Page 427 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 397

different trip now.”
“So am I,” Kweenie said.
“It’s about time for you both,” Solly said.
“I’m going to Los Angeles,” Kweenie said. “January asked me to come
stay with her. She knows some people she says I should know. I’ve never
performed in El Lay.”
Before Kweenie left, Ryan gave us each a copy of the lead essay in
Armageddon. It was a confessional titled, “By Blonds Obsessed: Southern
Men, Scarlett O’Hara, and Me.”

Loss. It stays forever. The only truth that stays forever is
Kick couldn’t stay forever. It registers in my whole being. Forever
I’ll feel him in my whole body. I’m filled with him, emptied by
him, of him, for him. Somewhere in it all I sinned. I had a false
god before me. I made him a god when he was only a man. He
couldn’t sustain that. Who could? He feared that. He must have
seen the way I looked at him, seen adoration in my eyes every time
I was behind the cameras shooting him, recording the moments
I knew even then couldn’t last. I gave him everything you can
give a god: myself.
He knew he was no god; but he took the honor I bestowed on
him. He shined with divinity. He took my money, my time, my
love—everything. Friends said he emptied me like a checkbook;
that he was not a god; that he was only a vampire. But I loved him.
I loved the ideal I saw incarnate in him. So forever, at least, I have
that to remember: that joy of fullness, that pain of subtraction, of
emptiness. I hurt. When I die my thoughts will uncontrollably
go back, not just to our three years together, but to those ecstatic
moments when time stood still and space did not exist, when we
were gods together, and my last thoughts will be of him.
I don’t think he knows, not really, how I loved—love—him.
Maybe he does—did—and that’s why, when I told him I was
dying, being drained by our relationship, by our way of relat-
ing, he said he’d have to go. Period. No discussion. Nothing. He
knew. He knew. He knew all along—and that was the greatest
betrayal—that he was loved more than he could love, not only
me, but anybody.
That was it. That was his betrayal. That was the golden man’s
deep secret.
He knew he could not love.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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