Being man (part 7)

Turning around, he thundered, “Did you hear that? I’m in love with another man!” He himself seemed surprised to hear the words slipping from his lips about his own self. “God, what have I gotten into?” His hands reached for his hips, then raised one, I don’t remember which, to his face, producing movements that expressed the confusion and the chaos and the agony that was he. Shaking his head vigorously, he said in escalating pitch, “This is crazy. I am crazy! Everything is! Oh, why did I ever have to feel this way? Why?”

That stark, unprecedented statement of Mark left me dumb. His confession became a lump on my throat so that not a word passed through it. I opened my mouth, but I just didn’t know what to say. My lips opened and closed like my sister Angela’s fish’s. For moments that seemed like eternity, I was not sure about my feeling about the issue. Would I be mad at him for making a fool out of me? Would I laugh at him, disdain him, for being the being that he is? But I did not have the right. Would I dump him because he was not the friend I thought he was? I treated him the way I did because he was who I thought him to be, didn’t I? I was not sure. But it would have been un-friendly of me. I supposed even my sense of feeling suffered numbness from the rush of words that escaped from his closet.

Faintly, I could hear him blaming his heart. “It’s all your fault. Lia was there, but you chose him.”

At that instant Mark let go of his 'little secret', everything looked different. The moon seemed to have lost its orbit. The stars, which were vibrantly lending themselves for a romantic setting, looked like they were starting to fall away, one after another. (February, 1998)

To be continued...