All Eyes on You
Reflections on how things end, begin, and also keep going.
We went to the courthouse together. On the way, we talked like we used to. We were friendly. We made jokes. We smiled, despite the unequivocal fact that what we were doing was sad. We approached our end the only way we knew how, the way we’d weathered every other storm for the last ten years: together.
I held the door open for him, and as I walked into the courthouse behind him I had to physically restrain myself from reaching out. My hands were accustomed to grabbing onto and massaging his shoulders whenever they looked tense, but I wasn’t allowed to do that anymore.
We shuffled through security and into the halls like two parents marching through a hospital, stone-faced and searching for the room that contained our sick child. A bad analogy, perhaps, because in this scenario the sick child is (or was) our relationship. The only person we were going to find there was a clerk who would help us legally end it, severing us from one another for good.
We couldn’t agree on a direction. Neither of us wanted to believe that the other was right about where we should go because, I think, we were both trying to embody the things we were saying to our friends and family.
“I’m going to find my way. I’m going to be alright. This is for the best.”
The right way, it turns out, was down a completely different hall in an entirely different section of the building.
“Girl, yes,” Chris murmured once we’d taken a number and found a seat. “You better show don’t tell us who the judge is.”
He was talking about the portrait plastered on the wall, declaring Jonica S Hunt the Superior Magistrate of Fulton County. Making jokes like this was the only way he knew how to combat the heaviness, tension, and bleak sterility of that somber place.
“Werk,” I agreed. “She really does look like she’s in charge.”
“I’m saying.” He looked to his right, then, and so did I. We watched a frowning woman holding her two children. The little girl and boy looked confused. The woman looked miserable, but was forcing a smile.
We frowned at one another.
Staring at my hands, I asked, “Is it weird that we’re doing this together?”
“No.” Chris answered without hesitation. “I’m glad that we are.”
It’s beautiful. I love you. Don’t leave me.
“Yeah.” I leaned back in my chair. “Me too.”
Chris wasn’t the first man I’d ever fallen in love with, and he wouldn’t be the last, but so far he’s the only person who’s made me feel like I understand what love even is. The way I felt (and will always feel) about him was deep, strong, and special. Being in love with him felt like being a part of something bigger than myself, and sharing my life with him was the one of the greatest privileges of my life.
I’m used to falling loudly and all at once. In a restaurant. At coffee. In a stranger’s bed. In the middle of a crowded dance floor. In an audience, listening to someone else’s favorite band. Chris was no exception, but with him the feeling didn’t dissipate, like it always did with the others. With him the feelings got sturdier as time went on, more confident, and our bond became something I thought was unstoppable.
When we met, we worked at neighboring restaurants. I was at a gay dive bar called Joe’s on Juniper, and he was at a slightly more upscale bar and grill called Einstein’s. Much like our relationship, neither one of these places exist anymore — both demolished to make way for a high rise — but it was on the iconic patio and dingy interior of Joe’s on Juniper that we had our first encounters.
Joe’s stayed open much longer than Einstein’s, so Chris and the other servers he worked with would walk over to our side of the fence for drinks after closing. The way he tells it, he spotted me immediately and thought I was cute, but didn’t want to show it. The way I tell it, he was cold, curt, and gave me the impression that he was totally uninterested.
The earliest exchange I could ever recall was when I spotted him, too, and gave him a compliment about his Lego Star Wars R2D2 keychain. He was attractive to me in a way that was intimidating: a beautiful man who took up space with a confidence that I envied. He didn’t smile when he turned to look at me, just scanned me up and down, said a quick “thanks,” and resumed whatever he was doing.
Disinterest wasn’t foreign to me. I’m a big flirt. I wasn’t one to withhold a compliment when it came to mind, so I was used to a myriad of reactions to my forwardness. A polite smile. A flushing of the cheeks. Usually reciprocation, but sometimes stinging, forceful rejection.
So when Chris gave me the cold shoulder (on more than one occasion, I might add), I simply wrote him off as not interested and carried on my merry way. And apparently, despite initially being very much interested, he quickly did the same, but for very different reasons. He saw me outside of Joe’s, and watched me dance with different guys over different nights, and decided I wasn’t his type.
Chris had had exactly one boyfriend before me, although they’d never officially called each other that. He was the polar opposite of someone like me. This was something that diminished his affections for me, or at the very least made him keep his distance, but only for a time. We continued to cross over into each other’s orbits — at work, on the dance floor, and on OKCupid — on more and more occasions. And the thing that finally took was one of his friends unwittingly suggesting that we should meet.
“He’s really smart,” I remember her saying, shortly after we met. “I think you two would really hit it off.”
By then I’d long grown tired of flirting and the transient, meaningless connections that came with it. I had been dating someone else, and trying to take it seriously, but they hit me with the classic “I’m not ready, let’s be friends,” so before I knew it I had found and added Chris on Facebook.
“I hear that we’re soulmates,” my first message to him said. “When are we meeting?”
Although we felt special, evolved, and mature to be filing our divorce papers together, no one we encountered seemed all that impressed. The most notable thing that anyone behind the glass did was pause and glance when Chris mentioned that I, the respondent, was present. Whether the reaction was because I was present or because I was a man, however, I couldn’t say.
Chris sat at a computer and stuffed our paperwork into a scanner, then passed them to me to keep track of what was done and what was not. This only took about an hour. Afterwards, a clerk impatiently told us that yes, the hearing would take place virtually over Zoom, and that yes, it was next month, and that again, we would receive an email that explains all of this.
And then we were back in the car, driving him back to the shop where his car was being worked on. It felt like we were simply on our way home after completing a chore, just like we had for the last decade. Only we weren’t heading anywhere but toward a fork in the road that would veer us away from on another for good.
We didn’t ignore the deeply sad, overwhelming heaviness between us. There was gravity in what we had just done, and what we were about to do, but we didn’t shy away from it. We talked about it. During that car ride, we asked the questions out loud, and openly leaned in to both the excitement of possibility and the daunting unpredictability of how our lives would soon transform.
What would happen next?
Where would he live?
What would being single even be like?
When would we start dating again?
“I don’t know,” Chris answered, shaking his head. “I really can’t even think about that right now.” He wasn’t looking at me, but I could see the pain in his eyes, a glimpse of his broken heart. It was only for a moment, though, because he was already putting up new and improved walls to shut me out. “I don’t even want to. I’m gonna focus on me for a while.” He got quiet. “I think you should, too, but I think we both know that you won’t.”
He was never one to mince words. It was one of the things that I loved about him, that I was going to miss, even if he no longer spared me from the barbs.
I didn’t know what to say.
“You’re probably already seeing someone else.”
He said it jokingly, but my silence made his smile crumble into a frown.
“You probably kept someone as a Plan B.”
Again, I didn’t know what to say. “That’s not—“
But he threw up his hands. “I don’t wanna know.”
I didn’t dare say a word.
“It isn’t Nathan, is it?”
He didn’t wait long enough for me to answer. “I don’t wanna know.”
The car fell very silent.
“You told me I deserved better,” he decided to say after a while. “Well, I think you do, too. It’s easy to think about what ifs, and the way things could have been instead of how they ended up, but… I don’t know. Even though ours didn’t work out, I think we still deserve the kind of love we thought we had.”
He looked out of the window just as we passed a billboard of a smiling attorney, advertising their services for help with a divorce. Our destination was ahead. Just one last turn and he would exit my car for good.
Chris cleared his throat and took a deep breath.
“I just… hope you don’t settle, for him or anyone. I hope you don’t look back.” He slipped his hand into the little handle above the door and gripped it tight. “I certainly won’t.”