I didn't initially understand any of it at first, and walked into far too many ego-bruising battles as a result. In time, learned on that giggle to tense, move, and change the volume of the TV or, later, my personal location, all in an effort to prevent the inevitable.I learned less how to dance my mother's feinting dance but instead to form a gap - a buffer space, a dislocation allowing for a proper understanding of things before engaging. Like a general on the battlefield, finding it best not to commit too much to any particular battle, I saw the necessity to hold back, to watch, and wait. My core wasn't exposed. I was safe.

As necessities learned well became skills, as skills pushed habits, as habits formed routine and routine fostered certainty against the chaos of life, that Gap, that slight disengagement but paradoxical awareness, became something not all that terribly bad. As a counselor, and later a therapist, I found I could watch a hugely convoluted situation, with a thousand emotions and bits of detail flying at once, and hear through the cacophony what was of tell-tale importance, value and need for further exploration. As a public speaker, I could trade away the din of fears and concerns echoing in the background of my mind, and move quickly into a room of three or three hundred and convey pretty clearly what I wished to say. As a writer, seeing the connections between people, their internal dislocations and paradoxes, the thrust of their dramas and the depths of their plots, allowed the creation of the stories I wished to tell to be far, far easier. As a person though, as an integrated being, a gestalt of thoughts and emotions, a system of wants and desires, an exchange of music and dance, having that Gap is rather limiting in result. Distance is distance - be it between me and my friends, me and my loved ones, or more importantly, me and myself.

The greatest movements in my life came in leaping that Gap, in moving into whatever it was that I held out at a distance. As a young man, acknowledging I was Gay returned all that I was feeling to the normal place it was supposed to be. What I had held in abeyance, left lonely on the shelf, became the rich and vibrant paints applied lovingly to a previously monochrome and bland emotional canvass. Seeing the fear that was holding me in place at my job, recognizing that my figurative martyrdom was fast becoming a literal one, gave me the certainty to step away and off into a fear of not knowing was to happen next - as no school and no job prospects were in hand. Now, the paucity of deep, fundamentally loving relationships stands visibly clear as a current expression of that Gap. Snaking alongside is the space there between choosing to be a writer and living fully as one. Both are aspects of not living fully, richly, deeply, proudly, the life I've chosen. Disengaged routine forms a familiar certainty, after all.

Peering across this part of Gap, I spy the oddest of things. Along the isles of the supermarket, between the Charmin displays and the Coke C2 specials, near the sushi bar and past the bakery, are the couples, gay and straight, pulling, dropping, comparing, cupon-ing all the sundry pieces of a shared and sharing life. It's a simple expression that fanciful or not, upon the stage of my Mind's Eye, playing out in the beats of price pointing, the movements of produce searching, the acts of salsa dip finding and dénouements of trunk stuffing, is a profound simplicity, a searing closeness, that I currently lack. It's finding my away onto this stage, enacting the same drama, that exemplified the next part of my journey.