My left cheek felt hot; the underlying muscle disturbed and the nerve endings rapid firing the sensation of shock and pain. After his hand jerked past my face and rested once again at his side, my hand flew up to where the heat was coming from, where he had hit me. I cradled my face out of habit; I did what I thought you were supposed to do when you were punched in the face, but my face didn’t hurt at all. I was too angry, sad and confused. I was also disappointed. I was disappointed that my relationship with John had changed so quickly. I was disappointed that I felt like I was in a made-for-TV movie. What’s really sad is that after my boyfriend punched me in the face the first time, I was actually thinking about what actors would be available to portray me in the story of two boys who were so wrong for each other.
It wasn’t always like that. John and I met in a club in Providence, RI, staring at one another like dazed zombies. There’s a crazy thing that happens when you stare into someone’s eyes for the first time and they’re staring back at you. You’re wondering what they are thinking about and they’re wondering the same about you. He was big, bigger than me, an ex-wrestler: strong, arrogant and handsome in a way that boys rarely are; he had a big open face, a strong jaw and the bluest eyes I have ever seen. He was not print-model-handsome, but he was handsome in a way you never forget, which is actually more dangerous.
We were dangerous together, voracious from the very beginning. I loved his strong hands pulling me over to him, how small his lips were, in comparison to mine, and how they fit when we would kiss. I remember laughing at him on the inside, this endearingly dumb boy who fared himself an amazing lover with a fierce intellect, which he wasn’t.
There’s a grace period when dating someone, where you can keep up the illusion that your situation is casual, although sex is involved. In the first two weeks or so of a relationship, you do a great job acting as though seeing your partner is desirable, but not a requirement. You say things like “yeah, dude, I mean, I want to see that new movie, so if you are still alive on Thursday and you don’t have any other plans, we should hang. But I mean, I don’t want to run your life, you can hang with your friends, unless you know, you’re not busy, because I won’t be busy.”
You should just cut to the chase and say “I want to spend time with you,” but you’ve been burned by other people and the scar tissue from the past scalding has built quite an elaborate set of armor, which you won’t let down for anyone. So, you play games until you’re comfortable, and then you can say what you feel.
The games never stopped with John. Three months into our relationship, an exclusive relationship, he continued to point out to me other boys he found attractive, discussing how he wouldn’t mind having sex with them. I didn’t know what to say. Every time he pointed someone out, I looked at them, studied them and then looked at me, studied my own face, body and style to see how I measured up.
Was he trying to tell me to lose weight, wear more brown, be less loud or even more confusing, or that he wanted to have an open relationship? I would ask him if he wanted to be with me, or just be casual and he would give me an angry look as though I was the one who was parading my sexual interests in other boys around him. I have never wanted to cry or throw a chair through a window with such frequency during any other relationship as I did with John. I felt so alone in the world while this boy who said he liked me so much stood next to me and gawked at other guys. I wanted to vomit; was this my fate as a gay man, to be just an ornamental boyfriend to a series of apes in a dog-eat-dog dating pool?
I should have left so many times that counting them would only affirm for anyone reading this my ultimate stupidity. Seeing his attraction to all these other boys, totally disregarding my feelings made me feel so empty, so needy, as though I was so unattractive that only he would be with me. I was trapped; I felt crazy. I felt like I was just another trick, just another station on the tracks of his “relationship train.” Feeling like you mean nothing to someone who says that you mean so much to them is one of the worst sensations to ever experience.
Except the worst is what comes next.
We fought. We had to. I was sick of acting like his snide comments about looking for my replacement didn’t bother me. He said that I think too much, a funny thing to say coming from someone who apparently didn’t think at all. It was only a matter of time that our verbal arguments would sink into him just hitting me like he did, or throwing me into a wall. I slid down against the wall, cradling my face, looking up at him with watery eyes from swelling and sobbing as he said “sorry”. I continued to cry as I stumbled into his bathroom, crying and insulting myself for crying.
Then I looked in the mirror, and I did what people who are crying usually do when they look in the mirror: I stopped. I looked at my red face, my big lips wet with spit, and my huge red eyes.
“I’m so ugly,” I said softly. I thought of my friends and how they had been so angry at me for staying with him. I thought of my sister and how angry she would be at me for letting this happen. I wasn’t crying tears of pain, I realized looking in the mirror, I was enraged. When you are crying tears of rage for someone in your life, your relationship is over. It was abuse from the very beginning, and it ended with me driving back to Boston from Providence away from that apartment … forever.
Thomas Naughton is a Collegian columnist.
