Me

I am feeling is true, I am diving in without fear.” At one point when I was answering one of his questions (he later confessed that he thought his questions were really stupid because he was so nervous he didn’t know what else to ask me), I stared at him steadily, and when I saw that he did not turn his gaze away . . . Boom! He confirmed what I was thinking. We exchanged phone numbers. He began visiting me in my hotel. We both loved music, as well as art and literature, and we spent our time talking about so many different things. At one moment I would tell him something about music, while he said something about literature, and later perhaps the roles would reverse. We had a really intense physical connection, and intellectually we were just on the same frequency.
    When I visited him, we were literally inseparable. At night, he would go to work at the radio station, and I would stay in bed listening to his voice, while he would send me subtle messages over the airwaves. It was especially meaningful to me because I had always been the one who did the pursuing. I don’t know if it is because of what I represent that the people I am with can sometimes be a bit intimidated by me, but when it comes to both women and men, I’m always the one who makes the first move. Honestly, no one had ever sent me coded messages over the radio before! It was very original and very romantic. During the days I would do whatever I could to be with him and court him, but at night he would counteract on the radio. Without anyone else noticing, he would play certain songs and say certain things that only I could understand. He would scream his love out to me over the airwaves, but the really incredible, powerful, magnificent, and devastating thing about it was that only I knew it.
    After a few weeks I returned home, but we continued our relationship at long distance. It was not easy because on most weekends one of us would have to get on a plane and travel for several hours to see the other. But I loved him a lot. Once I even suggested we both run away and leave everything behind to go live together somewhere . . . Asia, Europe, anywhere. We were young and I truly felt that the best thing we could do was to leave our worlds behind and move in together. I didn’t care about my career or what would happen if I told the whole world I was gay. Nothing else mattered.
    But he didn’t feel the same way.
    “Ricky, you have a very clear mission in life,” he told me. “You move masses. You can truly impact people. You are at a point in your career where you are so much more developed than I am. I still have a lot of work ahead of me, and if something bad were to happen between us, you would inevitably blame it on this, on me, on the fact that I held you back. . . . And I can’t let that happen.”
    At the time, his words deeply moved me, but I still tried to convince him, by all means possible, that we had to at least try. But he refused. In the end, I think he was right. I’ve come to believe that he simply wasn’t ready for the relationship I wanted us to have.
    It might just be that I loved him more than he loved me, or maybe he still had to find himself in several other aspects of his life. Who knows. The fact is, we shook one another; while I was with him I stopped fearing my sexuality, and I was ready to confront it and announce it to anyone and everyone who was willing to listen. It was because of that relationship that I came out to my mother. When it was over, she noticed I was very sad and she asked: “Kiki, are you in love?”
    “Yes, Mami,” I answered, “I am completely in love.”
    “Aaaaah,” she said. “And is it a man that you are in love with?”
    “Yes, Mami. It’s a man.”
    When the relationship ended, I told myself that maybe this was not my path. My soul was in pain; I felt abandoned, alone, broken. So much pain didn’t seem natural, so my instinct was to convince myself that being with men was a mistake. I locked my feelings even deeper inside, and started to date women again, with the hope that with one of them I would finally find true love. Even though my instinct tells me to wonder what would have happened had I decided to accept my sexuality at that point in my life, in reality I see that it did not happen this way because it was not my moment, and there were still many things for me to live before I would get to that point.

IDENTITY CRISIS
    THE RELATIONSHIP WITH that particular man taught me a