Striking without warning...

Maybe it was another aftershock of the September 11th attacks, maybe I'd been working too hard or maybe it was just the onset of winter but I'd fallen into the blackest of funks throughout the middle of November, suddenly spiralling into deep unhappiness. I hadn't responded to phone calls or the e-mails of a far-away friend because I just couldn't seem to muster up anything positive or interesting to say -- live or 'memorex'. I knew things had really gone south when I found myself weeping uncontrollably at the end of a Thanksgiving episode of "Once and Again" (such a lovely, bittersweet TV show but Jesus, man, get a grip!). The 'black dogs' certainly were biting, that's for sure.

The sad thing is that, since I'm usually upbeat, content and free of illness or dependents or poverty or any of life's tougher stresses, the slippery paranoid terror that I'm proving unable to manage my own life is especially unnerving. The strangest part about that week was this constant, inescapable feeling of loneliness. No matter how hard I worked, how many friends I tried to hang out with or how many phone calls I made, I consistently felt utterly, desperately alone. It was very creepy.

Having exhausted all the usual meditations, affirmations, rationalizations and distractions at my disposal, I realized I needed something -- anything -- to get rid of this feeling and leapt back into old habits. I went out on Friday for the prescriptive 'two-pints-of-Kilkenny-and-a-stranger-I-won't-call-in-the-morning.' I don't do this often -- not out of some moral imperative but more precisely the knowledge that sleeping with a stranger leaves me feeling worse off more often than not and -- honestly? -- I need to at least like whoever I sleep with and I don't tend to like two-thirds of the people I encounter. Not sure what that says about me but there it is. In the end, though, I do believe that a 'meaningless' tryst can be a therapeutic and lovely thing if handled well, so off I went.

And that's when life tossed me another one of its cruel, side-spin curveballs -- I met someone *perfect*. Like love-at-first-sight perfect. Within the first minutes of talking to this guy, I felt my heart beat faster in a way I've only experienced once before. I was thrilled to find not a relatively rare Person I Could Like but a highly scarce Person I Could Love, and right when I was at my lowest point, no less. Delighting in each other's company, we went to see a movie the following afternoon (because the joke goes that, while the typical Heterosexual Date consists of dinner, a movie, then sex, the typical Homosexual Date consists of sex, a movie, then dinner!) and, when he reached over to hold my hand midway through, I felt, as Walt Whitman said, that had made all the difference. And after I worked Saturday night and had breakfast with a friend the next day, we reunited Sunday evening, curled up on his sofa with a big chicken, garlic and mushroom pizza, flipping channels back and forth between the good bits of "The Phantom Menace" on Fox and Tim Burton's "Batman". Geek heaven, I thought, and I haven't been that happy in months.

These early stages of a romance are always simultaneously joyous and nerve-wracking. I'm frustrated by the unyielding anxiety -- like a teenage girl, I'm constantly thinking, "Does he like me too? Does he think about me too?" -- but I then remember how sad and old I felt as a teenage boy and suddenly I'm thrilled at how I'm living life backwards. As I next endured a cold creeping up on me that week, staying in to rest up with soup, a book and jazz on the stereo, he called before 11 to see how I was doing and wish a good night. That insignificant little gesture made me glow with happiness because it gave me hope.

And that's what it's all about -- I've long been fascinated by how delicate hope and faith are and how easily they can be stripped away, leaving nothing to live on. Despite a crust of cynicism, I'm a generally optimistic guy and an unhappy friend once asked me, "I don't have any faith -- where do you get *your* faith?" (as if it were available on a shelf somewhere). I couldn't answer him then and I doubt I could answer him now, even after years of pondering his question.

I keep thinking of Ian McKellen's fantastically sour delivery of a line in 'X-Men', mocking another character's "continuing search for hope." He spit it out as though it were a foreign word to him and it sharply showed how sad and evil his character had become after a lifetime without grace or joy. And I recognize that such a grim attitude is spawned in the real world on a daily basis.

No matter what happens next, I've seen that, while we were horribly reminded on Sept. 11 that tragedy can strike at any unprepared moment, joy can do the same if you hang in long enough. I'm still a cynical guy -- I fully realize that he may change his mind at any point, that we will certainly discover disappointing flaws in each other over time, and that he may very well just suddenly give up and never call again. Doesn't matter -- I feel saved. While I learned a long time ago that you absolutely cannot rely on anyone else for your own happiness, I've also learned that you can't expect to do it all yourself either. We all need help in some form or another and, once again, I'm delighted and mystified at the way it seems to arrive right when you need it most.