If you could relive one year of your life, which one would it be?
WordPress gave me one of those writing prompts that looks almost harmless on the screen:
If you could relive one year of your life, which one would it be?
For me, there is no debate.
- 1992.
I would go back to 1992 for John.
I would go back and watch everything more closely. I would listen to every word twice. I would study his face when he said he was fine. I would pay attention to the silences I probably dismissed as nothing. I would remember exactly how long he looked away before answering me. I would ask what he was thinking when a conversation suddenly stopped. I would stop assuming there would always be another day to ask whatever question I did not ask that night.
Most of all, I would go back to the moment his father looked at him and called him a “dick loving faggot.”
I was there.
I heard it.
More than three decades later, I can still feel what those words did to me, and they were not even directed at me.
It shattered my heart to hear someone speak to John that way. This was his father. The man who was supposed to love him before the rest of us ever got the chance. The man whose voice had probably mattered to John long before mine did. I remember hearing those words and knowing they were vicious, hateful, and cruel. What I did not fully grasp was how deeply they may have cut into John once the room became quiet and he was alone with them.
I sometimes tell myself that I cannot know how much pain those words caused him.
Then another part of me says that maybe I do know.
Less than two weeks later, John was dead.
He died by suicide.
I cannot prove that one moment caused the other. I cannot take a line between what his father said and what John later did and pretend human pain works that neatly. Still, I have lived with those two moments sitting frighteningly close together in my memory for more than thirty years.
And John left me a note.
“I’m sorry Jay, I just cannot be like you. Your strength and commitment to being uniquely you is what I love most about you. Please never let anyone anywhere change that Jay. I love you and I’m sorry.”
I still have it.
It is safely put away, protected like something sacred and terrible at the same time. Every so often I take it out and read it again. I know every sentence. I know where my eyes slow down. I know which words still hurt in exactly the same place they hurt the first time.
I just cannot be like you.
Those words haunt me.
What did John think he had to be?
What did he think I possessed that he did not?
What did he think strength looked like from where he stood?
Did he think I was fearless? I was not.
Did he think hateful words did not hurt me? They did.
Did he think I had figured out some secret way to exist as a gay man without fear, shame, rejection, or doubt? I had not.
I wish I could go back and tell him that what he saw as strength in me was often stubbornness, survival, anger, fear, and a refusal to surrender pieces of myself just to make somebody else more comfortable. I wish I could tell him that being “uniquely you” did not mean I never hurt. It meant I had decided, sometimes shakily and sometimes defiantly, that other people were not going to get final ownership of who I was.
I would tell John he did not have to be like me.
He only had to stay.
Stay one more hour.
Stay through one more awful night.
Stay long enough for me to sit beside him.
Stay long enough to tell me he was scared.
Stay long enough to be furious.
Stay long enough to hate his father.
Stay long enough to cry.
Stay long enough to tell me that he could not see a future, so I could tell him that I could still see one for both of us.
That is one of the things I would change if somebody handed me 1992 again.
After his father said those words, I would not allow that moment to pass into history as one more ugly family confrontation. I would sit John down and ask him what hearing that did to him. I would not accept “I’m fine.” I would not assume love itself was enough communication. I would tell him exactly what I believed.
John, your father does not get to decide who you are.
He does not get to decide whether your life has value.
He does not get to decide whether loving another man makes you dirty.
He does not get to decide whether you deserve a future.
And he sure as hell does not get to decide whether you and I have one.
I would tell John that our relationship was okay. I would tell him I was not going anywhere. I would tell him that whatever came next, we could face it one ugly day at a time. I would tell him that I loved him when he felt strong, and I loved him when he did not. He did not have to perform courage for me. He did not have to become some version of Jay Santana to deserve staying alive.
That last part hurts terribly now.
John’s final words to me included admiration for my strength.
I would trade every ounce of that strength for the chance to have told him he never needed to match it.
Then come the what-ifs.
They are endless.
What if I had realized how badly he was hurting?
What if I had asked one more question?
What if I had stayed closer after the confrontation with his father?
What if I had told him that I was scared too?
What if I had made it unmistakably clear that whatever anybody thought about us, I still wanted us?
What if I had recognized something in his voice?
What if I had called at exactly the right moment?
What if he had given me one more hour?
What if I had gotten there first?
I know where those questions lead. They lead nowhere, and I still ask them.
That is one of the cruelest parts of losing someone to suicide. The person dies once. The survivor can replay the death thousands of times, building alternate endings out of moments that can never be revisited. Memory becomes a courtroom, and somehow you are the witness, the prosecutor, the defendant, and the person waiting for a verdict that will never come.
I have spent decades wondering what I missed.
I have spent decades wondering whether there was anything to miss.
I have spent decades wondering whether one conversation could have changed everything or whether I am asking an impossible question simply to give myself someplace to put the pain.
And then I read John’s note again.
“Please never let anyone anywhere change that Jay.”
He died telling me not to let anyone change who I was.
There are days when that feels like love.
There are days when it feels like a responsibility.
There are days when it feels unbearably heavy.
And there are days when I would give anything to hand the note back to him and say, You tell me the same thing tomorrow.
That is why my answer to the WordPress prompt is 1992.
I do not want the money back.
I do not want to change a career decision.
I do not want another vacation, another party, another younger body, or another chance at some ordinary mistake.
I want John.
I want those days back.
I want the conversation after his father called him that name.
I want the hours I did not know were disappearing.
I want the chance to tell him that he did not need to be like me, that he did not need to be strong for me, and that he did not need anyone’s permission to exist exactly as he was.
I want to look him in the eyes and say what I wish I had understood needed saying:
John, you are enough. I love you. I am still here. We are still here. Whatever happens next, we deal with it together. Please stay.
Then I would keep saying it until I knew he heard me.
Maybe the ending would still be the same.
That possibility destroys me in a completely different way.
Still, if I were given one year to live again, I would choose 1992 without hesitation.
I would listen harder.
I would ask the questions I was afraid to ask.
I would never assume there would be another chance.
And if nothing else changed, John would leave this life knowing that there was one person standing beside him who saw him, loved him, wanted him, and never once believed there was anything shameful about the man he was.
