Creature of the Night

Something about gay young-middle-age that is so mysterious: you don't know what you miss or don't miss anymore. It's quite a limbo, especially if you grew accustomed in your mid-20s carry on about the good-old days in college, as if you were 80 years old or something.

It can be embarrassing to admit to yourself that when you hit 40, you suddenly realized you're much younger than you realized.

It's one of the humorous parts of being married to someone younger, too. My husband -- like I did at his age -- comports himself with utter confidence that he knows most of what he needs to know to get on in this world as an adult. Now, I don't doubt he can handle his life and be successful in things large and small. He can manage bank accounts and Fortune 500 client projects with the same adeptness as he drives through São Paulo or arranges a weekend in Los Angeles without ever having been there.

But there is no way to explain to him how wrong he is about how much he knows. He's still in graduate school, so he can't help but view everything in life through the academic lens -- he is constantly trying to get an A+ in life like it was a written exam. If you know a wide range of random facts, you will get all the answers correctly and will score another triumph. Until about four years ago or so -- around when I started Club Whirled -- I kind of thought the same thing.

But that ain't it. It's way bigger than that. There is a whole other dimension to life that you only realize later, especially if you're like Vini and me in that you rocket out of school and into your career with such intensity that you spend much of your days having this false concept of life being reaffirmed over and over. You get things right, and you get rewarded. You move ahead, and you get more interesting things to do (and you do them right, too).

It took me almost 20 years to see it clearly. My career sort of consumed me for a long time so it makes perfect sense. What's more, my close-in life -- i.e., my romantic relationships -- were all a wide range of varying failures that it was easier to cleave toward the work identity because I was accomplishing so much and doing what I love to do, what I really believe in. Naturally, once I stepped off that and had more free time, more freedom to explore life for real (and not just as a diversion), it began to change and reveal itself to me.

Becoming a social animal in D.C. the last six years I lived there was so healthy for me. I miss it in almost the same sort of fond way that I miss college sometimes. It isn't an age thing. It's missing those periods of life when you threw all your doors open and were just growing and growing all the time. Taking it all in, sometimes painful sometimes joyous. But you woke up every morning knowing one thing for sure -- you were growing as a person, and learning so much about what needed to come next in life.

As much as I loved clubbing around the world in those days -- a glimpse of which is on old Club Whirled -- I really enjoyed the regular social scene in Logan Circle and Rehoboth much more. I knew everyone. They knew me. I knew the timetables and the structure and routine of everything. All awkwardness was gone. I could dive into a party and move all over the place and talk to everyone by night's end. I could swim right out to the middle of the dance floor anytime I wanted to and always be in familiar territory. I was never out in search of something fleeting and diversionary, like so many of the people around me who drank or got high and were simply looking for a quick fuck to be able to sleep that night. I was really out there, in the thick of everything, gleaning something from every minute that would mean something to me. Always focusing on what there was to learn that night.

It's come to an end mostly. I think maybe because I've probably learned all there is that the night has to offer me. At least for now, and at least the contemporary night as it is. My days are much fuller now, as well. I find myself learning everything in the morning now, for some reason.

In the end, though, one of the biggest lessons that took hold of me in January 2007, in the big cottage at Pineapple Point one night when Jeff and I were laying on his bed and talking about our lives (he was turning 40 that weekend), was that I couldn't be without Vini anymore, not another day, and the time had come for me to move, to go, to make it happen. Not to wait. He was my biggest supporter, but he also was making a big decision to leave. Two months later, I was here in São Paulo, and Jeff was dead. Suddenly, the stakes in life's lessons grow larger and larger. I needed to move on, and Jeff decided he was "over".

And sometime around my 40th birthday this year, something hit me. I was supposed to feel old. To feel "over" in some way. Sure, I can see that I've aged. I can feel it. But all that didn't follow the formula in the end. I didn't get that sorrowful sense of "over"-ness. If anything, the sum of the last year of this blog should be some indication that what happened was a sense of enormous humility: I realized that I could carry on for years and thousands of gigabytes about the hundreds of men I've been with since I was 17, or the thousands of nights I've been out and about in this city or that, or all that I've done in my career or with my life since I was a child. And none of it can scratch the surface of what my life will end up meaning when it ends.

I realized at 40 that even my assumptions about life at 35 were fairly uninformed. That my concepts of order and society were hopelessly narrow. That my idea of the perfect love was as hopelessly naive as a little girl's. And my image of myself -- who I really am -- is barely a pencil sketch. I have almost an entire other life left to live, maybe more than one. Today, I am embarking on what will clearly be the longest and most important relationship of my life to date. But the bigger picture is also there. Nothing can be taken for granted. Everything could -- and probably will -- change completely at some point. And I'll still be here, walking along. Whirling, as it were.

And I could literally choose whether I am "over" or not simply by realizing all of this, or denying it. If you know anything at all about me by now, you know the choice I will always make.