One more thing to add to the week

It's been a week. Joined EC, made an appointment with a lawyer to get started on a divorce, my daughter had a visit from Family Health Services because of an incident with my wife that got reported by a friend of hers, came out to my boss, and a rough week at work....my brain is toast.

I'm very involved with music at my church, including the choir (hence the user name), playing the organ, and teaching music to the religious ed kids. A couple of years ago I met one of the dads who helped out teaching, and I felt like someone hit me in the stomach. He was smart, kind, interesting and incredibly cute. Meeting him and feeling that instant attraction to him was one of the first things that made me realize that I really, really needed to rethink my life.

We see each other now and then, pretty rarely over the summer when religious ed is not in session, but he's always very friendly with me. VERY friendly. Lots and lots of eye contact (which can be a little awkward when I'm singing in front of church!), a lot of physical contact like pats on the arm or the back, and he seems to go out of his way to come up to me and talk, whether it's at church, in the grocery store, whatever. For like, 10-15 minutes at a time, and I'm a quiet guy who rarely has more than a 90-second conversation! He interrupts phone conversations to say hello and waves to me across a room. I assume he's just very friendly, but the guy doesn't have even the slightest idea how much he affects me and how much I think of him.

I was talking to my boss yesterday about the week and laughed, "watch, this will be the week some guy shows an interest in me, just to really mess with my mind!" And on the way home, I drove through the cemetery past my parents' graves and said aloud to my mom--something I really never do--"Hey there Mom, I need a hand here. Am I doing the right thing in all this? If you have a minute, it would sure be nice to get some kind of sign".

So today just before I left work for the day, I logged on to LinkedIn which I occasionally do--and there was a contact request from him. We have no shared contacts and our lines of work have basically nothing in common. It was totally out of the blue and threw me totally for a loop.

I'm not big on signs and stuff like that, really, and most of the time my feet are so firmly planted on the ground that you can barely see my ankles. And I suspect this may just have been a random thing that has no significance at all. But seeing his picture on that request was the most welcome thing I've seen all week, and it cheered me up even more than some of the conversations I've been part of on EC, which is saying a lot! Just had to share.

 

He's married with 4 kids, and the oldest 2 are the same age as my daughters (and they actually know each other in school). And he and his wife know our next-door neighbors. Go figure.

I'm only out to 3 people, and he's not one of them. But particularly since I started losing so much weight, I've found myself acting a lot less straight than I used to, and I play it up a bit more with him--deliberately, to gauge his reaction. I also return and sometimes initiate some of the physical contact. Doesn't seem to have scared him off any, and I was in the store the other day and heard someone call my name. It was him, way on the other side of the produce section, and we ended up talking for almost 15 minutes. He stands so close I could kiss him without having to take a step. It will be interesting to see how he reacts once I file for divorce.

 

Yeah, the fantasy quotient is pretty high for me with this guy, but I am trying (pretty desperately) not to set up something in my head that will almost certainly not happen. It doesn't help that I have never really had a lot of close guy friends anyhow, so straight or gay, I'm pretty naïve about male friendships. Come to think of it, that may have played into my staying closeted for so long, as well as the numerous other factors--no guy friends, in my head, probably meant ending up a lonely old gay guy to me 30 or so years ago. And, outside of that one big, giant exception, I am very much an open book, so I have trouble picking up subtext because I am not subtle myself.

That being said, I am going to keep doing what I've been doing and watch for anything that might be a little more obvious clue. With a certain amount of hope, I'll admit, but no expectations. Although I will admit that there's a part of me that will always hope he will walk up to me in the store some day and says "Hi [name]....or would you rather I called you 'Choirboy'?"

 

Well...would that necessarily be a bad thing? :icon_bigg