Do you know where you're going to?
Do you like the things that life is showing you?
Where are you going to?
Do you know...?
Theme from Mahogany - Diana Ross
Did I?
Did I know?
Everything about this day was a rush.
I rushed to the tuxedo place to pick up my chocolate brown tux with the newly-retro fashionable style pleated tuxedo shirt with wing tip collar. Accompanied by a thin brown bow tie. Gone, apparently, were the days of ruffles and velvet.
I rushed to the florist to pick up my single simple yellow rose boutonnière and Kathleen's organic spray of 9 yellow full stem roses. Maverick for the time. The 9 blooms represented the nine months we'd been going out. My idea.
I zoomed down Rt. 146 towards Providence to pick her up. The prom was to be held all the way up in Randolph, Mass. A lot of driving for an overactive 18 year old.
It was her prom. We were scheduled to attend my prom only a few weeks later.
When I got to her eastside Providence house, her family did the obligatory thing and took pictures of us. But soon we were off in my Chevy Astre wagon north to Randolph. Kathy looked great in her pale yellow satin dress but as it hung on her and revealed more intently that, in fact, she lacked a sufficient rack, I wondered if this was one of the reasons I found her attractive, and, perhaps, why she hadn't found a suitor in her own hometown.
We danced alot that night. Not so much that I desired to be close to her, but that I desired to avoid her friends...and their prying questions.
All I could think of was that they would have wondered: "Why was I interested in a girl who went to school 20 miles away from me?"
And frankly, by then, I wasn't really interested in Kathleen anymore. She had become an easy tool by which I could avoid confronting what I already knew. That I was gay. As long as I was going out with her, there was always the feeble hope that lust, then love, would spontaneously develop and I would be free to live my life, what I then saw as a "normal" person.
This was not fair for her. And I realized it more and more as the night went on.
The theme song of the event started and as we danced to it, I hugged her tight to me but I knew that my gaze was a thousand miles away. Diana Ross belted out her "Theme to Mahogany" and, as if the "Diva" herself were asking little old me, a teenager from a little city in Rhode Island, "Do you know where you're going to?".
And, for the first time in my life, I couldn't answer that question.
Do you like the things that life is showing you?
Where are you going to?
Do you know...?
Theme from Mahogany - Diana Ross
Did I?
Did I know?
Everything about this day was a rush.
I rushed to the tuxedo place to pick up my chocolate brown tux with the newly-retro fashionable style pleated tuxedo shirt with wing tip collar. Accompanied by a thin brown bow tie. Gone, apparently, were the days of ruffles and velvet.
I rushed to the florist to pick up my single simple yellow rose boutonnière and Kathleen's organic spray of 9 yellow full stem roses. Maverick for the time. The 9 blooms represented the nine months we'd been going out. My idea.
I zoomed down Rt. 146 towards Providence to pick her up. The prom was to be held all the way up in Randolph, Mass. A lot of driving for an overactive 18 year old.
It was her prom. We were scheduled to attend my prom only a few weeks later.
When I got to her eastside Providence house, her family did the obligatory thing and took pictures of us. But soon we were off in my Chevy Astre wagon north to Randolph. Kathy looked great in her pale yellow satin dress but as it hung on her and revealed more intently that, in fact, she lacked a sufficient rack, I wondered if this was one of the reasons I found her attractive, and, perhaps, why she hadn't found a suitor in her own hometown.
We danced alot that night. Not so much that I desired to be close to her, but that I desired to avoid her friends...and their prying questions.
All I could think of was that they would have wondered: "Why was I interested in a girl who went to school 20 miles away from me?"
And frankly, by then, I wasn't really interested in Kathleen anymore. She had become an easy tool by which I could avoid confronting what I already knew. That I was gay. As long as I was going out with her, there was always the feeble hope that lust, then love, would spontaneously develop and I would be free to live my life, what I then saw as a "normal" person.
This was not fair for her. And I realized it more and more as the night went on.
The theme song of the event started and as we danced to it, I hugged her tight to me but I knew that my gaze was a thousand miles away. Diana Ross belted out her "Theme to Mahogany" and, as if the "Diva" herself were asking little old me, a teenager from a little city in Rhode Island, "Do you know where you're going to?".
And, for the first time in my life, I couldn't answer that question.