The Journey

Listening to Sean Kagalis at 37 Main tonight. He's covering some throaty ballad - hauntingly – and through the music I'm eerily drawn to the places I've yet to go. Dark lonely places shuffling along among people on their last ride, loud night clubs listening to a Bauhaus clone - moving to the music with the other Lost Souls, the Gothic youth with their died black hair, their eye liner outlining sunken, sullen eyes. To be on the beach at Monterey watching the sea take shape with the dawn rising behind me, or by a solitary fire looking deep inside myself in the quiet solitude of my soul.

It all comes down to the trip we are all on; the journey to death's friendly embrace oh so many, many years from now, or perhaps on our way home from our jobs/classes today.

Sharing those roads with someone is ultimately the goal for most of us. Whether it's the professor-to-be among us, the poet, the actor, the meteorologist, or the musician. As humans we seek to belong, to know that we are loved and that we have someone to love.

I've belonged and I've been loved, and still do to some extent with my ex-wife although daily I see that evolving into a more distant existence. But to love, or truly be loved - not the love of friends or family but the love of poets, of sunny spring days in the south of France, of gentle walks and waterfalls in the mountains, and of tears at the bedside of a lost partner when you're 80 – that deep place in ones soul that can't ever be replaced once lost - Its that love that we seek. That I am hopeful of -

I care little for what others think – I'm a gay man - raised in a family of tough men straight out of the Maine woods, the roadhouses of the depression - men whose masculinity was defined by the other men they've bested - and now I'm just like them - constantly out to prove my manhood to myself - yet I'm the paradox.

So my journey - now and in the days ahead will be of my own making - without preconception or concern for the expectations of others. I love who I love - regardless of what others may think. I am who I am, walk the paths I walk, and dare any man to take from me my freedom to be, to love, to live as I will. Be it in the dark places where those on their last journey congregate, in a sandy beach watching the ship float by - or with someone special in all of those places or wherever else that may be.