was, right at eye level, the box with him on the cover. The whole room went into an Alfred Hitchcock zoom as I stared at him, standing there with his thumb hooked into his belt loop. He would never stand like that in real-life, I thought. He was much too cool for that. I loved this guy. I was head-over-heels in puppy love with him. He wore organic fiber clothing, and weird little hats, and his eyes were so bright blue they glowed in the dark. Beautiful. We would hang out in his 5-floor walk-up apartment, with his homemade orange curtains, and we'd lay on his futon on the floor and listen to Bjork, and talk about gay oppression and the meaning of life and other subjects much bigger than we could realistically handle. Or he would talk, and I would listen, as he laid on his back and I laid on my side next to him. And we'd eat falafel or some other food I considered "exotic" and have sex and sleep through all my classes the next day. It's a miracle I passed anything that semester.

He was a senior when I was a sophomore; when he graduated he moved to the woods of Tennessee and joined an all-gay commune called the Radical Faries, where he practiced Pagan rituals and danced around a campfire in the moonlight. It was around then that we lost touch. But I went out and bought a hat just like he would wear, a little black skullcap that I thought made me look artsy and alternative. In retrospect, it just made me look like an artsy Jew.

So it was years later when I found that movie; I, of course, rented it immediately, told my friend I couldn't wait for him to close the store and go out as we planned, and ran home to watch it. I thought it would be funny; really it was just creepy and sad. His eyes were really bloodshot, he was stumbling around a little, obviously completely high on some drug. I just turned off the TV and brought the tape back that same day.

Some time after that I saw him, a chance meeting at the beach; he looked much better, yet still terrible. His face aged well beyond his years, I asked him how things were. He had a job, he had a boyfriend, he had a life. I said "Things change." His eyes focused out of range as he stared back into the depths of his brain, and he nodded. "Yes, they definitely do," he said. And he glanced at his boyfriend, nervously. So...I walked away, never saw him again.