When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,77
drawback was the pain.
For the first few days I kept my discomfort to myself, thinking all the while of what a good example I was setting. When Hugh feels bad, you hear about it immediately. A tiny splinter works itself into his palm, and he claims to know exactly how Jesus must have felt on the cross. He demands sympathy for insect bites and paper cuts, while I have to lose at least a quart of blood before I get so much as a pat on the hand.
One time in France we were lucky enough to catch an identical stomach virus. It was a twenty-four-hour bug, the kind that completely empties you out and takes away your will to live. You’d get yourself a glass of water, but that would involve standing, and so instead you just sort of stare toward the kitchen, hoping that maybe one of the pipes will burst and the water will come to you. We both had the exact same symptoms, yet he insisted that his virus was much more powerful than mine. I begged to differ, so there we were, competing over who was the sickest.
“You can at least move your hands,” he said.
“No,” I told him, “it was the wind that moved them. I have no muscle control whatsoever.”
“Liar.”
“Well, that’s a nice thing to say to someone who’ll probably die during the night. Thanks a lot, pal.”
At such times you have to wonder how things got to this point. You meet someone and fall in love; then umpteen years later you’re lying on the floor in a foreign country, promising, hoping, as a matter of principle, that you’ll be dead by sunrise. “I’ll show you,” I moaned, and then I must have fallen back to sleep.
When Hugh and I bicker over who is in the most pain, I think back to my first boyfriend, whom I met while in my late twenties. Something about our combination was rotten, and as a result we competed over everything, no matter how petty. When someone laughed at one of his jokes, I would need to make that person laugh harder. If I found something half decent at a yard sale, he would have to find something better — and so on. My boyfriend’s mother was a handful, and every year, just before Christmas, she would schedule a mammogram, knowing that she would not get the results until after the holidays. The remote possibility of cancer was something to hang over her children’s heads, just out of reach, like mistletoe, and she took great pleasure in arranging it. The family would gather and she’d tear up, saying, “I don’t want to spoil your happiness, but this may well be our last Christmas together.” Other times, if somebody had something going on — a wedding, a graduation — she’d go in for exploratory surgery, anything to capture and hold attention. By the time I finally met her, she did not have a single organ that had not been touched by human hands. Oh, my God, I thought, watching her cry on our living room sofa, my boyfriend’s family is more fucked-up than my own. I mean, this actually bothered me.
We were together for six years, and when we finally broke up I felt like a failure, a divorced person. I now had what the self-help books called “relationship baggage,” which I would carry around for the rest of my life. The trick was to meet someone with similar baggage and form a matching set, but how would one go about finding such a person? Bars were out; I knew that much. I’d met my first boyfriend in a place called the Man Hole — not the sort of name that suggests fidelity. It was like meeting someone at fisticuffs and then complaining when he turned out to be violent. To be fair, he had never actually promised to be monogamous. That was my idea, and though I tried my hardest to convert him, the allure of other people was just too great.
Most of the gay couples I knew at that time had some sort of an arrangement. Boyfriend A could sleep with someone else as long as he didn’t bring him home — or as long as he did bring him home. And Boyfriend B was free to do the same. It was a good setup for those who enjoyed variety and the thrill of the hunt, but to me it was just scary, and way too much